Digital Media News

What is digital media planning? Today seems like as good of a day as any to open up a discussion about digital media planning for online advertising campaigns. Have you ever found yourself traveling in a new city, right after it has gotten dark, without a map, no money, hungry, thirsty, and no place to sleep for the night? Well, if you have had such an experience, it’s not very fun, and you probably developed a pretty skewed view of the city and your related experiences. This is because you visited the city without a proper plan and limited information and as a result, you most likely had a stressful and negative experience. You could have been visiting a great city, full of wonderful potential, but without proper planning ahead of time, you had a very difficult time experiencing the full potential of your environment.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the real-time bidding revolution in online display advertising is well and truly here.

Over the past couple of years, digital marketing has been all about programmatic ad buying, and the industry continues to grow on all fronts; display, mobile, social and video. And within programmatic, real-time bidding (RTB) plays a very important role. In fact, one could even say that RTB has completely changed the face of online advertising, but there’s still a lot of confusion around what it actually is. So here’s a primer, in plain English:

Real-time bidding is a dynamic way to purchase individual online impressions. Itenables advertisers to buy media in real-time rather than from pre-procured inventory. Using RTB, advertisers can deliver better targeting, richer audience insights and fully integrated marketing campaigns. For additional information please check out ExactDrve's real-time media buying brochure.

As the online advertising industry continues to popularize a programmatic media buying format with real-time bidding abilities that work in tandem with automated advertising optimization our jobs seem to be getting busier and more overwhelming. Yes, technology is getting faster and smarter but the amount of expected work output and expert knowledge required is increasing in parallel. Or so that's how a person can easily start to feel if they don't read our online media buying recommendations we are sharing below. Kidding.

We deal with thousands of online advertising campaigns and have built a proprietary advertising platform around the process of buying media online. As a result, we are constantly refining the process, observing issues, and working to make the entire online advertising process easier, more effective, and successful.

Be better at online media buying. That isn't just friendly advice, it's essential if you want to get your hands on a piece of success. You might have a great display advertising campaign in the works, but that doesn't mean you won't be searching for ways to enhance your tactics for direct-response. Buying display ads, banners and/or text can be a fantastic way to engage customers.

The way that you manage your campaign is up to you. You may focus your advertising scheme to be oriented to direct-response, including product sales and lead generation. On the other hand, you may focus your advertising completely on branding, in an attempt to build name recognition and brand awareness over time.

For those familiar with the concept, media planning is both a science, and an art. From a scientific perspective, the idea is relatively straight-forward - you simply gather enough data and research to understand your performance, and figure out how to match that data to the needs of your client. Unfortunately, it's the artistic aspect of media planning that's the hardest to grasp. It takes a great deal of trial and error to get things right, and as the industry continues to move forward at lightning-fast speeds, more planners are coming face-to-face with a number of challenging hurdles that stand between them, and success. Here are just some of the most common problems and issues media planners have to deal with on a regular basis.

Despite best efforts, discrepancies in statistics are still quite a big issue for advertisers and publishers or between the advertiser’s statistics and the advertising platform's statistics. Typically, discrepancies of up to 10% can be acceptable; however, at times they can reach 20% and more. There are many different reasons why discrepancies occur. For example, counting methodologies can differ between parties, as each party can potentially count an impression at a slightly different point in the delivery of an ad (i.e. publishers can count impressions at the time the ad request is sent, while advertisers can count an impression when the creative/ad is delivered).

One thing to take into consideration is that before investigating any discrepancies always ask for most granular 3rd party report (e.g. hourly or at least daily). If discrepancies occur very suddenly, always check if anything was changed in campaign setup, (e.g. new creative added, new inventory sources added etc.).

As the era of digital transformation continues, new roles have begun to appear in the marketing world. One common professional responsible for improving brand exposure and increasing awareness is the digital media buyer. In fact, today, the position of digital media buyer has emerged as one of the most highly desirable roles in the advertising industry.

For decades, marketing teams have relied on media buyers to find places for promotions in relevant environments. In the past, media buyers looked for ways to implement television campaigns on the correct channels to drive purchases or help companies to stand out with newspaper and magazine ads. Today, digital media buyers support the creation and implementation of campaigns on multiple new platforms, all the way from social media, to online video.

As we move further into the age of Internet advertising, changes in the way that people utilize the Internet, and innovations in business tools have begun to influence the way that we attempt to communicate with our target market. While planning a unique and creative marketing scheme using interesting media can be an exciting experience, it's important that companies don't allow their enthusiasm to override their common sense. Sometimes, when this happens, a marketing campaign that seemed promising at first can turn out to be a complete disaster.

Failing to plan your media marketing campaigns properly, or dedicating little time to planning them in the first place could mean that you lose crucial customers, profits, and brand authority. The more that your customers come to associate your company with bad media, the more they're likely to avoid your business in favor of your competitors.