NEW YORK: Coldwell Banker, the real-estate group, has developed a "programmatic content" strategy to both reach its target audience with online video and maximise the value generated by its marketing dollars.

David Marine, the firm's vp/brand engagement, discussed this topic at MediaPost's OMMA Programmatic TV & Video conference held during New York's Internet Week.

"Programmatic, at its core, is a machine," he said. (For more, including how the company has tapped addressable TV, read Warc's exclusive report: Coldwell Banker's "programmatic content" strategy.)

"We like to fine-tune the machine. And that's probably been the main focus, from a programmatic standpoint, of advertisers and agencies across the globe."

But these same marketers, he warned, have typically paid less attention to "what we are putting into this machine" – meaning the technological capabilities often outstrip the creative that is ultimately deployed.

Coldwell Banker, by contrast, is utilising tools that can help it "pre-optimise" the material promoted in its automated ads.

As an example, it can determine which of its broad slate of online videos are proving most popular with consumers thanks to a tie-up with measurement firm ConvIndex.

"We hook it up to our YouTube channel and it puts together an algorithm that scores the relevancy and engagement of each individual video that's on our channel, and applies a score not just to our channel in general, but also to each individual video," said Marine.

"This is the effort that we're taking to try and make sure that what we're putting into our programmatic buys are already pre-optimised for that digital audience," said Marine.

Combining these insights with property and customer data drawn from a proprietary app used by the firm's sales agents can then help identify a tight audience to target with programmatic ads run on sites like Facebook.

Such a model differs from the A/B testing techniques used by many brands, where they introduce several pieces of content simultaneously, before then boosting their spend behind the top-performing ads.

"The idea of 'programmatic content' and pre-optimising our media ahead of time before spending a dime is something we need to take a serious look at going forward," Marine advised the OMMA assembly.

Data sourced from Warc