Author: woutervanwaning

Programmatic advertising has changed the face of digital advertising as we know it. Automatic buying enables solutions like dynamic creative optimization for a level of granularity and relevancy not possible with traditional digital ads. Programmatic enables buyers to set geolocation targets and deliver hyper-local and hyper-relevant ads. Yet, those same conveniences have often been difficult to scale for franchises, chains, dealerships, and other businesses maintaining unified branding across a network of smaller, largely independent businesses.

National-level organizations push branding and marketing messages to local outlets, but those businesses are sometimes still responsible for selecting their own advertisement, setting budgets, and offering deals or discounts. Managing this setup with traditional programmatic means setting up hundreds if not thousands of individual campaigns. This added complexity results in costs and setup difficulty for national-level organizations. It’s further complicated for large organizations who manage advertising and branding for distributors through a central platform, essentially offering advertisement-as-a-service to their retailers.

Adcombi’s multi-advertising technology solves many of these problems by reverting campaign setup and control to the local level. Plus, with our open API, large-scale organizations can simply integrate Adcombi directly into platforms to deliver solutions directly to campaign managers.

Multi-Advertising Simplifies Local-Advertising for National-Level Campaigns

Adcombi’s multi-advertising allows advertisers to differentiate ads at a local level. The advertiser sets up a campaign, complete with individual retailers. Each retailer is linked to its own geofenced area or zip code, and campaign budget.

Essentially, Adcombi allows national campaigns to localize marketing, driving traffic directly to dealers, distributors, and retailers responsible for income. Most importantly, local advertisements can draw from individual retailer campaign budgets and display custom location and content per location, without requiring individual campaigns. Our API solution adds another layer of convenience, with local access and control.

Delivering Ads-as-a-Service With our API Platform solution

While anyone can use Adcombi’s multi-advertising technology through our platform, many of our customers are large-scale brands with platforms for their retailers. This is essential because most organizations allow local retailers to offer their own discounts and offers. Advertising needs and budget can also vary considerably from one brand to the next. Adcombi resolves this with an open API, enabling brands to directly integrate our services into their platform.

Jumbo, for example, delivers branding and marketing to its franchises through a single platform. Store owners and managers can log in to purchase folders, banners, point of sale, and social media branding content from a single location. This allows Jumbo to maintain consistent branding across all its retailers.

Adcombi’s open API meant Jumbo could directly integrate our services into their own platform. Jumbo’s 700+ retail store owners can now log into the platform to set up local digital advertising. Here, Jumbo simply creates content and campaign templates inside its platform, the platform uploads the retailer’s location, and Adcombi handles the rest. Local stores have full control over what’s advertised and their own budgets, but everything is pushed through a central platform, giving Jumbo full control of approved branding materials.

How does that work? Once the organization integrates the API into their platform, the platform shares two-way data. Platform managers can upload campaign templates, set access levels, and assign campaigns. Local managers can access and edit campaign templates, set budgets, launch ads, and view data for their own results. The local franchise chooses the campaign, sets its own budget, and selects content. Rather than the central organization pushing everything to the local dealer, the local dealer controls advertising based on its own needs and budget.

This essentially allows hyper-local outlets to run their own local, programmatic campaigns at a DSP level, through the central organization’s platform.

L’Oréal runs these types of campaigns as well. Its platform allows hairdressers and salons to drive business using L’Oréal approved branding, templates, and its DSP. The local dealers can then use their own budgets to drive foot traffic to their own salons.

Access and available options are fully dependent on how the API integration is set up. And, of course, Adcombi reviews and updates data on our side to ensure the API offers access to the data your platform needs.

Our solution also scales exceptionally well. Coca Cola runs national level campaigns through our platform, pushing sales to over 90,000 local outlets in the Netherlands. These range in size from theme parks to snack bars, meaning they require diverse budgeting and marketing messaging. In this case, Coca Cola uploads templates and campaign options, outlet representatives discuss marketing with the outlet, and the outlet owner/manager can log in to see their own local and relevant ads. Because Coca Cola uses full access management tools, every level maintains privacy and security.

Similarly, both AkzoNobel and Unilever use our platform solution, connecting to outlets for their dealer networks, and giving hyper-local retailers control over ads.

Our open API means all of these companies have the option to direct their franchises and dealership advertising through their own platforms, keeping everything in-house and visible, and enabling those hyper-local outlets to access high-level DSP advertising.

Simplified National Advertising

Localizing national-level ads can increase efficacy and ROI for digital marketing, simply because ads are more relevant. Rather than driving awareness, most ads push viewers towards local dealerships, stores, and outlets where they can directly purchase or access the product. Our API solution puts control of those ads in the hands of the dealers benefiting from and using them.

