Consumer behaviour has driven an evolution in advertising from Newspaper ads to Billboards to Radio & Television to a more complex landscape of digital channels where customers expect to be engaged in highly personal ways with Ads that are targeted to their specific needs.
Gone are the days of analysts poring over spreadsheets and haggling with publishers over the placement of generic Ad placements. Today, the landscape is dominated by API-based automated systems driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) that orchestrate complex audience management and bidding strategies in real-time.
Pega’s Paid Media Manager does exactly that. Before delving into how Pega’s Paid Media Manager utilises 1st-party data from owned channels as well as its AI-powered real time decisioning capabilities to drive personalised and targeted Ad experiences across all channels, lets first understand how the landscape has evolved over time.
The Early Days: A Manual Marathon
In the pre-2000s, bidding was a laborious and manual process. Media buyers had to meticulously set individual bids for each Ad placement, often on websites or in publications, which were managed in sprawling spreadsheets. Optimisation was more art than science, reliant on intuition and gut feeling, and Ads were not personalised to a customer (meaning every customer viewing that website/publication would see the same Ad).
The Middle Years: Evolution of Ad Networks & Ad Platforms with API-based Automation
In the early 2000s, a big change arrived with the introduction of Ad Networks such as Google AdSense and Ad Platforms such as Google Ads along with Supply-Side platforms (SSPs) and Demand-Side platforms (DSPs), which played the middle-man in the whole Ad inventory subscription and publishing process.
Ad Networks aggregate Ad inventory from multiple publishers and make it available to advertisers. Advertisers, in turn, can reach broader and more varied audiences by displaying their Ads across the network of participating publishers. Meanwhile, Ad Platforms serve as centralised hubs which enable advertisers and publishers to plan, create, launch, and monitor their online advertising efforts.
These platforms often provide a range of features to facilitate various aspects of the advertising process. Since these are technology platforms, they offer a wide variety of sophisticated APIs which advertisers can use to automate the creation & management of their Ad campaigns, and very quickly and automatically place Ads on digital channels.
Findings presented by Statista suggests that more than 50% of digital advertising revenue is shared between Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
The Present & Future: The Age Of AI and Personalised Ad targeting
While there are many aspects to an advertising campaign such as Ad creative, bid management, analytics and reporting, etc., choosing the right audiences for the products advertised on the paid channels is the key to the success for any marketing campaign. During the early years, advertisers would generate audiences based on very broad targeting options such as location, demographics, interests, behaviour, connections, keywords etc., While this approach proved somewhat successful, times have changed along with the expectations of consumers.
According to a report by eMarketer, personalised and targeted Ads tend to have higher engagement rates and click-through rates compared to generic, non-targeted Ads. Users are more likely to interact with Ads which are relevant to their interests and needs.
Recognising the need for more personalised and targeted advertising, along with advancements in machine learning, data analytics, and a growing emphasis on privacy and user consent, has led to the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI). With AI, advertisers have the ability to implement models which use data and analytics to predict the customer behavior in relation to specific product offers. Increasingly, brands are recognising the power of their enterprise 1st-party data and AI, which can be used to identify relevant products for their audiences and provide an Ad experience which is much more personalised – Pega’s Paid Media Manager is a powerful tool which allows brands to do just that.
While Pega Customer Decision Hub (CDH) acts as the brain that drives Next-Best-Action decisioning to identify the relevant, contextual and suitable product offers per audience, Pega’s Paid Media Manager uses this ‘insight’ which CDH has provided and integrates with Ad platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Linked Ads via relevant people-based APIs to automatically and regularly update audiences, allowing brands to personalise Ads on these platforms.
With most browsers now blocking 3rd-party cookies, 1st-party enterprise data based integrations are a proving to be the obvious way forward for brands if they want to continue to engage customers with personalised and targeted Ads.
With an implementation of Pega’s Paid Media Manager, brands can:
- Eliminate wasteful ad spend
- Drive more conversions
- Acquire high value prospects
Enhancing the customer experience with seamless customer journeys across paid and owned channels
While a lot of emphasis is rightfully placed on refining the audience selection process with the tools and data that’s now available, today brands must also consider what happens after they have successfully targeted the right customers via Paid channels. Brands frequently operate each of their owned channels and paid channels in silos, which can cause differences in the experience provided to customers across channels, and affect the audience’s engagement with brands. With Paid Media Manager, both owned and paid channels are unified by a single brain allowing for seamless customer journeys across paid and owned channels which ultimately drive better engagement and customer experiences.
This unified approach allows for consistent behavior across owned and paid channels to create seamless customer journeys. For example: when a customer or a prospect sees an Ad on paid channels such as Facebook or Instagram, the call to action should direct the user to an owned channel such as a website or a mobile app. It is important that the offer presented on the owned channel aligns to the Ad the customer just saw on the social platform to keep the customer engaged with the offer. If this consistency between the paid and owned channels is not maintained, it will lead to wasted Ad spend.
About DCS
As a specialist Pega Partner in 1:1 Customer Engagement DCS has made significant investment in both its people as well as its Design & Innovation labs to put us in a unique position to help guide brands on their journey from siloed to truly unified omni-channel customer engagement solutions.
Having worked with some of the largest brands globally helping them leverage and optimise their Pega capabilities in owned channels we are well placed to help brands looking to extend their customer engagement in newer paid channels. We help brands formulate strategies required to bring both customers and prospects from paid channels to owned channels with personalised engagement, all driven by Pega’s single brain. We do this by helping prioritise and define powerful business cases collaboratively, by designing and building commercially focused solutions aimed at maximising return on investment as well as mitigating risk, and by ensuring that any impact of these solutions can me measured through meaningful results.
Though the specific marketing objectives of organisations will always vary, we recommend starting with the most significant and powerful use-cases that provide the highest return on investments such as ‘Reducing wasteful ad-spend using Negative Audiences’, ‘Driving more conversions using high-propensity action targeting’ or ‘Acquiring high-value prospects using Lookalike Audiences’. While we appreciate the priority order of these use-cases will vary from client to client, we help share valuable insights to develop micro-journeys that deliver your roadmap.
It should also be recognised that this capability does not need to replace or compete with existing Paid Media investments, but rather, complement and extend them.
Find out more about our solutions by contacting us here or via Pega Marketplace here.
About the Author
Sathiesh Lokanadan is a Principal Decisioning Architect at DCS. Having joined the business over two years ago he has worked across a broad range of industries in consulting roles as well acting as a Product Owner for their in-house Design & Innovation team.
His previous roles have seen him work for Chordiant and Pegasystems in a variety of roles largely centered around the product development of Pega’s Customer Decision Hub (CDH) – notably developing and enhancing features such as Pega’s Paid Media Manager capability.
His ability to combine technical expertise with simple to understand designs has seen him support some of the largest brands in the world. His intimate knowledge of Pega CDH’s capabilities coupled with his tenacity to deliver best-in-class solutions has proven to be a valuable asset for many organisations.
