Make it Count: New ANA Report Emphasizes Performance Optimization

Ed Lyon
August 8, 2023

What a waste. 

The $88 billion open web programmatic media ecosystem is riddled with as much as $20 billion in waste, which represents 23% of the total open web investment, according to the Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study conducted by ANA. 

The report highlights (and has for many consecutive years) that the direct response race to the bottom is ironically having the inverse effect on campaign effectiveness. Ultimately, chasing cheap CPMs is killing ad quality and effectiveness. This age-old observation that programmatic spend on the open web is wasteful doesn’t offer a surprise to advertising professionals now grappling with more pressure than ever to meaningfully spend their budgets. Particularly in an economically-challenged market where tech spending is down and buyers’ objections are up, marketers have got to make every effort of spending truly count.

Marketers can’t achieve meaningful outcomes if targeting isn’t on point and spend gets wasted. Clearly marketers need to take more drastic action, and shift their budgets as radically as consumers have shifted their behavior away from the open web towards social engagement platforms. While there’s already been a big budget shift from programmatic to social, we believe that savvy marketers should level up. 

Meanwhile, social offers the solution to the issues flagged by the ANA: Greater inventory transparency, less signal loss due to logged in users, less intermediation from third parties, more creative consistency and governance, engaged audiences, more mobile and more screen real estate, and overall more meaningful customer experiences.

To really maximize the effectiveness of your ad budgets, programmatic should be the exception not the rule - reserved for meaningful, higher-impact publisher PMPs and other strategic executions.

But the open web is changing open AI and signal loss – it is no utopia. Marketers need smarter advertising strategies to deliver meaningful results in changing environments. That’s why at Smartly.io, we’re enabling organizations to tap into a more unified, informed digital advertising strategy. We’re supporting advertising innovators to help them test and learn about campaigns and provide a full funnel view for automated optimisation. 

Here’s a snapshot of how we’re focused on driving value for our customers, enabling marketers to refine their focus in the following three areas:

  1. REACH:

Consumers use an average of more than eight platforms, which means brands have to repeatedly build campaigns, produce creative, and test everything. This time-consuming, manual work makes it challenging to react quickly and focus on the bigger picture. The Smartly.io platform offers a centralized tool to manage creative and media budgets across multiple platforms, as well as reduce manual work and task duplication with one interface. Get it done faster by saving time spent maneuvering disparate logins and platforms.

  1. ENGAGE:

With an automated creative production strategy, marketers can better deliver on the promise of personalized experiences that engage and inspire buying. Smartly.io’s tools help creative production scale campaign workflow and track performance that translate to actionable insights. And we’re helping marketers with a more centralized view of their engagement tactics across social platforms to truly be with and incentivize audiences. 

  1. LEARN:

The Smartly.io platform offers a new source of rich data in a single platform across social ad performance. Marketers can integrate third-party data and build a unique dashboard that helps optimize and learn what is working for you, based on your brand’s objectives and audience focus areas. These insights are helping advertisers become more empowered to understand how to unlock performance lift.

Learn how Smartly.io can help you make your dollars count with a unified solution.

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