Consent is the future but is your APAC ad strategy ready?

With most Asia Pacific consumers concerned about sharing their data, Crimtan’s Joshua Wilson explains how a successful programmatic strategy can maximise the effectiveness of a digital ad campaign.

Digital advertising is undergoing a fundamental transformation. With the demise of third party cookies fast approaching, the digital advertising landscape is shifting from being cookie-based to consent-based.

While consumers are increasingly demanding relevant brand experiences on digital touchpoints, they are also becoming wary of how brands are obtaining and using their data. Over eight in 10 consumers in APAC are concerned with how their data is being used. And about two in three expect to be able to decline sharing any personal data.

This presents a big challenge for marketers when needing to stay connected with their audience across digital channels.

Leveraging programmatic: Strategic or shooting in the dark?

Delivering relevant communication in an increasingly digital and omnichannel environment makes the use of programmatic technology convenient, as well as inevitable. The technology automates ad buying and optimises the process, rather than directly buying ad space from individual publishers.

While programmatic offers access to millions of publishers and better return on investment (ROI), campaigns must be meticulously planned and strategised to reach the channel’s full potential. Therefore, a successful programmatic strategy needs to focus on five parameters to maximise the effectiveness of a digital ad campaign.

1. Leverage a connected media approach

In preparing for the cookieless era, marketers are prioritising investments towards building first party data. With the proliferation of platforms and technologies, advertisers have an abundance of data options to target their audiences. However, the challenge arises when these platforms operate in silos and the consumer data acquired from one platform cannot be applied to target them on another platform. This can make the data unscalable and ineffective.

The best solution might be to use a connected media approach. This enables brands to target the same customer across multiple channels with greater consistency of message across every interaction on every touchpoint.

2. Use consent-driven targeting

According to Forrester, only 59% of APAC marketers fulfil the minimum requirement to comply with data privacy regulations and only 18% believe they are mature in terms of their privacy oversight and process. Therefore, brands must embed privacy as design in all of their digital touchpoints. This could be achieved by investing in a customisable and easy-to-use interface that allows users to give consent to brands for collecting, storing, correcting, processing, restricting and erasing their data.

3. Use modern-day metrics to gauge performance

Consumers interact with multiple brands over multiple channels every day, making their attention a scarce commodity. Furthermore, it is difficult to measure effectively.

To gain an accurate overview, it is essential that marketers start measuring attention time. This can be done by evaluating a campaign’s performance and effectiveness against five metrics:  

• Viewability: Is this ad in view?
• Time in view: How long is an ad in view?
• Dwell time: How long did a user spend on the webpage?
• Interaction events: Did the user engage beyond an accidental click?
• Interaction rate percentage: How many users interact with the ad out of the total impressions secured?

4. Leverage dynamic creative optimisation (DCO)

DCO is the ability to allow you to change your creative on the fly based on different data inputs. It could be based on weather, geo, time of day, language, product and interest or behaviour. Its objective can involve any part of the customer lifecycle, including initial engagement, a user’s interaction (such as a click or hover) or key performance indicator (KPI) such as users signing up for a registration or trial or making a purchase.

Dynamic creative allows you to send the right message to the right consumer at the right time and in the right environment. For example, Subway Singapore leveraged DCO to grow in-store traffic. The brand selected two dynamic elements in their display ads, weather and day of the week, the basis on which the banner ads would adjust their ad copies, thus conveying relevant message and driving consumers to action – buying a sub. This improved the efficiency, scalability and engagement of the campaign, ultimately providing value for customers.

5. Maximise your lifecycle

Your campaigns need to focus on growing every stage of your lifecycle and effectively moving customers through it. This requires a focus away from the flawed last click attribution model and instead embrace a system that enables you to track people as they move through the new, convert and growth stages of your lifecycle. This requires access to the right fully compliant technology and a programmatic partner who has a tech stack that allows for such sophistication: DMP, DSP and DCO.

This was the approach Australian liquor retail chain BWS took to deliver relevant, targeted messaging to new and existing customers within their three core pillars of convenience, value and range. BWS partnered with Crimtan which took a lifecycle marketing approach by seamlessly linking creative, audience intelligence and investment intelligence to deliver relevant messaging to the audience in different stages of their brand journey.

As a result, BWS achieved an ROI of 6:1, hitting a positive return on adspend within the first 10 days of the campaign (20 days ahead of schedule) and a 6% higher average order value compared to other channels.

Effective data strategy is consumer-centric

Brands are already making strides in strengthening themselves for the cookieless world. However, the critical factor here is to make digital advertising more consumer-centric. Data-driven marketing in the cookieless era requires much more than technical fixes or workarounds. Generating a strong, trust-based relationship with customers may be the key to an effective data strategy.

A strong data strategy and execution capabilities should be an immediate priority for brands, leveraging data-driven expertise and insights from reliable adtech partners to gain an edge and stand out from the clutter.