Adstudio.Cloud organises Programmatic Colombo 2020

Section of participants 

Programmatic Colombo, the first event of its kind, was successfully held in Sri Lanka recently, organised by Adstudio.Cloud, at The Kingsbury Hotel, Colombo.  

Though it was originally planned to accommodate only 100 participants in terms of brand marketers, publishers and agencies, there were over 300 requests and Adstudio.Cloud successfully extended the capacity for 200 participants. 

The guest speaker, former New York Times Programmatic Director Matt Prohaska, shared his 26 years of experience in the realm of digital media and advertising technology, to raise awareness and to educate the marketing fraternity in light of programmatic advertising.

Programmatic advertising defined
Advertising has always been about connecting with the customers and with technology, it has evolved vastly over the past few years, to the point where advertisements display targeting its viewers, programmatically. However, it will not stop there. 

Programmatic advertising technology itself is ever evolving. Currently, in the US, more than 83 percent of digital advertising takes place programmatically and in India, it is close to 30 percent.

Programmatic advertising is the automation of data-informed buying, selling and/or delivery method for many types of digital advertising. It is a data-driven, targeted advertising mechanism, which provides tangible benefits to enhance the overall campaign performance. 

Focusing on the demand-side platform (DSP) or buyers’/brands’ side of programmatic advertising, there are five stages for programmatic buying. First, the brands need to determine the objectives. Then, they need to build strategies, pick their targets, activate and then optimise their campaigns.  

On the supplier-side platform (SSP) or the publisher side, programmatic advertising provides the opportunity for them to offer their ad inventory to multiple advertisers, thus increasing the revenue generation for 
the publishers.

About Adstudio.Cloud
Adstudio.Cloud is Sri Lanka’s premier advertising technology company, specialised in programmatic advertising, data engineering, digital PR and audience management. As the first programmatic ecosystem, Adstudio.Cloud serves the objective of supporting the Sri Lankan economy by retaining valuable foreign exchange within the country, which otherwise would flow out of the country. 

Led by the best minds in the industry, this platform follows global standards to level up the programmatic advertising in Sri Lanka through smart tools, sustainable strategy and intelligent systems.

Adstudio.Cloud is the only ecosystem to comprehensively cover the SSP: the local publishers and DSP: advertisers and agencies, where it connects both sides seamlessly to help reach the right audience, at the right time while maximising revenue generation for the publishers and conversions for advertisers.

Adstudio.Cloud has acquired a vast knowledge in the ad tech domain. Equipped with dedicated technology specialists and data scientists with over 30 years of experience collectively, digital strategists, campaign success managers, dedicated support team, expertise in consumer journey mapping, over 2000 creative templates for ad campaigns, Adstudio.Cloud thrives to provide a full-stack service in the ad 
tech industry.

With a wealth of over 312 publishers (English, Sinhala and Tamil), Adstudio.Cloud has executed over 617 campaigns and served over 570,000,000 impressions over last year, to a proven portfolio of clients from over 15 industries. Adstudio.Cloud’s vision is to extend the programmatic ecosystem to international ad exchanges, to connected TV and to digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising. 

Machine learning and technology are key features of programmatic advertising. During the session of Programmatic Colombo, Prohaska explained what programmatic advertising is, what’s in it for the publishers, strategies for the publishers to grow revenue, what’s in it for the buyers/brands, strategies for brands to achieve better return on investment (ROI), future of programmatic, opportunities and challenges for 
sellers and buyers.

Programmatic advertising for publishers
Programmatic advertising provides convenience for the publishers to sell their advertising space. With the AI and automation tools integrated into the system, publishers can optimise their ad sales and save time required to find advertisers. It also helps serve viewer-centric ad campaigns, which are highly relevant to the viewers and with which they are more likely to engage.

Efficiency is another benefit of programmatic advertising for the publishers, which helps them to maximise revenue generation from their available ad space while reducing costs and increasing margins.

Should publishers have all of their content on social media? Prohaska, with his experience at New York Times, one of the early and successful adopters of programmatic technology in the world, said ‘no’. It is not advisable for publishers to push all their content and marketing efforts on social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, Google or any other because publishers may experience traffic at the beginning but the revenue may start to dwindle.  

Thus, it has to be a balance between having a sneak peak that drives traffic to their own sites versus highlighting content that gives them thorough brand exposure on 
social media.

Adstudio.Cloud is the only platform in Sri Lanka, which supports the local SSPs and to advertise content in all three languages (English, Sinhala and Tamil). This has allowed reaching the correct target audience with the most appealing ad creative in the language of the targeted audience, for better conversions. 

Adstudio.Cloud allows the local publishers to place campaigns directly on its network without having to go through Google or any other foreign network. This in fact allows them to obtain maximum monetisation with their available ad inventory. As a result, it helps to retain ad revenue within the country and within the local publisher network. Not only that but also the Adstudio.Cloud network has gone a step further by supporting the SSPs and DSPs to connect with ad networks internationally, creating further value to both publishers and advertisers equally. 

Audience manager is the backbone of the entire ecosystem of Adstudio.Cloud, where it allows publishers to enhance the value creation through the quality profiling of viewers, giving them access to target the right ad campaign to the right person on real-time bidding (RTB). 

With the objective of enhancing support to the Sri Lankan economy, Adstudio.Cloud provides value-added services, including technical support for publishes, advice on how to increase more traffic to the website, how to improve content quality and many more.

Programmatic advertising for brand marketers/advertisers
Programmatic advertising offers a multitude of benefits for brand marketers, including real-time optimisation, better reach, contextual campaigns, less wastage and 
many more. 

Given the automated nature of programmatic ad buying, the risk of error is minimised. It also offers the ground to eliminate waste in terms of reducing impressions being wasted and targeting correct consumers for the correct ads.  

Adstudio.Cloud provides direct access to insightful data analytics through the Campaign Manager system, where the brand marketers can monitor the performance of their ad campaigns. With this, brands will witness improved ROI. 

Contextual campaigns on the other hand are potentially one of the most advanced aspects of programmatic. With contextual campaigns, marketers have control over who sees which ads and at what times. This increases the chances of showing the right advert, at the right time to the right consumer, who will then click and engage with 
the brand.

Moreover, the feature of frequency capping limits how often the same individual would see a certain advert and it’s a great way of ensuring lean spending and avoiding ineffective exposures.

The possibilities are endless with programmatic advertising across any industry. For example, retail companies can benefit from the ability to push specific products through retargeting. Travel corporations can target customers through geolocation within a set distance of the place they’re advertising for. With the powerful set of tools it offers, marketers can optimise programmatic advertising for greater marketing performance, transparency and ROI for marketing budgets.

Future of programmatic advertising 
The future of programmatic advertising is omnichannel, said Prohaska. The default of every standardised ad campaign would be done programmatically. Currently, it is more than 80 percent of display advertising, more than 60 percent mobile, video ads more than 58 percent, social media more than 32 percent and on TV, it’s close to 8 percent in the international arena, which run programmatically.

It is amazing to see how certain countries are taking DOOH screens to go programmatic to display relevant ad campaigns to those who pass by. For example, in airports, shopping centres and other locations that people gather, the digital screens are being set to run programmatically.

DigitalX (Pvt.) Ltd is a fully-owned Sri Lankan company, the only ad tech R&D company in Sri Lanka.