Marketing automation enables advertisers to reduce overhead. But will they sacrifice control over ads in the upcoming holiday season?

Dan Pratt, chief operating officer, AdHawk

Dan Pratt, chief operating officer, AdHawk

With the holidays right around the corner, marketers are scrambling to set up ad campaigns that will lead to the highest likelihood of success during the busiest time of year. These same marketers are increasingly looking at automation as a way to refocus their attention on more strategic initiatives that will drive business growth, simplify their day-to-day responsibilities, and reduce marketing overhead. But are advertisers truly ready to relinquish control of their campaigns to automation in order to capitalize on this trend?

Automation is playing a much larger role in the world of advertising these days. Ad tech companies are developing technology that simplifies the ad-buying and ongoing management and optimization processes. This is helping to ensure that marketers spend more time being strategic and less time in the tactical weeds. It also requires marketers to give up control and trust that the technology behind the delivery of their ads is optimizing delivery of creative assets and overall messaging to the right publishers at the right time.

For example, an online retailer using digital advertising to drive traffic for Cyber Monday sales will deploy outside technology to help with the buying and placement of ads (we call this programmatic technology). They may also use a keyword/digital advertising optimization tool to ensure that they are getting the best bid prices and placements for the Google AdWords and Facebook Ads they have purchased.

As businesses prepare for the upcoming onslaught of holiday-induced business, a ton of pre-planning on behalf of advertisers is taking place. And as this planning process begins, a number of questions are being asked: Who do we need to target? How often do we need to optimize our campaigns? And most importantly, how do we automate this process so our team can simply set it and forget it?

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Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.

All of these questions are incredibly important to answer during the planning stage, but the latter seems to be coming up more and more often as the availability and complexity of media in the digital world continues to expand.

It’s easy to see why businesses are getting curious. According to Nucleus Research, marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. More sales and less cost = kudos from the boardroom and accolades from the C-Suite.

In the ever-evolving world of digital advertising, marketing automation and the notion of set-it and forget-it advertising seems to be the new black. At the same time, dependence on managed services, or a dependence on agency or ad-tech partners to help operate and manage the technology used to deliver ads, is dwindling right before our eyes. Brands are increasingly moving marketing services in-house, and are looking at automation to save time, money and regain control. In fact, the ANA reports that 58% of advertisers in the US have started shifting towards in-house or on-site services. Larger brands that rely on agencies are also looking for change as they urge agency leaders to embrace automation and consolidate buying via programmatic platforms in an effort to reduce the overall cost of project management and media buying.

Who is driving this trend? Well, Google and Facebook to start. They have made it easier than ever to set up and execute ROI-generating campaigns. Feed your budget, ad copy and your target customer into one or both of these platforms and they do the rest. Well, kind of…

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As many of us know, there is an entire industry that continues growing around Google AdWords and Facebook Ads with automation, optimization and simplification at their core. Scott Brinker of the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog tracks this industry closely, and tells an interesting story in his latest spate of research. From 2016 to 2017, the marketing automation category of the marketing technology landscape grew by 36%, from 156 vendors to 212.

Agencies are also taking notice. Managed services teams are being replaced by automation tools in an effort to hold on to advertisers by providing them with lower cost solutions—on top of creative development—that serve to optimize campaign management and deliver ROI.

Andrew Pancer, co-founder of Fresh Group, a company that offers fully managed digital marketing campaigns for agencies and brands, recently riffed on this trend and its impact on small and large advertisers as well as agencies.

“The largest agencies are consolidating media spend to their trading desks and are now primarily using self-service platforms. Smaller marketers and agencies are, in many cases, not looking for this type of solution and are turning to automation to help drive campaign management. Collectively, brand marketers both large and small are looking for experts who can develop intelligent digital strategies using the best of what the advertising technology market has to offer. While managed services are still necessary in some cases, automation continues to take hold.”

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Matt Jernigan, vice president of creative for Pottery Barn, has created a hybrid model and is slowly navigating the waters of migration by testing automation while keeping some key elements of creative in house.

“While our in-house creative teams still play the largest role in our overall marketing efforts, we are constantly looking at ways to further automate processes such as ad creation for digital outlets,” Matt told me in a recent conversation. “With the number of ad formats and sizes growing in keeping with the exponential growth of new outlets, we’ve had success outsourcing ad design to keep pace and allow our in-house teams to stay focused on more content-heavy creative.” 

With the rise of set-it and forget-it advertising upon us and the holiday season just around the corner, advertisers need to be prepared. At the same time, some important questions continue to linger. Are advertisers ready to relinquish control of key messages and creative during one of the busiest times of the year in an effort to automate systems and free up their marketing workforce for more strategic thinking? And will the automation of ads deliver the ROI that the higher ups are expecting as shopping season kicks into high gear?

As we are seeing today, an entire industry of digital advertising agencies and technologies have popped up overnight to service these advertisers and make answering these questions that much easier. And as the tides shift and the mindset of marketers both large and small slowly move in a new direction, only time will tell if advertisers give up control and give in—fully—to automation.

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AdHawk provides technology designed to help companies manage their advertising on Google and Facebook.

 

 

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