Is your modeling causing flaky skin? Is your current fraud treatment ineffective? Are you suffering acute pain due to bad placement? Has automation caused you excessive anxiety, stress, or worry? Have your digital display campaigns gotten so out of control that it is negatively impacting those dearest to you…a spouse? A child? Is objectionable content causing Gastrointestinal discomfort? The Chief Marketing Officer Council’s milestone research report, “BRAND PROTECTION FROM DIGITAL CONTENT INFECTION” can help. The CMO Council and Dow Jones recently released detailed findings of extensive research undertaken this year on the impact of programmatic media buying and automated digital advertising placement (read it here).
But sometimes diligent Ad Channel Selection isn’t enough! When AdTech limitations become a problem, it can be hard to focus on everyday life. With help, treatment and ongoing support, even the most aggressive forms of abuse can be addressed, amended and resolved. Initially, it may be difficult to determine who is abusing budgets since it is so common, but here at the offices of the Marketing Blog Dr, we’ve identified key signs to look for:
1) Binging on programmatic advertising. The IAB describes Programmatic as the application of data and software to automate digital advertising. For Women, the number of Programmatic buys needed to be executed in a 10 millisecond time period to be considered Programmatic Binging is 400. For Men it is 500. This type of consumption of digital inventory involves the intention of taking advantage of the deformed and defective digital supply chain. This type of abuse pattern is very difficult to spot as the inner workings of Programmatic advertising are cloaked in mystery. Here, the disorder is defined as the Functional Sub-programmatic Type.
2) Loss of control over how much or how often marketing lingo is used. When looking for this abuse pattern, ask the person to describe the modern marketing landscape. If they say “it’s a many-to-many model as opposed to a one-to-many model”, you might want to express concern. But try again to see if this response was just an anomaly. You might request some clarification with a question such as “how do you mean?”. If the response is along the lines of “it is an amorphous organism as opposed to an neat structure that revolves around a company, brand or consumer”, you now have cause for alarm. But before you take on the difficult task of intervention, make one more attempt in order to eliminate all doubt. Ask if they have any other thoughts on the matter. A response such as “this new marketing ecosystem must be integrated and embeded into the consumers very fabric and fiber of operation” should a be clear indication that there is a problem. This type is known as the Intermediate Innovative Subtype.
3) A wish to stop talking about Millennials but an inability to follow through is another dead ringer for positive diagnosis. A good example of this would be the recent high profile case of P+G activist investor Nelson Peltz who had this to say in defense of trying to radically revise the CPG giants’ marketing strategy. “It’s what the Millennials want. They want a brand with emotions, a brand that’s got a story behind it, a brand that brings value to the environment or is organic”. Or take for example the incoherent musing Robert Kraft – “The thing we have to be careful of is Millennials. They don’t watch TV, they don’t have TVs or subscribe to cable. So we have to bring that audience in. Partly it’s done through fantasy games and linking to that.” This type is referred to as the Chronic Millennial Maniac.
Budget abusers may or may not share some or all of these characteristics with one another. What they will have in common is an aversion to strive for diagnosis. For some the cause is peer pressure. Family history may also play a role but a specific gene has not been isolated. An intervention can be helpful but seek our professional guidance and leave comments or questions if you suspect a co-worker or someone you love has a problem. And remember, The CMO Council rightly advises brands to hold everyone involved—including themselves—to a higher standard to protect brand reputations online. Otherwise, consumers will slowly move away—a trend that may be unnoticed until it is too late.
