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INTRODUCTION

Signaling that the rise of programmatic buying in mobile is equally as dramatic as its ascension in other forms of digital media, the Mobile Marketing Association’s first-ever Automation and Programmatic Forum studied not only its growth, but the ramifications that growth has for mobile. The Forum brought together several hundred practitioners from brands, publishers, agencies and technology providers.

Speakers discussed everything from the need for clients to manage their own data to better understand programmatic, to how to use it to accelerate growth, to how to make the programmatic marketplace transparent and well-lit.

But if programmatic is seen as the apex of marketing automation, speakers often focused on it as a means to an end much higher than automation in and of itself. As opening keynote Rob Griffin, chief innovation officer at Almighty said, the goal is “to automate the easier tasks so you can focus on the bigger tasks.”

Below are five themes that emerged during the course of the day, with further discussion below:

1. Creative execution is crucial to being successful in buying programmatic; it’snot just about effectively using data and technology.

2. Programmatic needs to be used to create a seamless user experience betweenplatforms.

3. Mobile programmatic is no longer a stepchild to managed buying, orprogrammatic in other media, but it lags in some areas.

4. Mobile programmatic suffers from some of the same problems regardingmeasurement, fraud and a lack of transparency as other digital media has had.

5. Mobile video is booming, and more and more buys are programmatic andcross-platform.

In short, the mobile programmatic marketplace is looking a lot like the marketplace as a whole, whether it’s being compared to programmatic on other platforms, or in what it can and should deliver in terms of the user experience.

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Creative execution is crucial to being successful in buying programmatic; it’s not just about effectively using data and technology.

Throughout the Forum, speakers kept coming back to how essential it is for practitioners to customize creative alongside the data they are using to complete the buy. As Griffin pointed out, without using targeted contextual creative: ”Now I’m just annoying all the right people with crappy ads.” To create the right degree of customization, marketers can use all sorts of levers, he said, including daypart, mobile vs. desktop, lifestage and so forth. Mihael Mikek, founder/CEO of Celtra, who spoke later in the day, affirmed that, “Users are looking for personalized and contextualized experiences.”

During his presentation, Rajeev Subramanyam, vp/partnership and digital acquisition for American Express OPEN, emphasized how creative, when customized with data, has definitive effects on the bottom line. For Amex, programmatic is defined as “using data and automation to deliver the right experience to the right prospect at the right price” and other speakers echoed that sentiment throughout the day. Subramanyam noted that at Amex, when creative, data and technology work in consort, the company has seen a 90 percent rate of card approvals.

Mikek pointed out that creative in programmatic so far doesn’t match up to its sophisticated data. The goal is to “use all the signals and data points to make it completely dynamic.”

If that sounds burdensome, producing creative that lives up to the data powering it doesn’t have to be difficult. OperaMediaWorks senior creative director Jason Collar – who presented with Mikek -- demonstrated just how simple it can be to bring context to creative. In the example, a campaign from Mountain Dew simply changed players to reflect the geo-location of the user, and made the campaign more relevant.

Mobile Marketing Asc @MMAglobal Apr 14

Quality is key: "Every app that's on your first screen should be personalized to you & contextualized relevant." @mihamikek1 @CeltraMobile

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Programmatic needs to be used to create a seamless user experience between platforms.

Almighty’s Griffin opened the Forum with an analog example of how frustrating it is when experiences aren’t seamless and integrated for the customer: phone-based customer service. He cited a scenario nearly everyone has experienced – being passed from service rep to service rep, continually having to repeat the same information: account numbers, phone numbers, the problem that needs troubleshooting and so forth.

In digital, customers experience awkward hand-offs all of the time: devices owned by the same user and being used to do research on the same product don’t leverage the connection. Data such as device IDs are needed to power those connections, but most companies aren’t leveraging them, he said, even though 71 percent of consumers “react negatively to inconsistencies in brand experience across devices” and one out of ten say such inconsistencies actually drive them away from a brand.

Amex’s Subramanyam expressed a similar sentiment, “Mobile is really a whole new set of opportunities…but yet we are in the infancy of how to communicate with our customers in a seamless way.”

The company’s goal is to move from the 2015 model of a fragmented mobile ecosystem, banners and the so-called “Black box” of programmatic, in which aspects of the transaction are unclear. By 2017, Amex hopes to make the experience for the user seamless and immersive, as illustrated by the visual below.

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Mobile programmatic is no longer a stepchild to managed buying, or programmatic in other media, but it lags in some areas.

Catherine Boyle, principal analyst at eMarketer, sketched out the statistical details about mobile programmatic’s growth in her presentation, “In-App Inventory: Programmatic’s Diamond in the Rough.” The company predicts that $15.45 billion in advertising will be served programmatically in 2016, about half on Facebook. That figure is larger than radio, newspapers or magazine spending, and is 69% of mobile display.

But there are still factors holding mobile programmatic back even though eMarketer predicts a 37% increase in it next year. One is a gap between app use and the programmatic dollars spent on in-app advertising. Users spend 79.3% of their mobile time within the app universe, but only 73.2% of mobile ad dollars go there. As advertisers look for cross-platform buying opportunities, the mobile web is still getting an outsized number of dollars since it plays a more dominant role in programmatic environments. Advertisers also still favor web-centric environments and say retargeting is easier and premium content is usually more available.