Managing branding and content for programmatic ads for local stores through your own platform simplifies campaigns while reducing setup and management costs. It also ensures brands can continue to push data in-house, tracking what retailers are using, when, and why.

Multi-advertising is designed to meet the needs of national advertisers with local retailers and branches. Our open API makes that simpler and more efficient, so you maintain control of data and branding across dealerships, retailers, franchises, and chains.
Contact us to learn more.

Demand-Side Platforms (DSP) offer advertisers access to premium inventory not available on Google Display Network. Yet, with high minimum spend, fees, and sometimes CPM thresholds, many small advertisers simply don’t meet the requirements set by DSPs. Larger DSPs have more to offer in terms of ad exchanges and networks, technology, tools, and settings. Yet, those DSPs remain largely out of reach for smaller advertisers.

That’s why Adcombi offers a self-service DSP access platform for our clients. You create an account, log in with our DSP access, and buy ads. With no minimum CPM and no minimum spend, you can benefit from a DSP, without committing to an out-of-reach budget.

Why Use Demand-Side Platforms?

Google Display Network is the “go-to” for much of the web. With some 2 million partner websites, Google ads display on 0.3% of all websites. That’s a lot. But, DSPs typically access many of those same websites through ad exchanges, including GDN, plus additional networks. So, DSPs offer significantly larger reach. Moreover, DSPs have access to premium inventory not available via GDN. This is largely because DSPs offer “first look” inventory. GDN primarily offers “rest” inventory, which is everything left after DSP users have purchased impressions.

If you’re using Google Ads or Google Ad Manager, Google takes an average 31% as a fee. While GDN is free to access and doesn’t have spend limits, you’re still paying heavily for what you do use. That’s quite often a bad thing, considering premium ad inventory is more and more frequently only available through DSPs. This development leaves Google Display Network users with inventory on a large number of unknown websites – which ultimately reduces its value to the advertiser.

Here are some of the advantages of using a DSP:

• Access to more websites and more premium inventory, including high-end sites
• The ability to reach lateral and bilateral audiences or target audience + other audiences
• Similar but typically more nuanced controls (e.g., whitelisting, blacklisting, greater frequency capping, retargeting across multiple exchanges, behavioral profiling) for better targeting
• Real-time data triggers to update ads based on real-world events like weather, stock market, etc.
• 3rd party integrations for data to improve ad relevance
• Access to rich media advertising such as lightboxes, homepage takeover, etc.
• Direct access to publishers, so you can skip the RTB auction in Google Display Network to directly advertise on a channel. This isn’t necessarily cheaper, but it will allow you to set up deals with publishers that hold interesting / desired inventory for your client.

Many of the largest DSPs offering these advantageous features also set high thresholds for advertisers. Some DSPs require advertisers to commit to spending $20,000-$50,000 per month. Others charge monthly fees whether or not you run ads, with some not breaking even over GDN until you’ve spent $5k-$10k, meaning they effectively have a minimum spend. This is where the Adcombi Suite comes in handy.

Connecting to a DSP with Adcombi Suite

Adcombi’s Suite tool offers our clients direct access to our DSP. When clients onboard, we offer access to their own advertising space in our platform. You log in, access data segments, build your own ads in your own creative space, and bid on inventory. Our software communicates that directly, using our account. You get full access to the DSP, without the minimums and without taking on the full weight of the fees yourself. While our platform is simplified, this means it offers a lower learning curve, while still supporting complex campaign requirements.

• Your own login and creative space
• Your own ads, campaigns, and targets
• Full access to DSP data

While Adcombi Suite is often used by small businesses, it’s also useful for larger companies that don’t yet have a DSP. For example, if you traditionally market on Google Display Network and television but want to expand, moving to Adcombi can allow you to explore DSP possibilities in a simple, usable environment, and without high startup costs.
Management – Adcombi is always here to help our clients build and send ads. While we won’t necessarily build campaigns for you, we offer a full suite of tools including campaign management software to make programmatic as easy and as profitable as possible. Of course, we also offer full campaign management if you prefer that instead.
API – Adcombi Suite supports API integrations, allowing users to connect Adcombi technology to their own accounts and platforms.

