In house marketing success

Advertising Automation Software
May 2014
MARKETING MONEYBALL
CHANGES EVERYTHING
WHY IN-HOUSE ADVERTISING

Programmatic technology revolutionized
Wall Street by automating trading
and removing middlemen, and digital
advertising is following suit. Companies are
increasingly taking their media buying from
external third parties to in-house talent.
When armed with best-in-class ad
automation software, an individual in-
house advertiser can achieve the scale,
efficiencies, and performance at or beyond
what’s possible through third-party teams.
CEOs and CMOs are increasingly
recognizing that online customer
acquisition and remarketing are key to
business success, and user-friendly tools
have enabled them to develop in-house
competencies around:
Campaign conception
Execution
Measurement
Optimization
Nanigans | Advertising Automation Software 2
The Internet hasn’t just changed the way people interact with one another socially; it’s
changed the entire foundation of how businesses reach consumers. With the rise of
lightweight web-based interfaces and marketing automation platforms for everything from
outbound email marketing to inbound content marketing, today’s businesses are empowered
to take control of their digital marketing in-house—and this includes taking media buying into
their own hands.




The normal pace at which businesses develop and plot out
learning and assignments will not suffice. Speed, nimbleness,
and imagination are crucial.
Partha Iyengar
Vice President
Gartner
Marketing Moneyball: Why In-House Advertising Changes Everything

In this eBook we discuss the growing trend
of in-house advertising, why marketing
teams are taking their advertising in-house,
and who’s best fit to adopt this model.
What’s Inside?
Data that supports the growing
adoption of in-house advertising
Benefits of in-house marketing in
terms of cost, control, expertise, speed,
and transparency
A teaser to our next eBook



What is in-house advertising?
LET’S GET STARTED

Since the first banner ad was served in
1994, marketers have been under pressure
to prove value through data—otherwise
known as return on ad spend. Today,
advertisers who have historically been
focused on broadcast and generating
brand awareness are expected to report
with hard data that they not only reached
their specific target audience, but they were
able to effectively encourage that audience
to take action.
With the proliferation and ubiquity of so
many digital channels comes the impulse to
put them under one in-house umbrella—
allowing companies to keep marketing
campaigns coordinated, aligned with
business objectives, and cost effectively
generating revenue through the online
marketing funnel.
CHAPTER 1:
What is in-house
advertising?
2014 US Digital Ad Spending Share, by Objective
Source: eMarketer’s Ad Spending Report Series, May 2014
59.1%
40.9%
Branding
Direct
Response

A September 2013 study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) shows that the
decision by companies to take their media buying in-house is becoming more and more
prevalent:
of marketers currently utilize
in-house teams, a 16%
increase from 2008
58% 56%
of marketers have moved
established business from an
agency to in-house
52%
of marketers are assigning
digital, social and mobile
functions in-house
Digital ad budgets are also beginning to reflect the impact of automated, data-driven software
in the marketplace, according to AdExchanger’s recently released State of Programmatic
Media Report. Based on a survey of more than 400 marketers, ad agencies and publishers:
2/3
Almost two-thirds of marketers plan to double their
programmatic ad spend over the next 12 months
1/4
One-fourth of marketers plan to spend at least
80% of their budgets programmatically

You may think that large-scale in-house
media buying means assembling a marketing
army, but the beauty of automation is
that it leads to massive time savings and
efficiencies—allowing one or two people to
make an impact that would have easily taken
three to ten times the manpower a couple
years ago.
A savvy new generation of marketers has
developed data-driven skills alongside self-
serve tools, possessing a killer combination
of creative and analytical instincts. In the
hands of in-house marketing professionals,
automation software is the key to delivering
the right message, at the right time, to the
right people.
Other key reasons why this
approach to advertising is taking off
UP NEXT

Taking advertising in-house means freedom—the freedom to react quickly to market shifts,
spend more time on strategy, and focus on the metrics that matter most.
CHAPTER 2:
Why are companies taking
advertising in-house?
Cost Savings: Pay for ads, not middlemen.
In-house advertising coupled with direct to publisher
media buying is the equivalent of passing go AND
collecting $200.
Even a back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis of
taking advertising from an external third party to an in-
house team is a compelling one. As you can see from the
example below, a company spending $2,000,000 annually on digital advertising
can save $500,000 by taking their advertising in-house.
Through a 3rd Party Using Software In-House
Annual digital advertising budget $2,000,000 $2,000,000
Average managed services premium of
third party (30% of spend)
$600,000 $0
Annual software subscription $0 $100,000
Annual budget for actual ad placements $1,400,000 $1,900,000
CO
LLECT
$200
SA
LA
RY
A
S
YO
U
PA
SS
G
O
This not only unlocks $500,000 in additional budget to be channeled to actual
ad buys instead of intermediaries, but it also means that you have more budget
to bid higher to win auctions and place your message in front of high value
audiences who typically cost more to reach.

