THE NEW PLAYBOOK FOR SELF-SERVICE ADVERTISING:FIVE STRATEGIES FOR DSP MEDIA BUYING IN THE AGE OF AUTOMATION

2The New Playbook For Self-Service Media

Adopting a self-service media-buying platform

used to mean building deep competencies in highly

esoteric skills and disciplines. It used to mean serious

resources – people, hours, budget, time, effort, and

hassle. And it used to mean endless uncertainty – are my

campaigns performing as well as they could be? Am I

using the right tactics? Am I deploying the right data? Am

I bidding at the right levels? How do I truly make sense of

the billions of messaging opportunities and data signals in

the ecosystem? It’s 2 a.m. It’s Sunday. Are my campaigns

delivering? Are they performing?

That’s what adopting a self-service DSP used to mean.

In this guide, we’ll present some cutting-edge strategies

and methodologies being used by early adopters of the

next generation of self-serve media buying technology.

You’ll see that with the right tech and the right approach,

you can leave the uncertainty behind, put results first, and

still benefit from the control and agility afforded by self-

service. This is the new self-service playbook.

3The New Playbook For Self-Service Media

1

In this example, one Rocket Fuel advertiser, a nonprofit seeking sign-ups, started out their campaign with tactics that specifically targeted demographic groups.

A couple weeks in, the advertiser increased spend on unconstrained line items, and found that by allowing performance models to zero in on high-propensity opportunities at the impression level, results greatly improved. The advertiser continued to increase spend on the unconstrained model throughout the remainder of the campaign.

FOCUS ON OBJECTIVES – NOT TACTICS

PRESCRIPTIVE VS. OPTIMISED

€21.44

€42.21

Oct

0

10M

20M

30M

40M

50M

60M

Nov Dec

Demographic-constrained line items

Cost-Per-Signup – Compared

Impressions by Week

Unconstrained line items

Increased spend on unconstrained media relative to demographic targeting

4The New Playbook For Self-Service Media

Humans and hubris

Let’s start with a humble admission: Marketing, and

digital marketing, in particular, is no longer a human-scale

challenge. The emergence of programmatic media trading

has created opportunities for marketers large and small to

make their advertising more addressable, more precise, and

more efficient. In doing so, it has also made media buying

more complex than ever before. In 2015, there are tens

of billions of unique opportunities to reach consumers, on

millions of web properties, across a range of devices, with

trillions of ways to slice and dice an audience every day.

Many ad tech companies have built tools and platforms that

help humans parse this ever-more-fragmented landscape.

But even with armies of highly educated analysts, these

tools can’t live up to the true potential of real-time marketing,

because this first generation of platforms set out to equip

humans -- not algorithms -- to make most of the necessary

adjustments. Unfortunately, humans are severely limited in

how many adjustments we can make for a campaign, and

across how many attributes.

The belief that humans can adequately manage and

optimise a campaign persists because the ecosystem

matured long before there were sufficient tools to harness it.

And though humans can achieve outcomes that are better

than random, we cannot achieve true optimisation.

But today’s marketers and agencies – whether they know it

yet or not – have access to sophisticated technologies that

let machines do the heavy lifting without sacrificing control

or transparency.

Embracing automation

The key to succeeding with the next-generation demand side

platform (DSP) is focusing on strategy and goals, rather than line

items and tactics. Start by telling the system what your objectives

are and the KPIs you’ll use to measure them. Perhaps it’s

purchases, or clicks, or lead-form fills. Regardless, the most

crucial steps in taking advantage of the best optimisation

technologies are setting your goals and configuring your

feedback loop, typically in the form of pixels or beacons.

From there, consider what we’ll call inherent constraints, or

targeting that must be applied due to the nature of the offering

and the campaign. This might be geotargeting (In which

countries, states, and cities is the offering in question available?),

device types (Is the offering an app download available only in

iOS?), or a first-party audience segment (Is the objective of the

campaign to upsell or cross-sell existing customers?).

Beyond these inherent constraints, resist the urge to

turn assumptions into prescriptive tactics. We can define

assumptions, broadly, as any tactical direction that is not

an inherent constraint. Contextual targeting involves an

assumption. Behavioural targeting involves an

assumption. Dayparting involves an assumption. You or

your client may have invested heavily in research to

define just who your target audience is and to what they

are drawn. That’s great, and it should inform your

messaging strategy and your tactics in less-optimisable

media. But in digital ad buying, particularly for direct

response efforts, these are assumptions -- assumptions

that get in the way of truly effective marketing. Really.