Connecting NoBears to Our DSP

NoBears is an advertising agency delivering creative design, venture building, and digital engineering to clients. While already large, the brand was working with GDN and social media ads. We onboarded them to deliver access to our DSP, including our full network. Today, NoBears leverages Adcombi Suite to deliver DSP opportunities to their clients. With clients ranging in size and budget, NoBears spends anywhere from nothing to thousands of Euros each month. But, with no monthly fees and no minimum spend, they can easily scale up and down to meet client needs. We don’t charge until ads are running.
NoBears has full access to our reporting tool, AdStats. This tool exports data directly to PDF, which NoBears can send to clients. And when they or clients need changes, more management, or other services, Adcombi is here to help with a full range of offerings.

Adcombi Suite offers a low learning curve, easy access to premium DSP inventory, and no maximum spend or fees. We’re upfront about what we charge (Discuss it with us), and you’ll never be billed unless you run a campaign. It’s that easy.

If you’re looking into working with a DSP, consider having a talk with us today to see if Adcombi Suite is the right solution for your needs.

We’re making programmatic advertising more and more relevant for the local media mix. Soon you’ll be able to have a Real geo-targeting setting on your programmatic campaign!

Happy to have this news covered in ONEtoONE Germany:

On our mission to bring programmatic advertising into the local media mix we’re scaling up and intensifying our activities in the German-speaking markets.

Happy to have this news covered in W&V Germany:

Programmatic ads have allowed us to target customers in ways never before possible. Features like dynamic creative optimization (DCO), automated buying, reduced middle-man fees, and personalization and contextualization allow advertisers to create granular, relevant ads on a local scale. That’s why 82% of digital ads in 2019 were programmatic. Today, digital ads are shifting further, with trends moving away from banner ads and towards video through mediums like over-the-top (OTT), TrueView, Facebook Video, Snapchat, etc. In just a few short years, video has moved to take up nearly half of programmatic ad budgets. Yet, video has consistently failed to meet the needs of multi-branch and franchised businesses. Regular programmatic offers nearly limitless selection criteria for customizing ads on a local level, but it would be prohibitively expensive to reframe video ads locally for hundreds of local franchises. By applying multi-advertising technology, Adcombi bridges the gap between national organizations and their local dealers. We use dynamic video to create seamless, locally relevant video ads from national campaigns.

The result? National companies can localize campaigns based on viewer location, driving traffic directly to local franchises. And, local franchises can spend local store budgets as part of the same campaign, rather than building their own. Everyone wins.

How It Works Dynamic programmatic ads have been a thing for some time. Even under GDPR, you have access to the buyer’s geographic area through mobile ID or IP as soon as you win the bid. This data is used to auto-select location-relevant ads campaigns, pulling from national or local budgets depending on the campaign. Consumers viewing ads now see local offers in ads and are redirected to the nearest store or dealer – all inside the same content as the national campaign. Dynamic video takes this same concept and applies it to video. Our design team works with you to build a dynamic video ad, consisting of a larger local ad with dynamic clips. These clips are assigned to campaigns so programmatic automatically selects them when a customer from a relevant area views an ad. This same process works for factors like location, viewer language, viewer device, and real-time factors like weather.

The corporation stills gets a single, cohesive national ad campaign. In the digital environment, that ad updates in real time based on viewer data to show location and context-relevant information. In the real world, that might look like the following examples from the automotive industry and quick-service restaurants.

The national ad for an auto-manufacturer shows city cars in an urban environment in between branded messaging. When the ad is loaded, it’s in a rural area, the program automatically replaces city cars with larger, more rural-appropriate clips and prompts the viewer to visit their local dealer, with address and phone number included. The national ad for a fast-food chain shows people eating burgers and ice cream and prompts viewers to visit. When the digital version loads, it’s raining, and the ad highlights coffee instead, again prompting viewers to their local chain, with address included.

Delivering National Campaigns at a Local Level with Opel DTC Media and Opel was one of our first dynamic video customers. Like many franchised businesses, Opel faces numerous advertising issues. Local dealers have their own budgets and are unable to afford the large ad-spend Opel does on national campaigns. Opel delivers national and international video campaigns. It wouldn’t be feasible for them to re-create ads for franchises.

With dynamic video ads, Opel does just that. Our multi-video ads update dynamically based on viewer location to show context and location-relevant cars, to pull out ads for local dealerships, and to direct clicks to local landing pages. This all works to improve local awareness and sales, meeting the original goal of Opel’s national campaign.

Dynamic video advertising delivers the granularity of traditional programmatic, but with video. Adcombi is proud to be one of the brands pioneering this technology, and we’re excited to see where it will take us.

Contact us to learn more.

Werben & Verkaufen (abbreviated W&V) reports in the current print edition about Adcombi and our multi-advertising software. The article covers the current state of affairs in programmatic advertising, with a special section where the benefits of our technology are explained.

