In today’s digital advertising landscape, financial institutions value speed, performance, and efficiency. Especially with the plethora of content uploaded every day, marketers need to reach the right consumers, in the right places, and in the appropriate context to help build a connection between the potential customers and the brand. In a bid to establish a connection with the potential customer, every moment and impression counts. This multifaceted journey is made easier with programmatic advertising, which helps advertisers gain control over their media campaigns, avoid bidding on low-quality inventory to reduce ad wastage and mitigate ad fraud-related challenges to safeguard their brand reputation amongst other benefits.
Let’s take a look at how financial advertisers can leverage programmatic advertising to drive efficiency and deliver targeted, high-quality campaigns.
Brand Safety in Programmatic Advertising
Brand safety is paramount in the financial sector, where reputation and trust are the cornerstones of business. Programmatic advertising offers a level of control and transparency that these brands find essential. With programmatic, they can carefully curate ad placements, ensuring their content is not associated with harmful, inappropriate, or irrelevant contexts.
Programmatic tools allow financial brands to set up strict parameters, using keywords, categories, and site lists to filter out undesirable placements. They can also opt for whitelisting, specifying approved websites or publishers, which guarantees that their ads will only appear in contexts that align with their brand values. This approach minimises the risk of ad misplacement, ensuring that their content remains in safe, reputable environments.
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Mastercard Improves Campaign Performance With Integral Ad Science
Mastercard, a global technology company in the payments industry, has a new brand safety target benchmark of 98% that is enforced globally. Mastercard aimed to achieve higher brand safety performance, bring down fail rates and ensure the highest media quality standards across their programmatic campaigns quarter after quarter.
To help execute and achieve these objectives, Mastercard partnered with Integral Ad Science (IAS) to identify the value and efficiency opportunities in utilising IAS’s pre-bid solution. Both aligned on a custom pre-bid strategy to generate a seamless activation process based on Mastercard’s post-bid setting. Mastercard enabled three IAS pre-bid solutions Brand Safety, Contextual Avoidance and Fraud across their programmatic campaigns from May 2022 onwards, which resulted in:
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15% increase in brand safety pass rate
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82% improvement in invalid traffic rate
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72% improvement in the cost of quality impression
IAS helped reduce Mastercard’s brand suitability fail rate, which resulted in delivering quality impressions in a safe and suitable environment. Mastercard is now able to make confident brand safety decisions across its programmatic media investments backed by IAS granular insights.
Quality Path Optimisation (QPO)
The financial industry places a premium on efficient ad delivery. QPO in programmatic advertising helps these brands ensure their ads take the most direct route to their target audience, reducing latency and enhancing user experiences. QPO helps advertisers balance cost and quality to avoid wasteful investments and focus on the value their media buys deliver.
Programmatic advertising platforms use algorithms to evaluate the best path to reach the intended audience. This involves real-time analysis of numerous variables such as server response times, network quality, and user behaviour. For financial brands, this means faster ad loading times, lower bounce rates, and a more positive user experience.
By optimising the delivery path, financial brands can also reduce wasted ad spend, as they are not paying for impressions that do not result in views due to slow-loading pages or other technical issues. This level of control allows them to invest their advertising budgets more efficiently, achieving a higher return on investment (ROI).
Ad Viewability
Prioritising high-quality inventory by leveraging programmatic advertising helps advertisers ensure that an ad is seen by its intended audience. Programmatic advertising platforms help the leading brands maximise ad viewability in the financial sector, where every impression counts. Ad viewability is typically measured by the Media Rating Council (MRC) standards, which require at least 50% of an ad’s pixels to be in view for at least one continuous second.
Programmatic advertising platforms use viewability metrics and real-time optimization to maximise the chances of an ad being in view. For instance, they can adjust bids and placements to favour sites and positions with higher viewability scores. This ensures that a larger percentage of impressions meet the MRC standards, which is crucial for these financial brands, which must capture their audience’s attention in a competitive landscape.
Additionally, programmatic advertising allows these brands to implement viewability verification technologies and third-party measurement tools to maintain transparency and accountability in their ad campaigns. This data-driven approach ensures that their ad dollars are spent effectively, as they can continually refine their strategies based on viewability data.
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Capturing Consumer Attention:
A rise in user generated content and short-form video consumption has led to a decrease in users’ attention spans. As a result, we’re seeing marketers look for new metrics that can be used to measure the success of their campaigns. Attention, whilst complex, has become a widely discussed topic today because it enables marketers to determine whether or not their ads are able to capture the attention of the viewer. Based on extensive research, IAS has identified that attention should be a function of three key signals — Visibility, Situation, and Interaction. The combination of these signals can predict if an impression is likely to lead to a business result. Marketers are starting to turn to attention to measure and optimise their campaigns towards greater attention, and, ultimately, greater business outcomes.
The top financial brands need a trusted global verification partner who can help them execute their digital advertising goals to advertise confidently. This strategic use of programmatic advertising helps them maintain their reputation and brand image and ensures that their advertising efforts are efficient and results-driven. In a fast-paced digital advertising landscape, these brands are setting the standard for others to follow, emphasising the importance of programmatic technology in their marketing strategies.
