DOOH Programmatic Guaranteed Now Available With Captivate

Captivate Partners with Place Exchange To Advance Digital Out of Home Advertising with True Programmatic Guaranteed Deals

What Is Programmatic Guaranteed?

Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) is the latest evolution in programmatic media buying, combining the automation and targeting capabilities of programmatic with a level of control previously only available to direct buys. PG secures the advertiser’s desired impressions on targeted screens at a fixed price & volume. With this level of transparency and control into both delivery and performance, PG enables advertisers to execute their media strategy with more certainty and efficiency.

Benefits of Programmatic Guaranteed for Advertisers

Advertisers gain improved transparency and reporting capabilities through Programmatic Guaranteed. Real-time access to campaign and performance metrics allows advertisers to track the effectiveness of their campaigns, optimize targeting strategies, and make data-driven decisions to maximize ROI.

INTERVIEW WITH A PRO

For a more in-depth understanding of the nuances of PG, we sat down with Stephen Williams, VP of Product & Programmatic at Captivate.

What is Programmatic Guaranteed and how does it differ from other programmatic buying methods, such as PMPs?

Programmatic Guaranteed is a way to allow an advertiser to leverage a programmatic mechanism, while still having the same benefits of a direct or guaranteed deal that might be brokered with a publisher like Captivate. When you are using other buying methods such as the OE (open exchange), or PMP (private marketplace deal), the allocation of the budget is not guaranteed to go to specific inventory. This can cause issues for campaign effectiveness research which often requires campaigns to achieve spending thresholds within specific buildings or spending at a specific pace or frequency.

There are some advertisers that want specific exposures, and have metrics that anticipate things including, “If a viewer sees my advertisement a certain number of times, it results in a purchase.” In the programmatic non-guaranteed space, it’s hard to set or implement those granular metrics, because of how the programmatic bidders work today. By interjecting a programmatic guaranteed ad at the publisher, as Captivate has, a campaign will be paced and have a specific frequency within our internal ecosystem, which allows for it to transact just the same as a direct campaign would.

What are the key benefits that Programmatic Guaranteed offers to advertisers?

The theory behind non-guaranteed, or traditional PMPs, is that you are going to reach your audience, you just don’t have exact control over how and where exactly that audience is reached. So a situation we occasionally hear about is that an advertiser will run a programmatic campaign targeting multiple different publishers, and if they aren’t paying close attention, by the time they get to the end of the campaign, they realize that the campaign didn’t spend the desired amount within all of the venue types they wanted. With programmatic guaranteed, it really allows for the advertiser to have confidence that their campaign is going to deliver in full within the venue types and strategy that their client expects.

“With programmatic guaranteed, it really allows for the advertiser to have confidence that their campaign is going to deliver in full within the venue types and strategy that their client expects.”

One other benefit is that planning considerations like reach, frequency, and campaign measurement research will be able to exist in the programmatic ecosystem more reliably. One of the problems with campaign measurement is that you need to have a certain amount of exposures to say that any feedback you received from that viewer is valid. If you were to run a campaign, but the ad only ran one time in the building, and you got five surveys from people there, you can’t really say that it’s statistically significant, because you can’t be certain that each person saw that particular ad.

Programmatic guaranteed is going to bring into the industry the ability to feel more confident about measurement, attribution research and brand lift studies, which is increasingly important to advertisers. They are looking to really understand how effective digital out of home is in contributing to the overall campaign success. Having these mechanisms at the source of where the ad is delivering is going to be an important part of that.

“Programmatic guaranteed is going to bring the industry the ability to feel more confident about measurement, attribution research and brand lift studies, which is increasingly important to advertisers.”

What types of ad inventory are available through Programmatic Guaranteed, and how does it differ from standard programmatic inventory?

Normally for programmatic guaranteed, only a portion of impressions are available to purchase. There is a power to the OE and allowing the ecosystem to naturally want to bid; it creates fair competition. That said, I can’t say that there is any different type of inventory available for PG. It’s all the same inventory that client was able to get, we’re just layering on the ability to confirm to the client that, even though they are leveraging a programmatic channel for delivery, we can guarantee the impressions with the internal ad server.

What role do Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) and Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) play in facilitating Programmatic Guaranteed transactions?

They still facilitate all the technology that connects the agency and the publisher. They serve the same role related to a technology function, whether that’s billing, delivery, asset management, invoicing, and all of those types of things. The only difference is that the Publisher will make the bid requests to the SSP, per the appropriate cadence to meet the impression and budget goals set within the deal. The DSP campaign will have a “flag” to bid 100% of the time on bid request for that specific PG deal.  This allows Captivate to guarantee delivery at the publisher level.

What are some common challenges or limitations associated with implementing Programmatic Guaranteed, and how can advertisers and publishers overcome them?

There isn’t much of a challenge at all. The only additional layer is that PG requires coordination with a publisher and typically requires a little longer set up time to ensure all systems are aligned. Most of the lift is on the publisher side. From the buyer perspective, it’s just about communicating to the publisher that they want programmatic guaranteed. Since the publisher is “controlling” pacing and frequency, there needs to be an open dialogue with the publisher to ensure everything is working as expected.

In what ways does Programmatic Guaranteed contribute to the evolution of the programmatic advertising ecosystem, and what future trends do you foresee in this space?

Couple things there; programmatic guaranteed is quite common within the mobile, desktop, CTV space, so for digital out of home to be bought more seamlessly alongside those channels, we need to meet those buyers where they are comfortable. The trends we are seeing from DSP buyers is that they want more control, measurement, they want more visibility, more clarity, and the ability to have the capabilities they’ve enjoyed from a direct perspective. A lot of the reasons why people buy direct is because they want to guarantee impression delivery. So those requests are going to become more common in programmatic over the years. In general, the trend we’re going to see is buyers requesting technology expansions to have capabilities they currently enjoy through a direct campaign but within the programmatic ecosystem.

“The trends we are seeing from DSP buyers is that they want more control, measurement, they want more visibility, more clarity, and the ability to have the capabilities they’ve enjoyed from a direct perspective.”

How can an advertiser initiate a Programmatic Guaranteed deal for digital out of home?

The process is the same as negotiating for a PMP. Advertisers can reach out to Captivate to build out the plan based on the required targeting. Once everything is set up on the SSP and DSP, Captivate will then be able to control pacing and delivery.

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