Cohorts: The future of AdTech

Success in communicating a message through advertising depends on how well the message is crafted (creative), the way the message is communicated (avenues, platforms, format), whether it is reaching the ones who it is intended for (target group) and evaluating the effectiveness of it. Much or the entire set of activities in the advertisement or its evaluation are centred on these elements. Blindness abounds when understanding any of these aspects is far from complete. The utilization of technologies of various kinds has helped address gaps in the process of planning, executing, and evaluating advertisements. Advertising Technologies (AdTech), generally, refers to an over-arching term that describes systems of analyzing and managing tools for programmatic advertising campaigns.

Any reference to AdTech would be incomplete without bringing up terms such as “Demand/Supply Side Platforms”, “Ad Exchanges” and the like. AdTech spans entities that want to advertise and entities that enable it (Demand-Side: Brands and Agencies), entities that accommodate a digital advertisement unit (Supply-Side: Publishers and Ad exchanges). The crux of it, however, lies in the fact that technologies have made it possible to map out specialization and entities engaged in a particular specialization can command a pie of the ad revenues.

“…accordingly and not approximately…”

To ensure that the ad targeting is relevant and effective, it is extremely important to capture information related to consumers, who could be prospects and possible leads.

Consumer data is the most critical component that feeds into the overall AdTech ecosystem. The more exhaustive the consumer data is the higher the chances that the communication is made to the right individual. This data could be related to certain defining characteristics: values, behaviours, attitudes, attributes, and even psychographic mindsets – ensuring that targeting is done accordingly and with minimal approximations.

Defining Cohorts

Given that successful a campaign is dependent on the magnitude of reactors post seeing an ad, merely identifying aspects of consumers is not enough. It becomes extremely important to discern the extent of consumers that are similar in defining characteristics, which gives rise to cohorts. In the AdTech ecosystem, data related to cohorts are included in a data management platform (DMP), where their interactions with the ads are stored – which allows for adjusting campaigns.

The need of the hour is to extend the definition of cohorts to include more behavioural data – form factor, topics of interests, immediate and future product ownership, their offline media behaviour as well as reactions towards the type of messaging. Such exhaustive definition will provide a complete 360-degrees understanding so that indicative effectiveness of a digital campaign can be arrived at before the campaign goes live.

Not just user data but “targetable” and “tradeable” cohort data

Such cohort data needs to be integrated further up the ecosystem and accommodate for long-term disruptive changes that could lead to a decrease in the performance of digital advertisements.

Integration with Supply

The supply-side equation in the overall ecosystem expects well-defined and industry-standard profile data. The cohort data can be aligned with the Interactive Advertising Bureau Taxonomies which then can be used further in the ecosystem. In addition, with technological innovation, the cohorts can be identified “on-the-fly” at the publishers’ end, which can be used to better target the communication based on the identifying characteristics, specified above.

Cookie-Less World

The inability to place cookies will reduce opportunities to provide meaningful experiences to audiences and generate revenues outside of the host or native environment. We can address this challenge by recognizing the importance of nurturing first-party sources (publishers, platforms, agencies and even brands), who collect data directly from the customer or users.We can probabilistically determine the cohorts that the users belong to and accordingly target the consumers.

Cohesive Delivery

The results of such an organized program can be included within a single cohesive delivery in a dashboard for better campaign planning and execution. With an integrated delivery of finalizing the creative format and messaging based on cohort as well as ensuring there is alignment with the supply-side of the ecosystem, the brands will be in a position to better evaluate their investments in the AdTech-enabled infrastructure for disseminating targeted digital advertisements.

About the author:

Tarun Abhichandani, Head Products & Solutions, Zirca Digital Solutions