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 (usually on linear TV) where they believe their desired audience will be watching. Here, the marketer cannot specifically target their intended audiences, so they choose websites or channels that will likely attract the audience they want to target and buy ad space on those websites or channels.

This is an “inventory first” strategy where the marketer picks the inventory first, in hopes that their target audience will be watching. They must make general assumptions about this audience to decide where that audience is most likely browsing or watching, missing other demographics in their market. Additionally, there is no level of attribution because it lacks any technology that could prove an impression generated a conversion.

How Would an Advertiser use Endemic Advertising?

A marketer using endemic advertising who is selling a truck, for example, would place their ads on ESPN, in hopes that some of those ESPN viewers are in their target audience of “men, between the ages of 18-45, who are interested in buying a truck.” This strategy creates a better likelihood of reaching desired audiences than if they bought ad space across all linear TV channels, but still does not guarantee that their target audience will be watching.

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

Programmatic advertising is the highest level of audience specialization that exists. This “audience first” strategy uses data and automation to first identify the target audience, then serve ads to only those individuals. For streaming advertising, data can first identify all the individual people in their market, find them across any streaming platform, and follow them throughout their streaming activities while serving them ads. Programmatic is the shortcut. The marketer can find their audience, whoever and wherever they are, and buy their inventory across all channels.

How Granular is the Targeting?

Targeted audiences are highly specific. Data can find actual individuals who have shown interest or are highly predicted to show interest in the marketer’s extremely specific item, and then find those individuals on whichever website, channel, or platform they are using and buy their ad inventory. Targeted individuals do not have to be grouped into one “assumed” endemic audience to focus advertising efforts on. These individuals encompass 100% of the individuals in their market. This means a truck buyer does not have to be restricted to men aged 18-45. 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.

How Would an Advertiser Use Programmatic Advertising?

If a marketer selling a truck is using programmatic advertising, data will identify individual truck buyers, and will automatically place the ad on whichever channel or platform those exact truck buyers are viewing on. 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 confirmed to be watching.

Ad inventory and audience are uncoupled, meaning the type of streaming content (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. Targeting data buys inventory across 100+ CTV and 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 targeted individual 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 content interest. It does not matter if most of the inventory purchased is completely unlike what their target audience would likely watch. It is exactly where an identified in or pre-market truck buyer is. Targeting advertising will reach 100% of the individuals in their target audience. This is confirmed via media data that guarantees marketers that their target audiences are viewing their ads, and can attribute these completed impressions to real sales and physical walk-ins.

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. Data can identify their valuable viewers and find them on CTV or audio streaming, wherever they are.

EMG provides streaming solutions on Connected TV and digital audio using programmatic advertising. By identifying the exact audience segments automotive marketers need to target, then following these identified individuals throughout their streaming activities, EMG can directly reach pre-market and in-market car buyers with targeted ad placement. Unlike other streaming companies, EMG has a closed attribution loop that can identify how the audiences, inventories, and creatives performed, and attribute campaign impressions to real results: physical arrivals and online metrics.

The deterministic data EMG measures and reports allows automotive marketers to know exactly what works and exactly what doesn’t. EMG’s recommendations draw from years of regression data from 40+ million dealership walk-ins, ensuring that automotive marketers will target the most highly predictive auto intending audience segments on the top-performing inventory to create hyper-performing campaigns. The data does not lie.

Gain access to expert-level programmatic advertising with EMG’s streaming solution. Launch your campaign today.