W&V is one of the highest-reach specialist portals in the communications and media industry with an average of 1.8 million unique visits per month, so being in the spotlight on this platform is a great success.

The complete article about the Adcombi way of “virtually ‘locating’ advertising banners” (Managing Director DACH Sebastian Kraemer), can be found here:

Managing and activating large amounts of regional and local programmatic campaigns can be quite a drag. Multi-advertising by Adcombi helps campaign managers save up to 80% of the repetitive and often tedious campaign work involved. Let us unveil just a little of our magic.

Multi-store companies

As you may remember from our previous blog, multi-advertising is all about effortlessly activating, managing, monitoring and reporting on large amounts of regional and local programmatic campaigns at scale for multi-store companies. In order to set up location-specific online local campaigns, at least three elements must be taken into consideration. First you need the individual message each dealer wants to get across in terms of product offering, discounts, opening hours or a local event, to name a few. Secondly, the respective geographical advertising areas must be determined. Their character may vary significantly depending on whether a dealer is located in a city or a less densely populated area.

AdActivate

Thirdly, individual budgets need to be defined per location and monitored. It doesn’t take a genius to see that tailoring these individual requirements for regional campaigns can easily turn into a real marathon. Without multi-advertising, you’re looking at often hundreds of individual campaigns that need to be set up with all their detailed settings. Because only with the freedom to create complex demand strategies, so-called bidding strategies, a programmatic campaign, even for the rather small individual location budgets, is target-oriented. To solve this problem, we have created a way to attach bidding strategies to each location automatically with our SaaS tool AdActivate.

AdStats

As the banners in turn contain both static and dynamic variables for every location, we have subsequently automated banner design as well. After all, campaign results also need to be monitored and acted upon. Since DSPs generally have a hard time dealing with large numbers of line items, we have developed a user-friendly monitoring tool called AdStats. AdStats offers an aggregated overview of all individual campaigns showing campaign results balanced against any KPI a client has defined, such as CTR (Click Through Rate), Viewability or Footfall Measurement.

Reporting tool

Our extensive filtering system then helps you identify what line items and/or campaigns need to be optimized. Knowing all this, it won’t come as a surprise that we have also replaced the labor-intensive hassle with Excel documents and the associated manual work by a reporting tool that enables you to generate hundreds of PDFs that can even be easily customized to your liking. Has the skepticism, mentioned at the beginning of this article, been resolved somewhat? You are welcome to see AdActivate, AdStats, the automation processes and the enormous potential for saving resources for yourself. Contact us and simply try out the tool!

Recently, Adform was one of the main sponsors of the (online) Programmatic Event in Italy. Davide Corcione presented a way of making life easier for programmatic agencies with the use of Adform’s full-stack solution. Adcombi perfectly fits that bill by providing an effective and intuitive way to run local programmatic campaigns at scale. Ward America presented the GVB case to show how Adcombi can contribute to giving multiple store brands that much needed Programmatic peace of mind!

Local offline media, ranging from door-to-door advertising to inserts and billboards, generally come with long lead times, high cost and inflexibility in terms of contact moment and location. On top of that, door-to-door advertising is further hampered by an increasing number of people, who reject advertising material in their mailbox. Thank God for multi-advertising that solves these problems all at once!

Multi-advertising

The fact that a shift is taking place from offline to online media is not exactly breaking news. Online programmatic advertising and even dynamic (video) advertising have already been around for a while, solving some of the above-mentioned challenges. To a certain extent, this even includes giving online national campaigns a local twist in terms of discount campaigns, opening hours and other local conditions. So how does multi-advertising fit into this picture? With multi-advertising we have created software for activating, managing, monitoring and reporting on large amounts of regional and local programmatic campaigns at scale for multi-store companies effortlessly.

Location-specific content

Our convenient templates and dashboards allow in-house or external campaign managers to set up and manage individual budgets, bidding strategies and creatives for many locations at once, while still maintaining control over them individually. Ads can even be personalized to connect with local audiences through dynamic content such as address information, dealer logos and location-specific images or text. Multi-advertising shows the same flexibility towards the exact size of the geographical area each individual dealer seeks to target. At the same time, we found a way to show the local ads to targeted consumers in the direct vicinity of a particular shop, based on GPS and IP data.

Complementing

As a result, our multi-advertising tool has been adopted by a growing range of renowned companies in the retail, banking and automotive industry. We are not claiming that print and out of home media have run their course altogether, don’t get us wrong. What we are trying to say is that multi-advertising satisfies the need for customized local digital advertising and, as such, fills the gap left behind by local offline media. In other words, multi-advertising is by no means designed to replace traditional media but much rather to complement them in a very affordable way.