Hitting the high street or shopping Saville Row? As London Fashion Week and Men’s Week approach, it strikes me that there are some interesting parallels with the world of premium online advertising.
The efficiency of automation has become extremely attractive to advertisers: programmatic advertising is now an irreplaceable part of the digital eco-system in terms of display advertising.
Every brand marketer wants to reach premium audiences with qualitative, safe and measurable delivery but that does not necessarily translate to media planning accordingly.
As online and mobile ad spends for mainstream brands set new records almost every quarter and with half of all marketers now using programmatic to buy mobile ads, many have argued that online advertising is by its very nature ‘off the peg’ and mass-market, and can never be truly premium.
Quality (of inventory and formats), authenticity (of access to audiences genuinely seeking out premium products and services) and the lack of reporting transparency, and placement visibility have all been cited by premium clients as major concerns in one-size-fits-all digital advertising.
There is now a real risk to an advertiser’s reputation by appearing in unsavoury, untargeted or unappealing digital environments and we are seeing a growing appetite among brand advertisers for impeccable execution and accountability for their brand campaign identity online.
Premium mobile impressions: the haute couture of digital advertising?
In a brainstorm, advertisers will mark out upscale publishers as positive environments for their new corporate message. In reality, those coveted premium placements are not a digital media myth.
Premium mobile impressions are there for the taking but what is frequently overlooked is that significant volumes of the most viewable and impactful inventory is simply unavailable through programmatic buying models.
Mix and match to style it out
Premium digital advertising should, and can, be as brand safe and accountably executed as any communications on a brand’s owned channels. This kind of execution is available to discriminating marketers willing to craft a tailor-made media plan alongside their scaled digital strategy.
The high street shirt with the high end suit, if you will.
Hand-picked media buying at a granular level can complement programmatic exposure to support performance or conversion goals. Premium advertisers with dual objectives can then reach their branding objectives with the best of both worlds: precise targeting in 100% safe environments without having to compromise on the scale offered by programmatic.
Exclusivity by association is on trend
As much as brands are highly conscious of their association to online content, premium media owners are equally concerned with the ads their audience will be exposed to.
Their audience is precious, and advertising can add greatly to the user experience when formats and messaging are appropriate to the placements in which they live.
For premium publishers, this “exclusivity by association” is a big plus.
It is through direct buys with premium publishers that premium advertisers can be offered quality at scale, unlocking sought-after mobile inventory, which is just not available any other way.
