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Creating relevant, targeted ads without scaring your consumer | Mumbrella360 video

In this session from June's Mumbrella360 conference, Pete Kim, CEO MightyHive shares his advice on how to effectively use programmatic to drive marketing success.

“Consumers more than ever before have a negative view of advertising,” and in order to break away from this trend, “advertisements have to be just as relevant, just as targeted and just as personalised as the content that you’re interrupting when you do it,” says Pete Kim, CEO at MightyHive.

In order to illustrate just how far we’ve come, Kim shows the Mumbrella360 audience a computer screen recording from 2009, which was intended to wow advertisers and reveal the power of retargeting – something that back then seemed “impossible”.

The results of these initial retargeted ads were “the highest-performing advertising execution” that his then-boss had ever seen. It resulted in not only the renewal of the client’s order, but a request to spend 10 times as much money.

Kim recalls how the travel client requested higher and higher levels of personalisation, with ads which would say “Hello Kenny. 42.6 seconds ago, you made a flight search from Kalamazoo to Moscow. The cheapest flight was $700, but actually we know that you like Qantas, and that’s a $900 ticket, we know you like the aisle seat, we’ve already got your credit card, click here.”

Unsurprisingly, this wasn’t something that Kim and his team did, but “it wasn’t anything to do with technology. That execution was simple back then, and it remains simple today,” he says.

“But the reason why we didn’t do it was because if we had, we would have scared the living daylights out of everybody up to and including Kenny.”

Thanks to the multitude of screens in the everyday person’s life, according to Kim, “every single person in this room has had their expectations go up around the relevance and the usefulness of every moment of screen time”, which then “spills over to the ads as well”.

Above all, ads “have to be useful”. They should appear like a conversation, which advertisers and marketers have to figure out how to simulate using the tools available.

No matter how complicated and confusing the terminology around adtech might be, Kim argues that programmatic can be broken down into three essential questions: “Who are you talking to?”, “What are you saying?”, and “How do you assess the results?”

The programmatic experts of the future have to be great at all three.

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