THE NEW PLAYBOOK FOR SELF-SERVICE MEDIA New... · 2020-04-20 · The New Playbook For Self-Service Media 2 A dopting a self-service media-buying platform used to mean building deep

By Matt Aaronson, Senior Product Marketing Manager

THE NEW PLAYBOOK FOR SELF-SERVICE MEDIA:FIVE STRATEGIES FOR DSP MEDIA BUYING IN THE AGE OF AUTOMATION

1 2 3 4 5

2The New Playbook For Self-Service Media

Adopting a self-service media-buying platform

used to mean building deep competencies in highly

esoteric skills and disciplines. It used to mean serious

resources – people, hours, dollars, time, effort, and

hassle. And it used to mean endless uncertainty – are

my campaigns performing as well as they could be? Am I

using the right tactics? Am I deploying the right data? Am

I bidding at the right levels? How do I truly make sense of

the billions of messaging opportunities and data signals in

the ecosystem? It’s 2 a.m. It’s Sunday. Are my campaigns

delivering? Are they performing?

That’s what adopting a self-service DSP used to mean.

In this guide, we’ll present some cutting-edge strategies

and methodologies being used by early adopters of the

next generation of self-serve media-buying technology.

You’ll see that with the right tech and the right approach,

you can leave the uncertainty behind, put results first,

and still benefit from the control, transparency, and

agility afforded by self-service. This is the new self-

service playbook.


1

In this example, one Rocket Fuel advertiser, a nonprofit seeking sign-ups, started out their campaign with tactics that specifically targeted demographic groups.

A couple weeks in, the advertiser increased spend on unconstrained line items, and found that by allowing performance models to zero in on high-propensity opportunities at the impression level, results greatly improved. The advertiser continued to increase spend on the unconstrained model throughout the remainder of the campaign.

FOCUS ON OBJECTIVES – NOT TACTICS

PRESCRIPTIVE VS. OPTIMIZED

$24.18

$47.60

Oct

0

10M

20M

30M

40M

50M

60M

Nov Dec

Demographic-constrained line items

Cost Per Sign-up – Compared

Impressions by Week

Unconstrained line items

Increased spend on unconstrained media relative to demographic targeting


Humans and hubris

Let’s start with a humble admission: Digital marketing is

no longer a human-scale challenge. The emergence of

programmatic media trading has created opportunities for

marketers large and small to make their advertising more

addressable, more precise, and more efficient. In doing

so, it has also made media buying more complex than

ever before. Today, there are tens of billions of unique

opportunities to reach consumers, on millions of web

properties, across a range of devices, with trillions of ways to

slice and dice an audience.

Many companies have built platforms that help humans

parse this ever-more-fragmented landscape. But even with

armies of highly educated analysts, these tools can’t live

up to the true potential of real-time marketing, because this

first generation of platforms set out to equip humans, and

humans alone, to make most of the necessary adjustments.

Unfortunately, we are severely limited in how many

adjustments we can make for a campaign, and across how

many attributes.

The belief that we can adequately optimize a campaign by

hand persists because the ecosystem matured long before

there were sufficient tools to harness it. But today’s marketers

and agencies – whether they know it yet or not – have access

to sophisticated technologies that let machines do the heavy

lifting without sacrificing control or transparency.

Embracing automation

The key to succeeding with the next-generation demand

side platform (DSP) is focusing on strategy and goals, rather

than line items and tactics. Start by telling the system what

your objectives are and the KPIs you’ll use to measure them.

Perhaps it’s purchases, or clicks, or lead-form fills. Regardless,

the most crucial steps in taking advantage of optimization

technologies are setting your goals and configuring your

feedback loop, typically in the form of pixels or beacons.

From there, consider what we’ll call inherent constraints,

or targeting that must be applied due to the nature of the

offering and the campaign. This might be geotargeting (In

which countries, states, and cities is the offering in question

available?), device types, or a first-party audience segment

(Is the objective of the campaign to upsell or cross-sell

existing customers?).

