With presence at Cannes this year, Captify take the time to explain to ExchangeWire why the brand market is now the main power behind display. Here, Vincent Potier, COO, Captify (pictured below), says that branding advertisers are driving the growth of video; but to make it work for them, they need to combine it with elusive, yet powerful, intent data.

For anyone involved in the advertising technology industry, it’s become obvious that the most mature markets (United Kingdom, United States) have, once again, turned into the fastest-growing ones. This goes against traditional business principles. We have been taught small and less mature markets tend to grow faster than the bigger, more mature ones, once they start adopting a technology. Not in this case. The explanation is simple: large markets are growing extremely fast because they are very large advertising markets (with plenty of offline money eager to move to digital and, more precisely, plenty of TV money ready to move to brand video the way DR print money fed performance budgets before). For years, digital has been associated with search and standard IAB performance campaigns. This is about to change, radically. Digital will be a programmatic branding environment, with DR turning into a commoditised sub segment.

There is no doubt that the display market is now powered by the brand market. The brand market grows at lightspeed because the traditional advertisers (FMCG, auto, telecoms, pharmaceuticals), which have outspent everyone else in advertising money for decades, are now doing the same with digital money. Now that they understand programmatic, have been reassured about inventory quality, the mechanics of pricing, have access to brand safety tools, viewability metrics, attribution models, analytics suites, understand how to overlay data, including their CRM data, are starting to manage the cross-device graph, are getting a cross-media picture of user behaviour, they have obtained better transparency on the way their money is spent, and have finally recognised digital can be bought at scale, those deep-pocketed advertisers are ready for the brave new world of programmatic branding.

Naturally, those TV-based advertisers have never been fans of the tiny IAB standards. For them, brand means video. But they don’t only want to target their audiences with video ads, they want data to make sure they can target the right audiences in the right environments at the right price and right frequency and recency; they want intent data.

The problem with intent data is that it’s not easy to find. For example, contextual data has been associated with intent data, whilst it is not. Transactional data is good intent data, by definition, but it is hard to find, and not always 'transferrable' (from one vertical to another). So, these advertisers have resorted to overlaying expensive panel data, because it’s been tried and tested in TV.

Injecting intent data in video buys in order to build audiences and understand their associated behaviours and campaign efficacy is the way to go. Rather than using panel data for running video campaigns, as they do in TV, large advertisers will test and then adopt intent data, ie data collected and interpreted from digital behaviours such as search data. The implications are limitless. Naturally, intent data streams can be overlaid with additional streams of advertiser-relevant data (weather data for fashion, store data for retail, geo data for car dealers…).

Advertisers will be able to serve creative videos to audiences based on real-time intent data. Advertisers will build audiences, or homogeneous segments, real-time, leading to more dynamic segments, and audiences tailor-made for specific promotional or new product campaigns. They will be able to build sequential creative suites, with creative assets tailored to each stage of the conversion funnel, from awareness to action. Advertisers will be able to respond creatively to those segments within the duration of the campaign, media spend will dynamically respond to the intent shown by the respective audiences, and creative solutions will respond accordingly; as the campaign runs, and once it is over, advertisers will also collect learnings and derive insights such as the way prospects interact with the ad, respond to the product or service, how they are impacted, how brand awareness and attributes are modified, and whether prospects bond more closely with the brand, allowing the advertiser to adapt continuously and finetune its creative strategies as they can monitor real time market feedback.

Rather than a lengthy creative-media chain inherited from the TV days (concept, test, production, test, campaign roll-out, tracking, insights, corrective actions, new campaign) sometimes taking many months, the creative process, the media planning, and the research will become more intimately intertwined, changing forever the relationship between marketing and advertising, and reinventing the interaction between creative and media.

These practices will profoundly change TV buying the way TV has influenced programmatic branding (then dominated by video). The generalised usage of intent data in programmatic branding will allow advertisers to show differentiated ads with a high level of quality in the right context and with the right frequency/recency; this will take programmatic branding to a new level in terms of prevalence, scale, efficacy, and measurability. As time goes by, the frontier between TV and programmatic branding will evanesce. TV will then be a high-context form of programmatic branding.

Join Captify at Cannes, who are exploring this and more at Captify’s Poolside Panel, as well as hosting a party on Tuesday 21 June.