This is because, with a next-generation DSP built for machine

learning, you have the luxury of testing all assumptions

automatically. The best way to start is typically from a place

of total neutrality. Define your objectives and your inherent

constraints, and let high-horsepower optimisation technology

take the handoff. Rather than letting a human paint in broad

strokes and hoping for the best, let the system evaluate

thousands of signals for each potential moment of influence

with a consumer while learning and adjusting on the fly.

Impression-level optimisation beats broad-brush optimisation

for a simple reason: At the impression level, a smart DSP

understands that what might look like a disqualifier (e.g. a

user identified as a man for a women’s magazine subscription

campaign) should actually be taken into context with all other

available signals. Maybe the man is in-market for a birthday

gift for his wife. Impression-level optimisation discerns the true

value of an impression for a campaign by considering the true

value of that moment with that individual. It recognises that

individuals are, well, individuals who are multi-dimensional, not

members of segments. It amounts to an information advantage

that prevents you from wasting dollars on poor messaging

opportunities and from neglecting moments that are worthwhile.

Embracing automation does not mean forfeiting control and

agility. It frees you up to focus that expertise on more strategic

tasks, while also driving the best performance possible.

5The New Playbook For Self-Service Media

Smartphone release

Goal: Drive purchase intent for new Android smartphone

Methodology: Advertiser used control and exposed groups with in-flight survey optimisation.

Outcome: 207% lift in purchase intent among 1.5 million consumers

BRING A PERFORMANCE MINDSET TO BRAND INITIATIVES

REDEFINE PERFORMANCE MEDIA

2

Denny’s

Goal: Deliver in-target impressions for their demographic

Methodology: Optimise for comScore-validated audience reach

Outcome: Delivered in-target at a rate 60% better than comScore’s benchmarks

207% Lift

Control Group (no ad exposure)

Consumer Purchase IntentPerforms 60% Better

Exposed Group (served product ad)

1.5 Million Consumers

6The New Playbook For Self-Service Media

Traditional Targeting Includes Wasted Impressions

Last year, Nielsen published a series of industry benchmarks showing that conventional targeting methodologies produced a profound volume of wasted impressions. For example, advertisers trying to reach the male 18-34 demographic were successful in doing so only 46% of the time. For females 35-54, Nielsen found a 28% success rate.

Programmatic came of age with direct response – driving

conversions, low-funnel clicks, etc. -- mostly because it offered

three things that are indispensable to direct marketers:

Addressability, measurability, and scale. Direct response and

programmatic seemed to be made for one another.

But somewhere, something obvious got lost in the

conversation: Brand marketers have objectives, too. And

now those objectives are supported by programmatic tools

that drive measurable, meaningful impact.

Reaching your audience:

In many upper-funnel marketing initiatives, reaching a

broad demographic group is an objective in itself. At face

value, this is easy to accomplish: buy some audience

segments and monitor delivery. But many are coming

around to the realisation that third-party demographic

data fails, often horribly, to accurately reach the intended

audience.

Getting to a better place on demographic targeting starts

with, once again, a focus on objectives and measurement. If

“optimising to a target audience” sounds oddly dissonant, it’s

because ad tech has for so long associated optimisation with

direct response goals. But when we treat reaching a target

audience as an outcome rather than a tactic, we can increase

our precision by leaps and bounds.

The right DSP will allow you to set an audience targeting

goal, perhaps even expressed as an in-target effective CPM

or cost-per-point, and then empower an optimisation engine

to study correlations between in-flight feedback from a third

party like Nielsen and thousands of available signals. Done

right, the result is astounding audience accuracy with verified

third-party reporting right in the UI.

Driving lift

Beyond reaching a demographic audience with precision,

brand marketers want to move the needle, too. While many

have long clung to clicks as the KPI of choice in programmatic

media, it’s been well documented that clicks do not tell the full

story. In fact, they often tell the wrong story.

Fortunately, the tools are now out there to combine powerful

automated media buying with metrics that brand marketers

actually care about. Specifically, attitudinal lift for measures

such as awareness, message retention, consideration,

purchase intent, or competitive preference.