Beyond these inherent constraints, resist the urge to

turn assumptions into prescriptive tactics. We can define

assumptions as any targeting restriction that is not an

inherent constraint. Contextual targeting involves an

assumption. Behavioral targeting involves an assumption.

You or your client may have invested heavily in research to

define just who your target audience is and to what they are

drawn. That’s great, and it should inform your messaging

strategy and your tactics in less-optimizable media. But in

digital ad buying, particularly for direct response efforts,

these are assumptions that get in the way of truly effective

marketing. Really.

This is because, with a next-generation DSP built for

machine learning, you have the luxury of testing all

assumptions automatically. The best way to start is from a

place of total neutrality. Define your objectives and your

inherent constraints, and let high-horsepower optimization

technology take the handoff. Rather than letting a human

paint in broad strokes and hoping for the best, let the

system evaluate all of the available signals for each

potential moment of influence with a consumer while

learning and adjusting on the fly. Some DSPs offer the

option of providing the system with ideas about what might

work without restricting targeting. These workflows create

a useful middle ground, allowing us to test hypotheses

without impeding a performance model.

Impression-level optimization beats broad-brush optimization

for a simple reason; at the impression level, a smart

DSP understands that what might look like a disqualifier

(e.g. a user identified as a man for a women’s magazine

subscription campaign) should actually be taken in context

with all other available signals. Maybe the man is in-market

for a birthday gift for his wife. Impression-level optimization

discerns the true value of an impression for a campaign

by considering the true value of that moment with that

individual. It recognizes that individuals are, well, individuals

who are multi-dimensional, not members of segments. It

amounts to an information advantage that prevents you from

wasting dollars on poor messaging opportunities and from

neglecting moments that are worthwhile.

Embracing automation does not mean forfeiting control and

agility. It frees you up to focus that expertise on more strategic

tasks, while also driving the best performance possible.


MOVE TO PEOPLE-BASED MARKETING2

We know that devices don’t buy things, don’t click things, and

don’t become loyal customers. People do. It feels silly to even

note that fact – but it’s one that legacy ad-tech infrastructure

has long ignored, treating devices as if they were people for

audience profiling, measurement and attribution.

That discrepancy has been made worse by the fact that

consumers are accessing the web from more devices than

ever before. But advertisers are increasingly coming around

to the idea that there’s a better way. New platforms and

technologies make it possible to create a unified view of the

consumer across computers, smartphones, tablets and other

devices, creating opportunities for marketers and agencies

to improve performance, expand reach and more accurately

attribute conversion activity across channels.

Cross-device optimization

Platforms that combine cross-device technology and

intelligent optimization are situated to drive the most benefit

for advertisers. Optimization models thrive on two basic

conditions: the availability of useful data, and selectivity.

Cross-device enhances both. By incorporating unified profiles

– which combine observed behaviors and characteristics

from across all linked devices for an individual – cross-device

platforms and their algorithms have access to more useful

data, and a more complete view of the consumer. Unified

profiles also help optimized campaigns become more

selective about the precise right moment to reach a consumer,

regardless of device. The improvement is real; an analysis

of more than 500 Rocket Fuel campaigns found that unified

profiles produced more than 14 times as many conversions

per dollar in ad spend as did single-device profiles.

Cross-device targeting

Cross-device also drives value further up the marketing

funnel. Using unified profiles in targeting means you can go

beyond the cookie. Advertisers can dramatically increase

potential reach by expanding the eligible pool of inventory to

all devices linked to a consumer known to meet the targeting

conditions. Suddenly, even difficult-to-scale first-party CRM

audiences can be put to productive use.

Unified Profile


MAKE YOUR DATA WORK FOR YOU

OPTIMIZING WITHIN, BEYOND THE SEGMENT

3

(Within a segment)

(Beyond a segment)

AUDIENCE A

AUDIENCE B

AUDIENCE C

AUDIENCE A

AUDIENCE B

AUDIENCE C


The migration of first-party customer data to the realm

of digital advertising represents one of the most exciting

developments in the field – and in business. Data

management platforms (DMPs) and onboarding vendors

help centralize, taxonomize, and enhance such data and

turn offline customer databases into online segments.

