Programmatic marketing makes digital outdoor advertising more effective | CSDM

Four companies, one digital ecosystem

‍

This first edition of CSDM Magazine shows how pioneering has resulted in a digital pond, a true ecosystem, of four companies within CS Digital Media (CSDM): outdoor advertising, technology, creative and programmatic buying.

The digital outdoor advertising company provides services such as adaptive planning and data services to efficiency-minded advertisers. The media technology division works with Shell on smart retail solutions to modernise the fuelling experience. The CSDM studio creates experiences in customer journeys with videos and digital advertising concepts. Finally, MyAdbooker, offering programmatic and automated buying solutions for outdoor and online media, ensures integration, optimisation and targeting in campaigns.

‍

The rise of the connected customer

‍

These days, I'd like to meet someone under 50 who doesn't go straight online to platforms like Google and Marktplaats with a relevant question, or ask someone else to do it for them. What I mean is that online search, or micro-moments as Google calls them, has caused a major change in our media consumption, while at the same time this change defines linear TV viewers, meaning older people and certainly not young people, more clearly as a target group.

Can advertisers handle this? Surprisingly, yes in the online world, but less so in the offline world. Online, people try to understand the wants and needs of the connected customer, who arranges many things on their smartphone and whose profile can be recognised through that device. What does the connected customer do when their car breaks down? They go to Google. Need new tyres? Google!

‍

From analogue to digital: programmatic marketing

‍

For advertisers, telling a consistent story about their message across the online and offline mix remains a challenge, because campaigns are still either analogue or digital. Online means video and banners; analogue means TV commercials, bus shelters and billboards.

That's why CSDM has evolved into a company that can also translate analogue into digital, in terms of both creative and media deployment. And that calls for a single strategy, which is what CSDM does with MyAdbooker: programmatic marketing. This means integrating all media types, all data and all technology. Programmatic marketing is an umbrella term. You can unpack it in different ways, for example down to the specific technologies CSDM uses, but at its core, everything revolves around programmatic marketing.

‍

Back to the basics of marketing

‍

Let's go back to the marketer I began this foreword with: the man who stresses that marketing is only now truly transforming digitally, while CSDM has been 100 percent focused on digital media and digital concept development for twelve years. It's cold comfort for anyone who realises that it was 'only' 36 years ago that Philip Kotler published his famous 'Principles of Marketing'. At the time, Kotler delivered the first real marketing ABC, based on influencing human behaviour into buying behaviour.

‍

Data as a foundation

‍

Today, digital marketing technology is changing the global market, a market in which consumers and devices provide data about their own details and needs. Consumers have become individuals guided by their peers, rather than target groups with a general profile.

That's why CSDM has become an officially registered data collector. In this role, we can identify anonymous audience flows while safeguarding consumer privacy. Just as important is CSDM's membership of the EU's Open Society Foundation (OSF), which gives us access to urban safe data platforms in Europe that are being built under the supervision of a number of major companies.

‍

Where will we be in 2025?

‍

Every day we change something about 'business as usual', but we also learn a lot from the foundations we've built so far in our media technology companies and in other industries. Digital is no longer a medium; it has become a way of life and thinking, and it requires knowledge of the fundamentals of digital transformation in our society. It's about the habits of connected customers and new ways of thinking about smart and programmatic marketing. In short, it's about reinventing ourselves.

‍

A transaction-driven society

‍

I think that by 2025 we'll have learned how to handle our data, and how not to. The result? As consumers, we'll steer society based on our needs, using our own data.

‍

Take an example: my washing machine. It's loaded to run a wash and 'thinks': hey, I need to place a bid for the energy I need. Who'll give me the best price? The same happens with a car when it comes to fuel and insurance.

‍

We'll then be living in a transaction-driven society with assisted economic decisions. That may sound complicated, but it means that my device will indicate, for example, that I'm on my way to Belgium and that everything has been arranged: insurance and everything else that goes with it. That's the essence of programmatic: many of the transactions we still have to carry out every day will be organised for us, personalised. So programmatic will only make our lives easier. Searching the way we did in 2015 will be old-fashioned. By 2025, the network society will be a reality: you plug into a network and your identity is part of the collective. Who you are and what you're going to do will be arranged 'neurologically'.

‍

The consumer in the driver's seat

‍

So, in about ten years' time? Consumers will have more power, and as a media company we'll need to ask ourselves how to facilitate that. The answer? Transaction-oriented thinking: in short, programmatic.

Here's another car example. Say you're on the road and you only have ten litres of fuel left. A company, Shell for instance, will then start 'bidding' on you to fill up. Your car will then negotiate and automatically drive the route to the place with the best price. I can't wait for that day to come.

‍