The task of the modern marketer is to use big data to personalize advertising

Programmatic media is a fait accompli; there is no doubt programmatic is the future of digital advertising, and brands can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to it.

According to the IAB, the programmatic market is expected to grow to $20 billion by 2016. Despite this, programmatic media buying has, to date, produced an inverse relationship between efficiency and engagement. Efficiency has increased and driven cost per impression down dramatically, but the overall quality of digital ads within programmatic environments has plummeted, right along with consumer engagement. The reason? Programmatic has traditionally limited creative capabilities by only enabling standard ad formats to be bought at scale. This trend has led to brands serving 1990s-style ads with 2015 media buying technology.

Having lost creative levers, brands are recognizing the need to personalize messaging to drive consumer engagement. Simply automating the mass distribution of digital advertisements is inadequate; the ads must incorporate relevant messaging and content in order to effectively engage consumers and convert them into customers. In fact, 54 percent of consumers find personalized ads to be more engaging, and 74 percent indicated they desire some type of content personalization. Those aren’t small numbers.

Relevant content does not mean designing more visually interesting ads with clever messages. Relevance is achieved by delivering personalized content at any given time, on the right device, at the precise moment they are ready to engage with a brand. Luckily, utilizing the right data, at the right time, can help brands understand consumer behaviors and preferences, and this is the key to the personalization of advertising.

The task of the modern marketer, then, is to use big data to personalize advertising. This new ad concept has been dubbed “programmatic creative,” and we’re hearing about it a lot, but not everyone knows how to do it successfully.

To achieve programmatic creative, brands and agencies need two things:

  1. A new model for ideating digital ads that simultaneously incorporates brand message, method of delivery, device, and consumer preferences through the use of data
  2. Technology that is able to:
  • Leverage big data for determining relevant ad content and automating ad production and serving, and
  • Dynamically generate and serve digital ads by combining creative assets, campaign rules, and data sources in real time

Jivox realized that the widespread adoption of programmatic media buying and selling was inevitable, and re-architected its ad platform, Jivox IQ, to handle the technical requirements of programmatic creative. This revamped platform is what we’re launching today.

Built from the ground up, and designed for programmatic, Jivox IQ employs a vastly different architecture to deliver dynamic ads. We’ve changed our creative studio to be entirely dynamic – you can choose what parts of the ads are dynamic, whether it’s the text, images, whatever part of the build. You can record what dynamic variant caused the consumer to interact, and we’ve increased the availability of data signals (gender, weather, location, previous purchases, etc.) so that can now be used to personalize creative further.

In addition to a creative studio and ad server, Jivox employs a CMS system to enable dynamic content to be stored and served at scale, and a data engine which processes data instantaneously applying rules to the data to determine what messaging and content to deliver to a user. To see more details click here.

This is the new age of digital advertising, and we are excited to be on this journey.