Digiday highlighted that more focus is being shifted away from single-mindedly optimising ad placement and to advertising creative. No amount of behavioural, contextual targeting or data-driven campaigns will fully compensate for abrasive sounds, unattractive visuals or stale storytelling in adverts.

So how can we get the most out of programmatic ads to boost their performance?

Work in an Interdisciplinary Way

With programmatic ad production, more in-depth consideration of things like colour theory and human psychology need to make up the fibre of all personalised ads. Why not widen the net even further to consult with therapists and other sector-specific industry experts to understand the unique vocabularies of your target audience? Armed with their insights into what really makes your audiences tick, your team will be better placed to A/B test programmatic ad creative. 

Don’t Compartmentalise Your Media Channels 

Teams can often pigeon-hole content onto one platform only, without regularly experimenting enough to create opportunities to consolidate their audience reach. With meta analyses and audience consolidation, take as holistic a view as possible. This includes comparing and contrasting ad success on different social media platforms, non-social channels, and exploring the extent to which your cross-channel marketing is effective. 

Do you do enough to incentivise your audience on one platform to engage with your other channels, such as running an Instagram or TikTok competition for people who download a particular game that you run ads in? In another example, perhaps you could sponsor a branded podcast series, exploring a topic that deeply concerns your target audience, with an accompanying VR/ AR challenge per episode which revolves around products from your brand that they already own? 

Repurpose Content (the Right Way!) 

Why not experiment with re-using viral social posts in scripts for programmatic ads? In display media, this approach has led to repurposed social media content outperforming regular display banners by 50% or more.

To boost interactivity with ads, regular QR codes or scannable soundwaves can be embedded into ads to link to games, product demo or competition pages, contact forms, or to signpost the audience to webpages or podcast channels for more information.

For more inspiration on how you can get the best out of programmatic ads, you can get in touch with us and explore the world of opportunity that audio advertising can offer you!