Programatic marketing is still a little known and understood opportunity for many marketing people and decision makers in Romania. For the early adopters and savvyier segments, other problems may arise: lack of training and education, complicated and strict approval levels that make it impossible for media agencies and other providers to leverage the potential of new technology. At ICEEfest, we took the opportunity to interview Jan Heumüller Managing Director Europe for DataXu, a leading provider of programmatic marketing software. Jan Heumüller has over 13 years experience in international digital marketing and previously worked at eVita and ePost. Before joining mexad, Jan held senior positions at software specialist at dacoma GmbH and AdNetwork Ybrant Digital. Furthermore Jan holds a degree in Economics from the University of Applied Science in Cologne, Germany.
Why should marketers care about programmatic marketing software? What kind of solutions do you offer and who are your main customers? Are there any specific industries such as media agencies or there are other segments that should explore these opportunities?
Jan Heumüller: Everyone who cares about his marketing ROI should care about Programmatic Marketing. Why is Programmatic Marketing so important? Because it helps to solve marketers biggest problems through the usage of consumer data and business rules to deliver the right message to the right consumer at the right time – across the entire marketing plan. This means being able to measure and tailor every interaction to a consumer at the impression level and in real-time.
We offer our clients one of the most advanced cloud-based platform for digital media buying and analytics, serving advertisers and agencies around the globe. Our software helps marketers focus their marketing investments and achieve optimal results across all available media formats, devices, channels, and buying modes. We are making marketing smarter with science.
We are happy to say that DataXu provides, accordingly to recently published Forrester DSP Wave from Forrester Research Inc., the current strongest offering and a total advertising solution. We received in this report the highest score for our offering, buying, data and analytics.
What’s the level of investment they should plan? What other resources involved, apart from technology? (training, skills, human resources).
Jan Heumüller: The level of investment varies with the challenges a client wants to solve. Programmatic Marketing platforms get smarter with every decision and can’t deliver excellent results from doing one campaign per quarter, so it’s recommendable to plan for the long-term. And allocate budgets that allow the platform to optimize and generate learnings.
One important part for a successful programmatic marketing strategy is education. Therefore it’s necessary to look for a partner who guides you through this sometimes confusion and challenging programmatic marketing world. We at DataXu offer for example different Service Models starting with Managed Service, where we serve the clients campaigns over Co-Managed Solutions up to Self-Service Solutions where the client is running its campaigns in the DataXu platform on its own.
It’s important that your trusted technology partner supports and guides you with special trainings and relevant best practices on this exciting journey.
What are the challenges? Could so many entities really move fast, act, take decisions and truly benefit from real time marketing opportunities?
Jan Heumüller: One of the biggest challenges is the siloed view of marketing activities. Most marketers have special teams per channel like one for Digital, Mobile, Social, Video, Print, TV or Out of Home. Thus they have no chance to get a holistic view of their customer and adapt their messaging accordingly.
“One of the biggest challenges is the siloed view of marketing activities. Most marketers have special teams per channel like one for Digital, Mobile, Social, Video, Print, TV or Out of Home. Thus they have no chance to get a holistic view of their customer and adapt their messaging accordingly.”
We work with a lot of advertiser and agencies out of different verticals across the globe and all of them could not just improve their marketing investments through the usage of programmatic marketing, they also improved their consumer engagement and gain more detailed insights in their customer. For example Ford, who is one of our clients shifted their marketing activities from a nameplate strategy to a user interest driven approach and generated thus a 20% increase in customer engagement and more than 50% in efficiency of their media investments.