In-banner brand studies have been part of the digital toolkit

for years. But by integrating them into a system that automates

real-time on a breadth of attributes based on survey samples,

we go beyond merely measuring these results.

By setting up two budgets -- one for a group exposed to

the advertiser’s message and one for a smaller control

group that is not -- the system can read lift signals across a

breadth of attributes and make automatic adjustments in-

flight. These adjustments allow self-service buyers to drive

meaningful, measurable lift.

7The New Playbook For Self-Service Media

MAKE YOUR DATA WORK FOR YOU

OPTIMIS ING WITHIN, BEYOND A SEGMENT

3

(Within a segment)

(Beyond a segment)

AUDIENCE A

AUDIENCE B

AUDIENCE C

AUDIENCE A

AUDIENCE B

AUDIENCE C

8The New Playbook For Self-Service Media

The migration of first-party customer data to the realm

of digital advertising represents one of the most exciting

developments in the field -- and in business. Data

management platforms (DMPs) and onboarding vendors

help centralize, taxonomise and enhance such data and

turn offline customer databases into online segments.

However, for all the advancements in making these

consumers identifiable and addressable, taking action

on the data in media execution leaves many marketers

scratching their heads.

Within the segment

It’s tempting to treat first-party customer segments like a

silver bullet for campaigns involving existing customers

(upsell, cross-sell, renewal, etc.): Set your DSP to target

these high-value consumers and reap the benefits. But in

reality, targeting on its own leaves value on the table. Even

within such a hyper-curated audience, there are plenty of

opportunities to get smarter, more responsive, and more

successful with your messaging.

Adding further targeting restrictions, such as a content

category or a third-party segment, to a first-party audience

typically constrains the volume too much to gain any real

benefit. And as we’ve established, it’s not the best way to get

performance in the first place.

By setting up a campaign to optimise within a first-party

segment—even a small one—you can skew your media

budgets to the higher-value individuals within that segment.

The machines find the right environments, times, messages,

sequence, and moment.

In other words, treat your first-party segment as a

narrower universe within which to optimise rather than a

bullseye for delivery.

Beyond the segment

Scale presents a central challenge for many marketers with

access to first-party data. Even for large enterprises, many

factors often conspire to whittle your audience down to a

fraction of its original size. But even a small first-party audience

can be transformed into a powerful asset.

Some platforms provide the opportunity to grow segments

using “look-alike” or “act-alike” optimisation. These

methodologies build statistical patterns to find similar

consumers outside of the segment based on commonalities

within it, looking at audience characteristics and actions taken

during a campaign among the original segment (browsing

patterns, ad engagement, site engagement, etc.) and finding

more consumers demonstrating congruent behaviour.

Let’s say a consumer “in the wild,” or outside the original

segment, matches on over-indexing for 15 specific

attributes with the original segment, including consumption

of sports content, purchase history in a frozen food CPG

category, and Android phone usage. You’ve identified this

consumer as someone with a lot in common with your

existing customers, which makes her a high-value prospect

to nurture toward conversion. Ideally, you wouldn’t have

to do this at all, because predictive modeling takes it on

for you at the impression level, in real time, crunching the

numbers and adapting.

9The New Playbook For Self-Service Media

ACCESS THE MARKETING LABORATORY4

10The New Playbook For Self-Service Media

DSPs have always supported reporting on campaign

delivery and performance. Some have offered analytics

tools that shed light on the best-performing audiences,

environments, and messages. This guidance has long been

seen as a highly valuable roadmap to the smartest tactics

that a campaign manager can implement mid-flight.

But as we’ve covered, an advanced platform will make

those adjustments for you faster, more granularly, and more

often that you ever could.

So what role does analytics play in a next-generation

approach to digital media buying? Oddly enough, it has less

to do with digital than traditional media. In places where

optimisation is not so readily available (think print, broadcast,

outdoor, and your messaging strategy), these learnings can

and should inform your tactics. Having machine-learning

insights, generated by objective measurement at big data

scale, at your disposal can greatly improve outcomes on

channels that do not lend themselves to adaptive learning.

INSIGHTS

You may find that many of your assumptions are confirmed.

Perhaps your assumed age and gender group align exactly

with the best-performing group in the analysis. But you

should still be glad you did not constrain to it for the whole

campaign because the system recognises that there are

good impressions that don’t meet those conditions, and

bad impressions that do.