However, for all the advancements in making these

consumers identifiable and addressable, taking action

on the data in media execution leaves many marketers

scratching their heads.

Within the segment

It’s tempting to treat first-party customer segments like a

silver bullet for campaigns involving existing customers

(upsell, cross-sell, renewal, etc.): Simply set your DSP to

target these high-value consumers and reap the benefits.

But, in reality, targeting on its own leaves value on the table.

Even within such a hyper-curated audience, there are plenty

of opportunities.

Adding further targeting restrictions, such as a content

category or a third-party segment, to a first-party audience

typically constrains the volume too much to gain any real

benefit. And, as we’ve established, it’s not the best way to

get performance in the first place.

By setting up a campaign to optimize within a first-party

segment – even a small one – you can skew your media

budgets to the higher-value individuals within that segment.

The machines find the right environments, times, messages,

sequences, and moments.

In other words, treat your first-party segment as a narrower

universe within which to optimize, rather than a bullseye

for delivery.

Beyond the segment

Scale presents a central challenge for many marketers with

access to first-party data. Even for large enterprises, many

factors often conspire to whittle your audience down to a

fraction of its original size. But even a small first-party audience

can be transformed into a powerful asset.

Some platforms provide the opportunity to grow segments

using “look-alike” or “act-alike” optimization. These

methodologies build statistical patterns to find similar

consumers outside of the segment based on commonalities

within it, looking at audience characteristics and actions taken

during a campaign among the original segment (browsing

patterns, ad engagement, site engagement, etc.) and finding

more consumers demonstrating congruent behavior.

Let’s say a consumer “in the wild,” or outside the original

segment, matches on over-indexing for fifteen specific

attributes with the original segment, including consumption

of sports content, purchase history in a frozen food CPG

category, and Android phone usage. You’ve identified this

consumer as someone who has a lot in common with

your existing customers, which makes them a high-

value prospect to nurture toward conversion. Ideally, you

wouldn’t have to do this at all, because predictive modeling

takes it on for you at the impression level, in real time,

crunching the numbers and adapting.


ACCESS THE MARKETING LABORATORY4


DSPs have always supported reporting on campaign

delivery and performance. Some have offered analytics

tools that shed light on the best-performing audiences,

environments, and messages. This guidance has long been

seen as a highly valuable roadmap of the smartest tactics

that a campaign manager can implement mid-flight.

But as we’ve covered, an advanced platform will make

those adjustments for you faster, more granularly, and more

often than you ever could.

So what role does analytics play in a next-generation

approach to digital media buying? Oddly enough, it has less

to do with digital than traditional media. In places where

optimization is not so readily available (think print, broadcast,

outdoor, and your messaging strategy), these learnings can

and should inform your tactics. Having machine-learning

insights generated by objective measurement at big data

scale at your disposal, can greatly improve outcomes on

channels that do not lend themselves to adaptive learning.

INSIGHTS

You may find that many of your assumptions are confirmed.

Perhaps your assumed age and gender group align exactly

with the best-performing group in the analysis. But you

should still be glad you did not constrain to it for the whole

campaign, as the system recognizes that there are good

impressions that don’t meet those conditions, and bad

impressions that do.

You’ll also find many insights that do not align with your

assumptions. Embrace the non-intuitive. A high-volume

digital campaign with analytics tools that study patterns

and correlations across millions of impressions can

lead to learnings that would never emerge from a focus

group. And they can create significant lift elsewhere

when properly utilized.

In all of this, it’s easy to see the beauty of automation.

Rather than trying to teach the machine how to do its

job, the machine leaves no stone unturned to teach us

what it finds.

Left: In this example, a campaign for a luxury automaker turned up some non-intuitive top site performers.

