Press: IAB UK - The Importance of Real Time

Digital advertising has many strengths, its ability to target specific audiences, to be interactive, to reach users at scale. But one key advantage which is often overlooked, and in the light of the IAB’s RTA Conference should be brought to the foreground, is its capacity to deliver advertisers real time insights into what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t.

With offline media, campaigns must be planned weeks and months in advance. The creative is sent out and fingers are crossed that it has some measurable effect on sales or brand metrics. Months later data showing campaign’s impact will arrive, but by that point the next execution will have been planned. Insights can only be put into practice for the following campaign, by which time the initial information is fast becoming out of date.

In comparison feedback from digital campaigns is fast, facilitating optimisation. With programmatic campaigns buyers can analyse the performance of a particular creative or provider and make the decision to push more budget towards those which show the best results. The time from campaign launch, to feedback, to optimisation has shrunk exponentially.

But even with programmatic, this optimisation still isn’t real-time. It’s down to the planner to check up on the campaign and make a decision on how to optimise it going forward. It’s also a blind decision – one creative may have performed better than another over the weekend, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will continue to do so over the week. Planners have to take a shot in the dark.