A separate prediction, offered by Joe Prusz, global head of mobile at Forum sponsor Rubicon Project: mobile programmatic would grow to 73 percent of all mobile display in 2018 from slightly more than half of the marketplace now. (Source: IDC, Digital Advertising Market Model)

Despite some roadblocks, the growth predictions underscore that some issues with in-app programmatic inventory are quickly being solved. Major publishers, including The Weather Company and Pandora, are embracing it, CPMs are rising, and advertiser interest in in-app inventory is growing.

AOL’s Lamborghini reflected the viewpoint of many speakers at the Forum, when she noted that creative options and targeting capabilities have caught up to managed buys, but outcomes are dependent on the quality of data -- such as first party data and location – the marketer has access to. Data is what gives the extra layer of context that makes programmatic work.

Mobile Marketing Asc @MMAglobal Apr 14

"Mobile Programmatic will be a 56 Billion dollar opportunity." @JoePrusz @rubiconproject on stage at #Programmatic Forum in NYC #MMAF2016

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Mobile programmatic suffers from some of the same problems regarding measurement, fraud and a lack of transparency as other digital media has had.

Another common thread through many of the Forum’s sessions was discussion of the issues that make programmatic – and digital – less than perfect platforms: measurement, fraud and lack of transparency.

Ron Pinelli, vp/digital research and standards for the Media Rating Council, gave attendees an overview of the progress being made towards more accurate measurement. Its mobile viewership impression guidelines are currently open for public comment and it is also working on a currency that will track viewable impressions to a human along with duration and targeted audience characteristics. Currently, he said programmatic lags other trading platforms in adoption of viewable impressions counting and it is also said that RTB and Exchange environments within programmatic were most concerning when it comes to invalid traffic detection and filtration.

The MRC’s progress in targeted audience characteristics is largely focused on attribution, including audience-based currently and location data and the validity of attribution methodology for things such as registration.

Other speakers pinned many of mobile programmatic’s issues to the complexity of the marketplace. “When we talk to our clients what they really want is much more simplicity,” said Scott Meyer, CEO of Ghostery. “You can now spend $100 million on the Web in ten minutes. Try spending $100 million in the app system without going through Facebook or Google. You can’t right now.”

“Complexity and security have an inverse relationship,” explained White Ops’ Tiffany, who said that mobile ad fraud is booming.

Meyer called for major industry players to set encryption standards saying it was their role, not that of the government or trade associations.

Mobile Marketing Asc @MMAglobal Apr 14

"You'll never remove the incentives. What you can work with are standards and objective metrics." @scottmeyer @Ghostery #MMAF2016

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Mobile video is booming, and more and more buys are programmatic and cross-platform.

As it has time and again, on other platforms, video is proving itself in mobile. Part of it, of course, is the union of video’s unsurpassed engagement with the intimacy of mobile’s full-screen experience, but it is also being extensively leveraged in programmatic, as buyers become more sophisticated with targeting and more inventory slowly becomes available. Additionally, video is increasingly being bought cross-platform, as advertisers seek to use video’s engagement wherever users are. As Spencer Scott, chief revenue officer of Fiksu said on a panel devoted to video: “I think we are seeing people move to screen-agnostic campaigns.”

[Clients are] looking for the consumer,” said Edric Chan, directory of inventory partnerships at the Trade Desk during the same session. “It doesn’t matter which screen….we’ll find you on whatever device you’re on.”

Per eMarketer, programmatic will account for more than half of all digital video buying in 2016, or $5.37 billion of the expected $9.59 billion total, and the vast majority of buyers throughout the world expect to increase their video budgets this year.

It’s also becoming more common for advertisers to employ mobile-first

strategies. Havas Media’s Kelly Leach, who presented a case study about Oppenheimer, noted that the advertiser focused on mobile because its target – financial advisors – tend to be on-the-go. The marketer used programmatic to buy a campaign featuring outstream video – which runs within the stream of content – that included dynamic creative optimization tactics, automatic resizing and the phone’s accelerometer so that the creative would change as the phone moved. Leach’s experience countered programmatic’s reputation of being “boring.”

No matter what prism attendees looked through at the MMA’s first Automatic and Programmatic Forum – targeting, creative, pricing and even measurement hurdles – one thing was clear: Mobile programmatic not only isn’t boring, it’s becoming a can’t-do-without-tool for mobile marketers.

Mobile Marketing Asc @MMAglobal Apr 14

"Mobile and video are important to your results. Should be over 1/3 of your allocation." Dave Coffey of Contexxt #MMAF2016

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MMA PROGRAMMATIC COMMITTEE Interested in participating or learning more about the MMA Programmatic Committee?

PROGRAMMATIC NAVIGATOR

Contact committees@mmaglobal.com and check out the Mobile Programmatic Committee website here www.mmaglobal.com/programs/programmatic

The MMA would like to thank our Forum Partners

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The Programmatic Navigator is designed to guide brand marketers to a place where the power of mobile can be harnessed today for all types of campaigns and objectives.

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