I’m Stefan Havik, Sanoma is one of the biggest publishing houses in europe and has a lot legacy. It hasn’t been easy to embed programmatic growth into our organisation. At first we were struggling in our approach. Now, we actually found that the best way to get this going is by following our companies core values and beliefs. Not in exactly the same way ofcourse as they where thought of in the late 19th century, but they’re still as usefull. For the next 10 minutes i’ll guide you through these 4 values and relate them to our programmatic challenge.
We are proud of the role we play in the daily lives of millions of people. Our media inform, entertain and inspire. We start conversations and discussions, share experiences, opinions and emotions. It’s as important for us as sharing our knowledge and experiences amongst our employees and our business partners. Programmatic advertising gave my company some big challenges.
With fragmentation in media consumption and our advertising eco-system, keeping up the pace becomes more and more difficult.
Jimmy Kimmel quipped during ABC’s upfront presentation last week. Like gluten, "programmatic" has become a buzzword that many people use but few really understand. They just know it's important. For some reason.
The term covers a wide range of technologies that have begun automating the buying, placement and optimization of advertising, replacing human-based methods like phone calls, faxes and, yes, three-martini lunches. Through programmatic technologies, advertisers can buy ads the way they pick up something on Amazon or bid on eBay.
The first thing we tried to do is reduce the complexity of our ecosystem for our product and sales teams. Explaning what every aspect of the lumascape stands for, what their role is, how their revenue streams look like etc. This was way too hard to get across to all 200 salespeople so we decided to organise differently around that. We had a hand full of salespeople dedicated to knowing exactly what’s going on in the programmatic market and pushing them forward to help the rest of the salesforce when programmatic was on the table. All the rest had to know is the straightforwardness of supply and demand, see it as a distribution channel and forget about the complexity of this ecosystem. What they had to focus on, and are still focusing on is the reasons why to use programmatic advertising like operational efficiencies, micro targeting, accountability etc. Their challenge is to grasp their clients more complicated DMU
Most important thing in increasing knowledge is number crunching. Sanoma is a big publisher where we used to be quite dominant. With programmatic advertising our competition really changed. We went from the big kahuna to rather small. This means we can’t focus on selling the fact we’re big and important anymore. We have to focus on real value propositions, for instance the fact that we provide the best premium advertising context out there. Which kind of still is a big thing when you look at results, despite the fact we’re so focused on audience and targeting capabilities as an industry.
People, that’s what it’s all about. We listen and learn, to be able to touch, fascinate and activate people with thing they think are important. We believe that what we do can make a difference when it stimulates and empowers them. Programmatic advertising in it’s current state is hardly fascinating for a lot lof people… And when the competition is that fierce, we have to think about other ways to engage our advertisers.
Brand advertising
Creativity
Brand advertising
Creativity
Ambition and guts are at the core of our company. We think quality and integrity can go hand in hand with inspiration and creativity. I allways focus on getting shit done, and not just talking about it. That’s the same what i expect from my team. Sanoma is large and complex, but there are some key organisational things that have to be in place to enable programmatic growth.
When you think about programmatic and concequences for your organisation you probably think about this guy first… Sales… If you look at the statistics of programmatic, with only a small portion being ‘IO based’, how should you organise around that. All the salespeople we have, what should they do?? In five years our sales force will be more like a marketing agency working with brands on bigger partnerships. Everything else will be RTB. Our sales guy will be a marketing strategist. Programmatic advertising automates mainly the transactional part, the key now is to talk strategy and creative ideas, not about transactions anymore!
Good cop bad cop
Product development, yield management and technology. But also sales. Don’t seperate programmatic and manual sales efforts. Our belief is that a holistic approach will allways win. Also make sure to incentivize wanted behaviour, which sound easier than it is. Want to increase yield? Incentivize net revenue or margin increase.
I always want to know what’s happening in the world around me. We’re allways monitoring changing consumer behaviour and developments in the market. …
Netstat
How we, as a traditional publisher, founded in the late 19th century, use our core values and beliefs to grow programmatic revenue the culture it surrounds
How we, as a traditional publisher, founded in the late 19th century, use our core values and beliefs to grow programmatic revenue the culture it surrounds