Still lagging in their adoption of programmatic, brands in Asia-Pacific continue to face myriad challenges cutting through the technology maze and getting internal support for the automated buying platform. Careful planning and some patience, though, may be all marketers need to get the ball rolling.

Programmatic, for one, plays an integral role in Kimberly-Clark's goal to reach more customers over the next five years. Its brands currently touch some two billion consumers a day, and it is looking to increase this to 3.5 billion by the end of 2020.

And the CPG company is hedging a big bet on programmatic to help it get there and establish itself as a legendary brand in the digital realm, according to Kimberly-Clark's regional senior marketing director Rahul Asthana, who was speaking at the second iteration of Campaign Asia's annual Marketing Innovation Summit, held this week in Singapore.

Elaborating on the importance of programmatic, he pointed to the need to increase the effectiveness and returns on investment (ROI) of the brand's marketing spend, especially as its digital budget had been expanding.

In Asia, the company's spend in digital media had increased three-fold compared to just two years ago, and would continue to grow. "More and more money is being spent in digital, and more is being purchased through programmatic", Asthana said.

He also noted the need to prepare for TV's progression towards programmatic, especially since this medium played a key role for the company. Gaining some familiarity with the technology now would enable the brand to figure out over time if it needed to establish its own resources in-house, in order to buy this medium in the most effective way.

Kimberly-Clark adhered to several key guidelines with its approach to programmatic, comprising a test-and-learn phase, during which Asthana's team would assess pilots running in different markets across the region. He underscored the need to test and learn because the technology was new and its ecosystem fairly complex, with some 200 technology suppliers involved in the company's programmatic deployment.

He emphasised the need to identify key priorities and focus on the essential pieces, such as the DSP, data, and media agency – which, in Kimberly-Clark's case, would be MindShare. One of its pilot runs, in Vietnam, for instance, involving its Kotex brand had yielded positive results and, because of this, he was able to secure commitment to significant digital spend and expand the pilot into a multi-brand programmatic rollout.

The company's programmatic strategy also looked at the need to form teams with the right people, especially since its team at an Asia-Pacific-level was lean, and boost its capabilities through partners.

While it recognised it was not a media company and was open to working with external partners, Asthana added that Kimberly-Clark constantly assessed what made more sense to build in-house or outsource; even as it continued to build more of its own capabilities and spend more dollars across the programmatic stack. The company runs its own trading desk, but outsources the management and operation of the platform to its agency partner.

Equally important, too, was the need to involve key stakeholders within the organisation and educate them on the company's programmatic media buy, he said. Noting that he regularly shared results and insights with other business and marketing leaders, Asthana said this enabled his team to incorporate feedback and finetune future campaigns.

This also helped more people in the organisation to better understand programmatic – which would otherwise be nothing more than a 'blackbox' – and, hence, be more willing to put more money into it, he said.

And, as with most brands in Asia-Pacific, they are still unwilling to venture into the realm of programmatic, the need to demystify this space continues to be a call made by many in the industry.

During a panel discussion at the summit, delegates highlighted that the complexity was turning advertisers away from the technology.

Hari Shankar, Asia-Pacific head of paid media at PayPal, said: "Today, if you ask me, is the whole ecosystem very clear? I'd say it's not."

Noting how roles were increasingly intertwined, where some DSPs also doubled up as DMPs, and vice versa, Shankar said that the landscape proved confusing to advertisers. And it was becoming more perplexing as roles continued to mutate; with some players claiming the ability to run an entire programmatic project for clients without the need to involve agencies.

"This is creating more confusion for brands that are already finding it a challenge to understand programmatic", he said.

Start programmatic with framework, incremental improvements

Fellow panellist Yiorgos Hadjiandrea, Google's Southeast Asia head of DBM, acknowledged that ad tech vendors had a responsibility to help educate the market, including advertisers and agencies. He touted Google DoubleClick's five-step programmatic playbook as part of the vendor's efforts to provide marketers key guidelines on getting started on its platform.

Hadjiandrea noted that it might take some time for an organisation to realise the true value of programmatic.

PayPal, for instance, had dabbled in the technology for the past 18 months, expanding its experience from buying inventory on a large scale into other areas that included mobile and video programmatic and working with DSPs.