Below: An airline running a bookings campaign found that the system identified some high-indexing consumer interest categories that one wouldn’t think of, like Father’s Day Shoppers and Cold & Flu.

Summer Seasonal - Father’s Day Show

Entertainment - Movies

Winter Seasonal - Cold & Flu

Spring Seasonal - Easter Candy

Entertainment - Video Games

Job Seekers

Parenting - Teens & Tweens

Entertainment - Humor

-56.6%

-73.8%

-80.0%

-81.6%

97.2%

81.3%

64.9%

56.6%

Interests


Average Campaign Performance Against Goal

Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May

0.00%

200.00%

400.00%

600.00%

800.00%

1,000.00%

1,200.00% Weighted by Spend

ENTER THE AGE OF OPTIMIZATION WITH ROCKET FUEL DSP5

A Look Inside

Search Optics is a digital marketing company with offices across the US, Canada, Australia, and South America that specializes in custom, integrated solutions with an emphasis on return on investment. The company uses an uncommon blend of leading-edge technology and human interaction to turn virtual traffic into measurable results.

“The Rocket Fuel DSP allows us to be hands-on with the media but not so in the weeds that

we’re constantly managing bids,” says Senior Display Media Manager Alex Meakin. Once

campaigns started to scale, the performance benefits became clear. “Rocket Fuel definitely wins

on performance. And I feel confident about the quality of impressions and engagement we’re

seeing.” Indeed, Search Optics has seen performance consistently improve as Rocket Fuel’s

models have become ‘smarter’ about campaign objectives, with aggregate indexed campaign performance against client goals reaching upward of 1,000%.


Sophistication is not thousands of knobs and levers.

Sophistication is tech that makes knobs and levers

obsolete. Rocket Fuel DSP is the first low-touch, high-

performance media-buying platform, driven by one of

the most powerful performance engines in the industry.

It drives unprecedented results by bringing order to the

chaos of the digital landscape and eliminating tedious

guesswork for better marketing outcomes and a lighter

operational burden.

Unmatched performance

Carry out high-performing digital campaigns across all

channels, across devices, and throughout the marketing

funnel. Rocket Fuel’s Moment Scoring™ technology learns

the critical—and often hard to recognize—predictors of

what makes one ad more appropriate than another in a

particular moment based on a marketer’s goal.

Tools that get out of your way

Assimilate what you know into campaign setups and let

the models handle every tiny detail you couldn’t possibly

anticipate. Manage your creatives, campaigns, line items,

and tactics with ease and launch brand new campaigns in

a matter of minutes.

Insights for action

Rocket Fuel DSP’s analytics tools translate machine

learning into clear, actionable reports. These custom

reports, in millions of potential configurations, show how

Moment Scoring identifies the attributes and variables for

each ad opportunity that improve engagement and lower

CPA. For example, a report called ‘Model Learnings’ is

a visual representation of how each attribute is driving

down CPA; real-time insights that help you discover all

new things about your customers.

Let’s get started

The next generation DSP replaces the complexity

of knobs and levers with the simple sophistication

of machine learning at big data scale. It taps the full

marketing potential of your organization’s data while

supporting the business acumen that puts you at the

helm of your marketing initiatives.

Talk to your Rocket Fuel account executive or

contact [email protected] to learn more about

Rocket Fuel DSP today.

About Rocket Fuel

Rocket Fuel operates in more than 20 offices worldwide and trades on the

NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “FUEL.” For more

information, please visit www.rocketfuel.com or call 1-888-717-8873. Rocket

Fuel can unleash Moment Scoring’s full potential to each valuable moment, on

whichever device and channel it may be and for whichever marketing goal it

may best serve.

mailto:sales%40rocketfuel.com?subject=

THE NEW PLAYBOOK FOR SELF-SERVICE MEDIA New... · 2020-04-20 · The New Playbook For Self-Service Media 2 A dopting a self-service media-buying platform used to mean building deep

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