You’ll also find many insights that do not align with your

assumptions. Embrace the non-intuitive. A high-volume

digital campaign with analytics tools that study patterns

and correlations across millions of impressions can

lead to learnings that would never emerge from a focus

group. And they can create significant lift elsewhere

when properly utilised.

In all of this, it’s easy to see the beauty of automation.

Rather than trying to teach the machine how to do its

job, the machine leaves no stone unturned to teach us

what it finds.

In this example, a campaign for a luxury automaker turned up some non-intuitive top site performers.

An airline running a bookings campaign found that the system identified some high-indexing consumer interest categories that one wouldn’t think of, like Father’s Day Shoppers and Cold & Flu.

Summer Seasonal - Fathers Day Show

Entertainment - Movies

Winter Seasonal - Cold and Flu

Spring Seasonal - Easter Eggs

Entertainment - Video Games

Job Seekers

Parenting - Teens and Tweens

Entertainment - Humour

-56.6%

-73.8%

-80.0%

-81.6%

97.2%

81.3%

64.9%

56.6%

Interests

11The New Playbook For Self-Service Media

ENTER THE AGE OF OPTIMISATION WITH ROCKET FUEL DSP

5

A Look InsideSearch Optics is a digital marketing company that specialises in custom, integrated solutions with an emphasis on return on investment. The company uses an uncommon blend of leading edge technology and human interaction to turn virtual traffic into measurable results.

“The Rocket Fuel DSP allows us

to be hands-on with the media

but not so in the weeds that we’re

constantly managing bids,” says

Senior Display Media Manager

Alex Meakin. Once campaigns

started to scale, the performance

benefits became clear. “Rocket Fuel

definitely wins on performance. And

I feel confident about the quality of

impressions and engagement we’re

seeing.” Indeed, Search Optics has

seen performance consistently

improve as Rocket Fuel’s models

have become “smarter” about

campaign objectives, with

aggregate indexed campaign

performance against client goals

reaching upwards of 1,000%.

12The New Playbook For Self-Service Media

Sophistication is not thousands of knobs and levers.

Sophistication is tech that makes knobs and levers

obsolete. Rocket Fuel DSP is the first ever low-touch, high-

performance media buying platform, driven by the one of

the most powerful performance engines in the industry.

It drives unprecedented results by bringing order to the

chaos of the digital landscape and eliminating tedious

guesswork for better marketing outcomes and a lighter

operational burden.

Unmatched performance

Carry out high-performing digital campaigns across all

channels (desktop and mobile display, desktop and mobile

video, social) and throughout the marketing funnel. Rocket

Fuel’s Moment Scoring™ technology learns the critical—

and often hard to recognise—predictors of what makes

one ad more appropriate than another in a particular

moment based on a marketer’s goal.

Tools that get out of your way

Assimilate what you know into campaign setups and

let the models handle every tiny detail you couldn’t

possibly anticipate. Manage your creatives,

campaigns, line items, and tactics with ease and

launch brand new campaigns in a matter of minutes.

Insights for action

Rocket Fuel DSP’s analytics tools translate machine

learning into clear, actionable reports. These custom

reports, in millions of potential configurations, show how

Moment Scoring is identifying the attributes and variables

for each ad opportunity that improve engagement and

lower CPA. For example, a report called ‘Model Learnings’

is a visual representation of how each attribute is driving

down CPA, real-time insights that help you discover all new

things about your customers.

Average Campaign Performance Against Goal

Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb Mar Apr May

0.00%

200.00%

400.00%

600.00%

800.00%

1000.00%

1200.00%

Weighted by spend

Let’s get started

The next generation DSP replaces the complexity

of knobs and levers with the simple sophistication

of machine learning at big data scale. It taps the full

marketing potential of your organisation’s data

while supporting the business acumen that put you

at the helm of your marketing initiatives.

Talk to your Rocket Fuel account manager or contact sales-uk@rocketfuel.com to learn more about Rocket Fuel DSP today.

About Rocket Fuel

Rocket Fuel operates in more than 20 offices worldwide and trades on the

NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “FUEL.” For more

information, please visit www.rocketfuel.com/UK or call 020 3651 1300. Fuel

can unleash Moment Scoring’s full potential to each valuable moments, on

whichever device and channel it may be and for whichever marketing goal it

may best serve.