Shankar related how its efforts were not seeing any results initially because the payment company had to spend considerable time collecting data and refining its processes for better efficiency. It made incremental improvements and, six months ago, began seeing the operational efficiencies often touted in programmatic.

Hadjiandrea noted that while it might take some time for an organisation to realise the true value of programmatic, being behind in its adoption provided a valuable opportunity for brands in the region to learn from the teething issues that other markets faced.

He added that programmatic seemed complex, but still could be straightforward to deploy, if organisations adhered to a basic framework. Programmatic, he said, ultimately was simply about the combination of data and technology to automate digital media buying.

Being behind in its adoption also provided a valuable opportunity for brands in the region to learn from the teething issues other markets faced, Hadjiandrea said.

Jonathan Yang, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise's (HPE) director of global media and digital marketing, suggested brands that were starting out in their programmatic journey to identify an agency that can run the entire initiative for them. This would allow marketers to learn the technology, and access help as they pushed out the technology.

With fragmentation a common challenge, more so for companies such as HPE that had a 75-year history, the tech vendor had to carefully plan and identify what it wanted to track, and pipe the data from its various databases into a centralised system. From there, it was then able to start doing attribution.

Noting that marketers used an average of 4.9 technology systems to execute one campaign, Hadjiandrea said that this created inefficiencies that programmatic could resolve.

To garner support within the organisation for its programmatic initiatives, Yang said HPE operated a centre of excellence that helped drive its digital agenda. This also facilitated a centralised model in which a global digital lead was to oversee its programmatic strategy; though, some aspects of this had to be decentralised to facilitate localisation for markets such as Korea and Japan.

Shankar highlighted the benefits of having such centres of excellence, as it could prove challenging for key stakeholders with a large organisation to understand programmatic. This was likely why some large brands were not further along in their programmatic adoption and still in their early stages of deployment.

He noted the difficulty of pushing forward such efforts, unless industry players such as the agencies and ad tech vendors worked together to help ensure large stakeholders within the brand organisation were able to fully understand the value of programmatic.

James Sampson, Asia-Pacific vice president and general manager of DataXu, agreed, adding that his interaction with large brands in the region indicated programmatic was still nascent and often fell flat because few within an organisation truly understood the technology.

Sampson underscored the need to have a dedicated person or team, with a firm grasp of programmatic, to play the role of an evangelist within the organisation and help the marketing team better run such activities.

Changes in corporate processes also were necessary to facilitate a brand's programmatic strategy. HPE, for instance, had to rethink the way it carried out its media plans.

Noting that the vendor's planning typically ran on a quarterly basis, Yang explained that this might not necessarily work with digital media where real-time tracking meant a campaign's direction could change at any time to achieve better results. This meant marketing plans had become more complex, with plans for creatives, ad spending, and programs all operating concurrently.

"With programmatic, we realise the need to switch to an always-on strategy", he said, adding that incremental changes had to be made as the campaign progressed.

Shankar concurred, and noted that PayPal also allocated budget to support 'always-on' campaigns. This better enabled the vendor to run the right programs that targeted the right consumers at the right time and place.

He further underscored the need to implement measurement tools to ensure that campaigns were yielding the desired results and that programmatic was indeed working for the brand. The challenge, though, was identifying the kind of metrics needed, he said, urging the need for some form of framework to provide an industry definition. Without one, it would be challenging for marketers to prove programmatic was indeed effective, Shankar added.

Asthana pointed to further challenges ahead such as those related to measurement and ensuring data accuracy, as well as deploying programmatic as a more integrated model. The company also would have to figure out what it needed to address next on its tech stack, be it attribution or CRM-related.

He acknowledged that attribution was an area Kimberly-Clark continued to struggle with; though, it was able to resolve some of this through e-commerce, which played a significant part of its business. The ability to track this online journey, from start to finish, helped establish an almost-direct link on returns and conversions, he explained. But he noted that this meant having to depend on data provided by its e-commerce partners.

He added that tech vendors such as Google also were developing attribution tools that operated beyond their own platforms, which would further help brands resolve this challenge.

Asthana also noted the "never-ending battle" regarding brand safety and pointed to the need for brands to be clear about the guard rails, and to consistently look at both their black and white lists. Because Kimberly-Clark brands often involved delicate subjects, such as babies, he said it would be "unacceptable" for its corporate brand to be exposed inappropriately. This stance also had been made clear to all its partners, he added.