Even if an additional in-house resource is needed for a company to manage the
advertising software in-house, at an estimated $100,000 in annual salary you still
have $400,000 in cost savings (and it is worth noting that even leveraging a third
party for managed services requires a dedicated internal resource to manage
that relationship, coordination and communication).
Similarly, if you are leveraging an ad network, agency
trading desk, or other black box vendor as opposed
to platforms that enable direct to publisher media
buying, a substantial portion of your budget is going
to media markup costs. Media markup costs are the
profit margins that advertising intermediaries take
by charging a premium on top of the cost of the
inventory as they resell that inventory back to the end
advertiser. According to Boston Consulting Group
research, these media markup margins average 40%
and can be as extreme as 100% depending on the ad
network and vendor.
40%
Control: Retain ownership over performance.
The most successful companies today understand the value of gathering data for
business intelligence. Rather than shy away from the responsibility of campaign
performance, in-house advertisers want to dive into the data to own and
improve the outcomes. These advertisers thrive on the ability to pinpoint new
opportunities and valuable customer learnings from campaigns to improve the
performance of future ad campaigns as well as other marketing initiatives.
In-house advertisers benefit from having total control over how their products
are marketed, from ad design and testing to how campaigns are optimized
and reported. When in-house teams assume responsibility for everything
from creative and budget allocation to monitoring performance and making
optimization adjustments, they gain real-time visibility into powerful customer
insights.
Marketing teams that control digital advertising in-house across a variety of
media channels further benefit from cross-channel learnings and performance
gains. Rather than keeping digital ad budgets siloed with various third parties,
these in-house advertisers can glean insights from one media channel and apply
average
media markup
charged by
third-party
intermediaries

them to another. Mobile is a great example of this as these devices continue
their trajectory toward becoming the first screen. Feeding purchase behavior
learnings from your mobile campaigns into your desktop campaigns can bring
new levels of relevancy to your audience that wouldn’t otherwise be possible if
desktop and mobile budgets were siloed among different external agencies or
vendors.
Expertise: Make the most of your in-house knowledge.
No one understands a company’s customers, products, and industry better than
the internal marketing team that lives and breathes these every day through
routine touch points like phone calls, emails, meetings and conferences. In-
house advertisers can leverage industry expertise to maximize the effectiveness
and scale of their campaigns. They also have the benefit of deep product and
customer knowledge to run high-performing campaigns like no third party ever
could.
An IBM C-suite study reveals that 94% of CMOs expect to accelerate the
introduction of advanced (predictive) analytics and mobile applications into their
business in the next 3-5 years, creating an immense opportunity for in-house
marketers to apply industry-specific insights to data and customer behavior. For
companies pursuing an IPO or increased valuation, “independent” and “data-
oriented” are two very alluring descriptors for investors to latch onto. In-house
expertise is a direct reflection of the power of your business.
Speed: React quickly and autonomously.
In-house advertisers are free to test and scale
campaigns quickly, react to new market opportunities
and pivot at will. Internal resources can achieve a
level of reactivity that external parties cannot hope
to match—a fact that is backed up by the ANA
study: faster turnaround time was cited by 71% of
respondents as an advantage of in-house.
Let’s look at a real-life example. For eCommerce
companies, sales over the holiday season represent
a large amount of revenue—climbing nearly 10%
according to eMarketer. Large-scale ad campaigns
71%
of marketers
cite faster
turnaround
time as an
advantage of
the in-house
approach

