Is Programmatic Advertising The Future of Digital Advertising In Cannabis?

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of digital advertisements.

It is a faster, more efficient, and less expensive way of buying digital ads that has changed the way that many agencies and businesses handle digital advertising. Programmatic advertising leverages customer data and insights to advertise more efficiently to various customer segments across multiple platforms.

Programmatic ad spend is projected to reach $127 billion by the end of 2020. Is programmatic advertising the future of digital cannabis advertising as well? It sure looks like it.

What Is Programmatic Advertising?

Programmatic advertising makes the most of customer data and computer algorithms to buy and display digital advertisements more efficiently. Instead of just casting a wide net and hoping for the best, programmatic advertising focuses on delivering the right ads, to the right people, at the right time.

On the demand side of the equation, advertisers use programmatic platforms to decide which impressions to buy and how much to pay for them. On the supply side, publishers use the same platform to sell ad space to the brands and agencies that demand it.

Manually managing a collection of different advertising platforms and channels can be incredibly difficult. Moreover, trying to figure out which ones to rely on at which time can be just as confusing. Programmatic advertising automates the buying/selling process and consolidates all digital advertising efforts onto the same platform, making them easier to manage and keep track of, and cutting down on time to market. With computers using data to decide which ad space to buy and how much to pay for it, the process becomes less time consuming and produces better results.

Programmatic advertising initially began as a tool to use up leftover ad inventory. However, over time it has evolved into a tool that greatly improves the efficiency of all digital advertising.

Why Are More Businesses Turning To Programmatic Advertising?

Capturing the attention of consumers in a digital ecosystem can be a daunting task. With so many websites, applications, and media platforms being viewed every day, knowing where to place your ads for maximum effectiveness can be complicated. The end result is wasted impressions and wasted marketing dollars.

Rather than simply buying up a million impressions and hoping for the best, customer data can be used to split these impressions up across platforms and audience segments. By thinking more carefully about what kind of audience they want to reach, on what day, at what scale, and on which device, advertisers can spend their marketing dollars more efficiently, while minimizing wasteful spending.

Apart from better targeting and more efficient spending, programmatic advertising also allows businesses to effortlessly market themselves over a variety of channels and devices. Since programmatic advertising allows for real-time tracking and changes, they can quickly determine which ones work best and eliminate wasteful spending more quickly when compared to traditional advertising campaigns.

More Data, Better Results

Programmatic advertising uses customer data to segment audiences into smaller chunks that can be grouped together based on behavior, interests, demographics, and other factors. This allows advertisers to spend ad dollars more efficiently by avoiding classic spray-and-pray strategies that simply publish impressions and hope for the best.

Demographics, behaviors, and visitation patterns can be used to target current and prospective customers. Programmatic advertising relies on a living database of consumers that can be associated with households, purchases, places of work, devices, frequently visited websites, frequently visited locations, and more.

This data can be leveraged to identify likely converters, associates, and parallel audiences, increasing the reach of marketing campaigns. For dispensaries and cannabis brands, this means identifying customers that show interest in similar products, that display behaviors that may make them future customers, or that simply shop at competing cannabis dispensaries. This data allows cannabis brands to expand their reach but in a targeted and efficient way.

Is Programmatic Advertising The Future?

As programmatic advertising platforms continue to eat up more and more of the world’s advertising budget each year, it certainly looks like it is positioning itself to be the future of digital advertising. And it’s not hard to see why.

By tracking user behavior across different platforms and devices, programmatic platforms can not only gain a feel for their interests and shopping habits but can also work to predict where digital advertisements will be most effective and successful.

Consumer insights gained through programmatic data collection can help dispensaries and cannabis brands to gain a better understanding of who their customers are and how they spend their money. This will not only give them a better idea of who to advertise to, but also how, where, and when to advertise to them in order to achieve the best results.

Moreover, as cannabis advertising laws inevitably open up and warm up to the idea of digital advertisements, brands that immediately take advantage of programmatic advertising are sure to gain a competitive edge.

With so many advantages, cannabis brands should strive to make the most of programmatic advertising wherever they can.

Article by David Andrei Baboi