The Future of Advertising is Now: How Programmatic Advertising Outperforms Endemic Advertising

Endemic advertising is the oldest form of targeted advertising in which a marketer places an advertisement on a website or channel (radio, linear TV, magazine, etc.) where they believe their desired audience will be viewing. Here, the marketer cannot specifically target their intended audiences, so they choose channels that will likely attract the audience they want to target and buy ad inventory on those channels.

This is an inventory-first strategy where the marketer selects the inventory first, in hopes that their target audience will be watching. Because they cannot identify and target their consumers directly, marketers must make general assumptions about their audiences to decide where they are most likely browsing or watching. This audience-to-channel stereotyping misses other demographics in their market watching or viewing elsewhere. Additionally, endemic advertising is unable to measure deterministic attribution because it lacks the technology to verify who the campaign reached, let alone which of them took a related action.

Let’s Sell a Truck Using Endemic Advertising

To sell a truck using endemic advertising, a marketer would likely place dealership ads on ESPN, assuming that most sports watchers also like trucks. This strategy might create a slightly better likelihood of reaching in-market truck buyers than if they bought ad space across all linear TV channels, but still does not guarantee that any interested truck buyers will be watching. They are grouping their entire audience into one persona of sports lovers because they cannot identify truck buyers. It’s an educated guess.

This was the most granular audience targeting strategy for over a decade. After 2010, modern technologies emerged with new data and automation capabilities that could place ads directly and exclusively in front of a marketer’s desired audience. Programmatic advertising’s popularity rose as endemic advertising became considered outdated and less productive.

Despite programmatic advertising’s remarkable advancements, marketers today still choose endemic targeting, missing the opportunity to directly reach their markets.

Programmatic advertising is the most granular audience targeting strategy that exists across the advertising ecosystem. Programmatic advertising takes a different approach, leveraging an audience-first strategy that uses data and automation to first identify the target audience, then serve ads to only those individuals. For streaming advertising specifically, data can first identify all the consumers in their market, find them across any streaming platform, and follow them throughout their streaming activities while serving them ads. Programmatic advertising gives marketers a direct line to valuable consumers. The marketer can find their relevant consumers, whoever and wherever they are, and buy their inventory across all channels.

What do Programmatic Audiences Look Like?

Marketers can reach any and all types of consumers via programmatic advertising. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party audience data finds actual individuals who have shown interest or are highly predicted to show interest in the marketer’s extremely specific item, then find those individuals on whichever website, channel, or platform they are using, buying their available ad inventory automatically as it goes up for bid.

Targeted individuals do not have to be grouped into one “assumed” endemic audience to focus advertising efforts on. Marketers can target their consumers wherever they are watching, avoiding ad wastage on the uninterested individuals that coincide with endemic advertising. This means a truck buyer does not have to be restricted to sports lovers. They can be people of every age, gender, or ethnicity, as long as they were identified as a person pre-market or in-market for a truck. Programmatic advertising will reach everyone in that audience, not just the largest demographic the marketer could hit with one inventory buy.

Let’s Sell a Truck Using Programmatic Advertising

To sell a truck using programmatic advertising, the marketer’s chosen audience data will first identify individual truck buyers, then find them across whichever channel or platform those exact truck buyers are viewing on and automatically bid on the ad avail. The truck buyer could be a 30-year-old man, or it could be a 65-year-old women; they are an identified truck buyer. This inventory could be an ESPN game, or it could be a Hallmark movie or comedy channel. It is whichever content the identified truck buyer is watching and does not have to relate to the product.

Advertising inventory and audiences are uncoupled, meaning the type of streaming content, or inventory, does not need to relate to the assumed audience anymore. Marketers no longer need to cast their advertising net across all of Hulu or all of ESPN to find desired individuals. This is only a fraction of the streaming market that includes 100+ platforms, and it is only based on where marketers assume their audience will be watching. Programmatic automation buys inventory across 100+ Connected TV (CTV) and streaming audio ad-supported streaming platforms by identifying individual people in their market and following them through their different streaming activities. There is no longer a tethered relationship between the type of channel or platform and the type of generalized audience. Programmatic advertising skips the need to guess where the valuable viewers are.

Data finds the relevant consumers and serves them the ad on whatever channel or streaming platform they are watching on, no matter how related it is to the assumed individual. The audience does not have to be generalized into one demographic, hence, the supply does not have to be generalized into one demographic’s assumed content interest. It does not matter if most of the purchased inventory is completely unlike what their target audience would likely watch. It is exactly where an identified truck buyer is, verified by vehicle sales, dealership walk-ins, and website visits.

Buying specific inventory, such as purchasing all the ads on an episode or season of The Bachelor, is unproductive. This is the same inaccuracy as endemic advertising, where the marketer believes they need to choose the show that will attract the most amount of their target audience. With programmatic advertising, marketers no longer need to assume their audience’s show interest in order to reach them. Audience data can identify valuable viewers and find them on CTV or streaming audio, wherever they choose to watch or listen.

EMG is the first streaming advertising solution purpose built for the automotive industry. By curating the highest performing commercially available automotive audience segments, then identifying and following these users throughout their streaming activities, EMG can directly reach highly predictive car buyers with targeted dealership advertisements in any market.

Launch with EMG to programmatically target these audiences and achieve a 20% market share gain in 90 days.