Programmatic TV Putting Automakers Into Advertising Fast Lane

wardsauto.com

PTV is a strong choice for reaching a Millennial or cord-cutter audience segment due to its capacity to deliver high impact brand messaging, capture responses to ad creatives and execute at scale.

This year is poised to be a healthy one for the auto industry, with light-vehicle sales in the U.S. projected to outstrip 2015’s record 17.4 million-unit tally.

But with revenue forecasts predicting a plateau in growth for 2017, auto marketers face more pressure than ever to resolve longstanding issues that continue to plague the industry.

Although the American auto industry consists of bold brands with distinct heritage stories, automotive also has become one of the most fragmented verticals in terms of marketing, sales and distribution. An array of challenges confronts auto marketers on a daily basis:

• Advertising campaigns and promotions are executed differently at national, regional and local levels. This makes it difficult for corporate and dealerships to strategically target, differentiate and personalize ad creatives.
• Traditional media such as television has long been a natural choice for achieving mass automotive brand awareness. But in 2016, TV inventory may come up against an election squeeze as space set aside for presidential campaigns skews available slots and rates for automotive marketers accustomed to predictable and accessible day parts.
• Dealership-specific campaigns based on geographies have become unwieldy to manage. With multiple tiers of car brands and unique markets, tactics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each, managing test drive messaging, brand awareness and seasonal deals for all locations typically have been time-consuming and resource-intensive.

The reach and capabilities of digital marketing have helped auto marketers resolve many of these challenges. Research from McKinsey & Co. shows digital channels have become the primary information source for customers who are in the market for a new car.

Data from Millward Brown reveals the average car buyer makes just two in-person visits to dealerships during his purchasing journey. However, one in four purchasers will research automotive options daily on their mobile phones.

Data collected from DataXu’s vast pool of automotive advertising data supports this research, indicating auto-purchasing journeys typically include a staggering 20 digital touch points, spread across three or more devices.

Automakers frequently lead the way in terms of product testing, concept and innovation. They often are at the forefront of new technology and are quick to adapt to the changing needs of customers. Leveraging programmatic television for future advertising campaigns therefore is a natural fit for auto marketers.

Programmatic TV is defined as television inventory planned, bought and sold on impressions using software automation, together with the use of advanced audience data. PTV opens up a world of benefits for all marketers, but represents a fast lane straight to marketing innovation for automotive marketing departments.

It also addresses the issues of targeting and measurement that auto brands in particular suffer from due to the nature of the industry’s infrastructure. Auto brands can use consumers’ digital behaviors to uncover interest earlier in the sales cycle and to be more precise in their targeting, both at a local household level and with the intent of finding new, previously undiscovered customer segments.

Cord-Cutters, Millennials Targets

As more viewers watch video content through devices such as Roku and Apple TV, online data can be leveraged to target across television’s massive scale without having to sacrifice the razor-sharp precision of impression-level “decisioning” that digital offers. Ad spend for programmatic TV is set to skyrocket, and if consumer adoption continues to increase at the rate digital did, one-to-one audience engagement soon could be executed simultaneously to billions of households at global scale.

PTV is unique in that it can be incorporated into existing digital strategies and similarly optimized. It also enables automotive manufacturers to test and refine ads across all channels in one place, if using a technology platform for execution.

PTV and technology-driven marketing enhanced by marketers’ existing data is overcoming the significant challenges presented by fragmentation to fuse the goals of dealerships and auto brands together. It expands automotive marketers’ ability to showcase calls to action (such as booking a local test drive), while ensuring every ad’s message and delivery is tailored at the individual viewer level.

Automotive brands are poised to drive adoption of PTV forward. The technology represents a move away from the status quo toward campaigns that are accountable, attributable and measurable no matter where they take place in today’s complex cross-device customer journey.

Some auto players already are in the game. Many of the world’s most innovative auto brands already have begun leveraging programmatic TV partners to test and learn more about this new channel.

DataXu, for example, works with a luxury automaker on strategic PTV campaigns that target a hard-to-reach audience of affluent Millennials. Cord-cutters, who consume TV content via alternative devices to traditional television sets and cable subscriptions, also fall squarely within the luxury brand’s ideal prospective customer base.

In one campaign, a luxury automaker was able to deliver just the right message to its Millennial audience. By focusing on themes such as innovation and new technology, the PTV campaigns drove greater engagement and completion rates were 40% higher than online campaigns.

PTV is a strong choice for reaching a Millennial or cord-cutter audience segment due to its capacity to deliver high-impact brand messaging, capture responses to ad creatives and execute at scale. It also offers 100% “viewability” – a welcome statistic in today’s ad fraud-fraught world.

PTV has become auto marketing’s fast lane. So don’t get caught looking in the rearview mirror. It’s time to accelerate toward the future of marketing – and that means PTV.