Advertising self-serve platforms have become vital to parties on both sides of the transaction. Peo Persson, Co-Founder and CPO at DanAds (www.DanAds.com), a leading provider of self-service advertising technology, explains the benefits of self-serve technology and how it is helping businesses across the globe.
Self-serve technology is both the present and future of buyer-seller interactions. From retail and e-commerce to hospitality and entertainment, it has transcended practically every sector in which goods and services are exchanged. According to Gartner, customers managed as much as 85% of their relationships with companies without interacting with an employee in 2020. In line with this growing trend, the advertising industry is yet another space in which self-serve technology has become vital to parties on both sides of the transaction.
In order to understand what ‘self-serve advertising’ is, and why it is becoming increasingly important to the sector, we need to first determine who these two parties are. On one side of the relationship – or transaction – is the publisher or platform owner who has advertising space on their website or app which is available to purchase through a self-serve platform. On the other side of the exchange is the business or advertiser who wants to buy this advertising space. By selling off their ad inventory in this way, the publisher grants the advertiser direct access to their first-party data, which provides a unique opportunity for the advertiser to reach the audience of their choice and manage their campaigns in real-time.
The publisher’s perspective
In order to become more efficient and reduce costs, the media industry has undergone a huge Digital Transformation, which has, more recently, also transcended its advertising infrastructure.
In the past, like most industries in which a service or product is being exchanged, advertising was sold over the phone or in a face-to-face meeting by a salesperson or wider ad ops team. And, like most industries, publishers had to pay the costs associated with this form of sale, such as salaries, commissions and rent for office space. Self-serve advertising tools enable publishers to streamline by removing these costs and manual processes and replacing them with a much more effective and faster automated platform.
Self-serve platforms also ensure that publishers retain a greater share of the revenue by removing the intermediaries involved in traditional programmatic advertising supply chains. These ‘middlemen,’ which include the likes of media agencies, DSPs, SSPs and trading desks, also reduce transparency as the data handled in these transactions is often shared without the full knowledge or approval of the publisher.
Improving the speed and transparency of the ad booking process are only some of the advantages that self-serve platforms bring publishers. Another is the role they can play in the ad distribution process. By integrating with a publisher’s ad server, self-serve platforms can seamlessly and autonomously distribute print and online adverts at a given time and in a given place.
So, what about the sales team’s involvement in all of this? Are they now redundant? Quite the opposite. Through the speed and power of automation, the sales team no longer has to spend time deliberating with the ad ops department in order to push booked adverts through a time-inefficient and bureaucratic system. Instead, they are free to dedicate a greater share of their time and attention to the needs of their bigger clients. Small-to-medium clients on the other hand, are able to control their own campaigns once registered on the self-serve platform. This gives them greater autonomy over their ad campaigns and expenditure, which the publisher’s sales team is readily positioned to improve by sharing performance data analysis when called upon.
Democratising the advertising space by providing SMEs with access to the same booking, buying and analytical services as bigger advertisers also means that publishers are able to increase their revenue by broadening their potential customer base. Whereas smaller clients with low budgets might not have justified the attention of under-resourced publishers in the past, the autonomy self-serve platforms provide means that publishers can now scale advertisers of all shapes and sizes.
The advertiser’s perspective
For advertisers, this level of control and autonomy can be equally empowering and is one of the main reasons self-serve technologies have become so popular and prominent within the space.
Once an advertiser has registered their account on a self-serve platform, all they have to do is follow a straightforward yet intuitive step-by-step process to build their ad campaign. For example:
- Set budget.
- Select ad format
- Choose target audience
- Focus on particular regions or cities
- Decide when the ads will appear
- Upload an existing ad or create a new one
- Add to cart and purchase
At each stage of this process, the advertiser is presented with a number of options which enable them to tailor the campaign to their specific requirements and revise their choices before finalising them. Although this process is automated, the best self-serve platforms also have staff members on-hand, often in combination with a chatbot, to guide the advertiser through the booking process and to help with any queries.
And the benefits of self-serve platforms don’t end there. Another essential feature, which informs the advertiser of the reach and effectiveness of their campaigns, is the reporting and analytics function. This information, which is typically granular and highly specific in nature, is invaluable for advertisers looking to enhance their strategies or cutback where campaigns aren’t proving effective.
Through self-serve, these tools and benefits are accessible to advertisers 24/7, irrespective of their size or influence.
How self-serve advertising differs from traditional programmatic advertising
Traditional programmatic advertising is the automation of buying and selling online advertising. The increased efficiency and convenience it has brought to the industry has made it the predominant advertising tool for a number of years. However, more recently, it has come under significant scrutiny for its lack of transparency and, most notably, how it disadvantages cash-strapped publishers by redistributing revenue to third parties, including trading desks and media agencies, further down the supply chain. The lack of transparency also removes the autonomy and control of the buyer and seller (advertiser and publisher) and slows down the transactional process.
One example of this lack of control from the advertiser’s standpoint, is the inability to determine where and when their adverts appear. As well as hitting the “wrong” demographics and being a waste of resources, their adverts might appear on websites or next to content that doesn’t align with brand values. Unsurprisingly, this has led to intensifying debates within the space and given weight to the argument that programmatic advertising is inherently flawed, and needs to be revised.
In its place, critics argue that self-serve advertising needs to be optimised as much as possible and, it seems, this transition is happening as more and more publishers look to preserve revenue and improve their relationships with advertisers. By harnessing self-serve platforms, publishers can reduce their spending and help to create a space, which is open and accessible to all businesses; irrespective of size or budget.
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