In the second half of 2020, in Bocconi, I attend the Market Research course. The exam involves conducting field research. In doing so, I try to answer this question: why, how and when to do programmatic advertising to children born after 1995?
Programmatic advertising: unknown and hated
Unknown to most people, programmatic advertising is the most common form of advertising on the web.
Think about the annoying banners and pop ups that appear while browsing. 90% of the time they are advertising spaces sold through the programmatic allocation system. Explained in simple words: within a few hundredths of a second from when we open a web page, an automatic auction decides which advertiser is the highest bidder and the most consistent with our interests and shows us his ad.
So far, beautiful. But there is a problem: advertising on websites is considered unreliable by people under 25 and also not very informative. Or at least that's what my team's positioning analysis showed. [besides me: Claudio Villone and Beatrice Colombo (follow them on Linkedin!)].
Look at the graph below: as you can see the programmatic advertising on the web is practically positioned in correspondence with the vector "scam risk".
So, the big question: WHY, WHEN AND HOW TO MAKE PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING?
Online advertising: valuable allies for every occasion
The first step was to try to understand how the different online advertisements positioned themselves in the mind of the Under25 internet user not only in general terms, but in every phase of the Marketing Funnel.
We submitted a questionnaire to more than 600 students. We were able to obtain a lot of data. Among them the positioning map seen above.
Reliability vs. degree of information conveyed. These seem to be the two variables that guide the user when he has to position the different forms of advertising in his head.
Which advertising, when.
What we have seen has definitely amazed us, and is summarized in the graph you see below. We have discovered that:
1) Instagram is fabulous to introduce your product to as many people as possible! The advertising there is easy to remember and is very consistent with people's interests, indicating that the advertising space allocation algorithm relies a lot on this.
2) In phase of consideration instead the advertising on search engines has no comparison. It is informative and naturally consistent with the search interest of that moment.
3) In phase of purchase? It will surprise you but it is Youtube, together with the advertising on search engines, to be considered more reliable as the last step before a purchase.
So when to do programmatic?
Apparently the best phase is that of consideration. The user has already recognized that he needs a product and is more or less actively looking for a model to buy. In that phase any kind of stimulus might seem interesting to him.
A first suggestion is: in this phase you should do programmatic insisting on its function as a stimulus for consideration. Then advertise discounts, special offers, or a differential feature of the product.
But GEN Z are all equal in front of advertising?
The answer (unfortunately) is no. This means that it is very important to vary the copy and provide different ones for each need.
The differences already arise from the opinion they have about advertising.
From a first qualitative analysis a twofold relationship had emerged: on the one hand some people appreciate the extreme personalization and the possibility to discover new products, on the other a not indifferent cluster considers it misleading and annoying, especially because it leads them to buy products they don't really want to buy.
At a further level of analysis we have seen that highly personalized advertising does not bother. The perception of anxiety to be "controlled" arises only when advertising is badly targetized.
A first conclusion: different profiles, different advertising
So we tried to better profile our under-25s audience.
We discovered that a fundamental difference is between men and women.
For girls, a more explanatory, more informative advertising is preferable: the eye goes in search of detail. For the male counterpart, however, it is the impact that counts. On the one hand, therefore, we prefer a more refined and informative copy, on the other hand, a stronger use of colors and memorable phrases.
More transversally then we found 5 profiles based on the responses and preferences accorded to different forms of advertising. To be very synthetic, the differences vary according to the need for information: some, naturally more curious, love to discover new brands and new products, others are more inclined to click on advertisements only if it gives them important information about the product they are looking for, others - distracted - need to be bombarded with all the same ads before they notice them.
It is natural to conclude that there is no such thing as pret-a-porter advertising, but it is essential to adapt the communication to each cluster of users.
But how to recognize them immediately?
(trans.) The passages are: A. Aprioristic target analysis; B. Creation of a number of variants of the content according to the target hypotheses; C. Campaign launch and anlysis; D. Finding of new parameters in order to forecast which content a new user will like the most.
Not an answer, but a process
The answer is: there is no answer. Or rather: if you look for a set of elements that make it immediately obvious that a person belongs to a cluster before launching the campaign, then none of this exists.
The solution however there is, even if less easy to obtain. It is a matter of establishing a process (like the one in figure above).
For every product different forms of advertising are launched, each thought for the different clusters. At this point we try to understand not so much which is better, but rather which types of people respond positively to that stimulus.
In a second round the previous advertisements are proposed, but this time they are targeted in a more restricted way.
Therefore, it is not a question of finding the best performing advertising for everyone, but the most interesting advertising for each one.
תגובות