require a lot of monitoring and adjustment to ensure that supply matches
demand. If a marketer runs a planned promotion over the weekend and
inventory runs out, two things need to happen: (1) the campaign must be
stopped; (2) the campaign must be rerouted to another sale. In the case of
working with a third-party agency or vendor, it can take hours to get a response
to a request for shutting down a campaign, and much more time spent back and
forth with another third party to get new creative and redirect it to a different
landing page.
Whether it’s pumping up the volume on a successful campaign, launching new
creative, hitting a seasonal window or reacting to something in the news, in-
house performance marketers have the competitive edge over third parties.
Nancy Hill, President of 4A concurs: “It’s been very clear for quite some time that
agencies need to be much more agile and faster to respond, and that’s what
real-time marketing has pushed us all toward.”
Transparency: Keep your digital media budget in plain sight.
According to AudienceScience research, 40% of advertisers believe that a tool
that provides transparency is ideal for better managing digital media spend.
Yet marketing teams working
with third-party agencies or
black box vendors with media
markup models rarely if ever
have insight into true media
cost data, let alone any depth
of additional performance
data. In-house advertising
software with direct-to-
publisher media buying turns
this model on its head by
offering full transparency
into the true media cost
and value their budgets are
generating. Best-in-class ad
automation software will
further offer transparency into
the decisioning logic behind
automated bidding algorithms.
Apple is driven not
by a desire for more
efficiency, but one
to keep intellectual
property within its
walls and retain more
ownership over its
creative work.
Ann-Christine Diaz
Advertising Age 
September 9, 2013

Bringing it all together
UP NEXT
Adding depth to this transparency is the power of sharable reports and data
visualization charts that make communications between marketing, sales and
executive staff both possible and necessary. If bids are increasing during a
campaign, marketing leaders in your organization will want justification. It’s much
easier to quantify the value of digital media spend when the details are two clicks
away.
On the flip side, marketers are also increasingly interested in taking media
buying in-house to ensure sensitive data is not made transparent to a third party.
Marketers have voiced concerns particularly around sharing proprietary revenue
data with external agencies and vendors for fear it will be leaked to competitors
or used for the agency’s own gain. With regard to mobile in particular, Mike
McGuire, VP of Research at Gartner for Marketing Leaders points out, “Who owns
that data for a campaign, how it is maintained once the campaign is over—the
issues around data ownership online are extremely difficult when we think about
mobile.”

The widespread adoption of marketing
automation software has been a gateway
for in-house social and mobile advertising
technology. Marketers who buy directly
from publishers as opposed to through
an agency or ad network benefit from:
Launching far more cost effective ad
campaigns
Unmatched in-house knowledge of
customers, products, and market
environment
Ownership and transparency of their
data
Innovative companies that care about
results and making the most of their data
are building cross-functional in-house
teams that take cues from customers
across all touch points.
CHAPTER 3:
Conclusion
What organization
isn’t interested in cost-
efficiencies and speed
to market, as long as it
does not come at the
expense of the quality of
the work?
Bill Duggan
Executive Vice President
ANA Group




In-house performance marketing teams can consist of one or more skilled operators focused
on user acquisition and retention. These small teams are more agile and focused on the
bottom line and success of the company than outside parties. Full-time staff are in tune with:
The company’s target market (customers)
Culture and core values
Aligning creative to branding and messaging style guides
Pairing traditional performance metrics like CPC, CTR and CPA, user acquisition and retention
numbers with social media and service monitoring tools across organizational siloes
provides key decision makers with a 360 analytical snapshot of the customer landscape. This
actionable data can be fed back into direct response and engagement campaigns to improve
performance.
According to Partha Iyengar, Vice President of Gartner, “As enterprises prepare for
an increasingly digital world, CIOs must learn to tap into technology expertise across
organizations and business domains.”
Developing in-house advertising expertise is only going to become more important as
competition for customer acquisition and remarketing talent heats up.
Now is the time to take action.



Our next eBook will tackle the big questions
around developing in-house advertising expertise:
Is in-house advertising right for your business?
What skills are important to hire for?
Where can you find or train qualified candidates?
How should you structure your team?





Nanigans empowers marketing teams to take control of their
media buying in-house with best-in-class advertising automation
software. A leading Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing
Developer (sPMD), Nanigans is chosen by the world’s leading
ecommerce, gaming and other pure play internet businesses such
as eBay, Vistaprint, Wayfair and Wooga.
Contributors
Cheryl Morris
Director of Marketing, Nanigans
Juliana Casale
Content Marketing Manager, Nanigans
Mike Lamy
Marketing Associate, Nanigans

nanigans.com
60 State Street | 12th Floor | Boston, MA 02109
info@nanigans.com
888-507-4456

In house marketing success

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (17)

Similar to In house marketing success

Similar to In house marketing success (20)

More from AdCMO

More from AdCMO (20)

In house marketing success