media update’s Adam Wakefield was at the IAB Digital Summit to hear Jessy Severins, advertising yield manager and monetisation product manager at eBay Classifieds Group, flesh out this idea.

The annoying salesperson who follows customers around

Severins’ speech at the summit focused on how advertisers should follow their customer’s digital lead, which put succinctly, means treating them as more than a collation of search, viewing and purchase history.

She began by noting that today, customers often know more about a particular product than a salesperson, because the customer knows what they want, and when they are looking for it. This makes them king.

The key from a digital perspective to treating the customer as king, is not being “that irritating person that keeps talking at a party. Timing is everything, be appropriate.” Today, this irritating person is represented by consumers being hunted on the Internet by the same ads, even though they are more likely to be irrelevant than relevant.

Severins illustrated this point by showing a College Humour clip about what Internet ads would look like if fleshed as a person, and the results were not pretty.

In the clip, a man is constantly followed around by a salesperson, who offers the man products he does not need, ask for, or want. While the video was made to be humorous, its source material was drawn from the daily reality consumers live in.

“We’ve seen this in about every programmatic summit. Last year it was on each and every slide, but this is what programmatic is. Programmatic is just a tool go get that right ad to the right consumer at the right time,” Severins says.

However, while programmatic opens the door to “a lot of global infantry”, it is not as effective as thought for targeting purposes.

“Behavioural targeting is way more important than getting to know our users, assuming they will be here, here and here,” Severins says, “I think we’ve created a situation. We all adapted programmatic as the tool to do easy marketing and keep brands happy the easy way.”

Collaboration is critical to get to customers

This needs to change. Doing so means brands, agencies and publishers can collaborate.  

“Brands should collaborate with their agencies to a defined strategy. Agencies should be eager to find their right audience for their brand. Publishes should have audience data readily available,”

Severins adds, “The customer of 2017 really demands to be king. Customers are fully capable of researching and making informed decisions. Programmatic buying is not the solution, it is just a technology.”

At present, the current concoction of tools and strategies is not paying dividends. Severins notes a couple of statistics from Hubspot’s 2016 US-focused research document, Why People Block Ads (And What It Means for Marketers and Advertisers), illustrating her point. The document dictates that 51% of people have a lower opinon of brands that use auto-playing ads, while another 87% of those surveyed say there are more ads on the Internet than two years ago.

If you sought out the research, there are other interesting stats to be found. Adblocker Plus, a popular ad blocking app, has been downloaded 300 million times worldwide. Of those who know about ad blockers, 41% found out via word of mouth. A total of 91% of those surveyed said ads are more intrusive than they were two years ago, 73% of people dislike pop-up ads and four out of five people have left a webpage because of a pop-up or autoplaying ad.

Added to what the likes of Alexandra Salomon and Leonel Silva also said at the summit, all is not lost, but as Severins suggests, using audience data well is, in her view, “the only way forward for the South African digital industry”.

For more information, visit iabdigitalsummit.co.za.

Want to know more about what Salomon and Silva had to say? Read our article, 2017 IAB Digital Summit broadens the digital mind.

*Image courtesy of Andreas Overland under this license