Some dark thoughts on the efficacy of programmatic advertising.

My two cents? Programmatic advertising is one step up or down from my email box.

I think if I ever pitched an airline account or ran an airline, I would make one simple rule.

I would make sure that all executives flew in coach. Not coach plus or coach executive. Plain, old-fashioned, no-legroom coach.

This wouldn’t be because I am a cheap sonofabitch. I would do this because it make sense to me for people—especially marketing people to have a good idea of the product they’re actually selling.

In fact, having people use the product they sell might be the only way most companies will ever improve a product.

Now, I turn my sights to professional marketing people. The people you’re likely spending 65-hours-a-week with.

Many of those people—people in our industry, are every day recommending programmatic advertising, programmatic banner ads. Let me ask you something: do you look at programmatic ads? Or do you regard them, like most sane people do, as craven, last-gasp attempts to reach people (to annoy people) via privacy-violating means.

All this crap feels very ‘no-leg-room’ seat to me. Something nobody likes but some fat-ass marketer optimizes his numbers by afflicting people with.

The idea that we can programmamatize people into seeing our ads, responding to our ads, to like our brand, is such convoluted thinking that it could only have been concocted in a conference room on multi-colored stickies.

Here’s how the business works today. The people who run agencies and marketing organizations are not creative people. Truth is, they don’t understand creative or creative people. And what these runners of agencies believe is this: nothing they don’t understand can be regarded as real and important. So something other than creative must be what motivates consumers—that they can understand. So that’s what we’re selling.

Just like we sold a million scams before this one.

In all my years of watching TV, reading newspapers and magazines, listening to the radio, tweeting or facebooking, I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘Wow! That ad was so well targeted.’

People respond to one thing: compelling creative. Something that makes you feel something. God forbid, laugh.

99% of the targeted ads I get miss the target, have misinformation about me, or just plain miss.

Anyone who tells you elsewise is blowing smoke.

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BTW, speaking of blowing smoke, here’s some actual web copy from a leading programmatic advertiser. These people are telling us they know how to reach people. Yet their words are so devoid of life and meaning, they are hardly human. These are the people we are supposed to trust our brands to.

Our creative, marketing and document solutions empower everyone — from emerging artists to global brands — to bring digital creations to life and deliver them to the right person at the right moment for the best results.

(When was the last time you got an ad when you wanted one? Have you ever wanted one?)

Maximize personal experiences. And ad revenue.

As a marketer in the media, broadcasting, and entertainment business, you need to precisely segment your audiences to maximize your ad revenue. That means you need to define segments based on behavior, transactions, and demographic traits. And you need to deliver personal offers to your most valued audiences. You also need to efficiently deliver ad experiences to mobile and OTT as they become more popular.
 

Get to know old customers. And find new ones.

(Have you ever felt “known” by a brand? Have you ever gotten a personal offer?)

To deliver targeted campaigns and discover new best customers, you need to understand the makeup of your audience. This means you need a solution that combines all of your data sources to give you a better understanding of how customers interact with your brand.

_______lets you target the same customers across every channel by bringing all your data into a single profile. This allows you to find new customers using attributes from your most valued segments. With Audience Marketplace, you can scale your high-value audience segments to deliver targeted content on every channel. And Audience Marketplace lets you quickly buy and sell second- and third-party data — without setting up individual partnership agreements.

Get a detailed view of every customer.

Understanding your customer is necessary to make sure your ads are effective. To get a clear view of your customers, you need to bring all your data together so you can create and use profiles for every customer experience.

  

With_______ core services, you can see an ever-expanding view of each customer using authenticated and anonymous data. And with access to a common profile across any Adobe solution, you can create more personal experiences.

Personal ads with your video experiences. No complex coding.

You want to quickly build and deliver video experiences tailored for each viewer across every device — including mobile and OTT. And you’d like to deliver targeted offers based on common characteristics like age and viewer frequency. To do that, you need an integrated solution that can deliver dynamic ads into video content.

___________ lets you build and deliver high-quality video content that can be watched anytime and on any device — creating more value for your pay-TV service and strengthening brand affinity for content owners. And you can develop video experiences with software development tools that let you quickly deliver to mobile and OTT devices. Which means you can dynamically insert ads into your video content across every screen.

Reach your customers on every channel.

____________ gives you the tools to maximize your ad revenue on every screen. This gives you a comprehensive picture of viewer behavior so you can define segments based on behavioral, transactional, or demographic traits. It also lets you quickly sell audience data without setting up individual agreements. You can even build and deliver high-quality video experiences to every device. With _________ Marketing Cloud, you can understand your audiences, deliver content on every platform, and take advantage of your revenue opportunities.

Why __________ 

In the past, to create such a unified digital marketing plan, you would need to cobble together a series of point solutions. Today, _______ Marketing Cloud unifies all these marketing tools into one integrated solution. No one else offers such deep integration with analytics, data management, optimization, and personalization.