Programmatic is transparent, but post-delivery: Vertoz CEO Ashish Shah

Start-ups take faster to programmatic than regular consumer product firms, Ashish Shah tells Vanita Kohli-Khandekar

Is programmatic useful from a brand building perspective?

If you have to buy space in Business Standard or Times of India for 30 days, they are fixed buys. You would buy the home page on, say, TOI or FT. Programmatic measures where to place the ad on a real-time basis. Like we have a client, GrabOnRent, a start-up that offers furniture, home appliances and other things on rent for single people who have to move houses or cities. They want to create awareness towards expats and then brand recall. Traditionally I would have approached an agency, gone to XYZ website, “do it yourself” blogs and websites. But with data management platforms you can buy specific audiences and then measure awareness, recall and lead generation. So if the objective is brand awareness there are a different set of KPIs (key performance indicators) from awareness to those for lead generation. And we can do multi-targeting that looks at content across mobile, desktop and other devices.

The trouble with the internet is unlimited inventory of content, ad space and multiple firms offering programmatic solutions. How does a marketer make sense of it all?

TOI has something called the Columbia Network, for native advertising, a specialised service. We are an omni-channel solution across display, native. So there are various ways in which programmatic can differentiate. It depends on how many data points we use. Our platform is a demand side platform and we keep collaborating and tying up with firms that help us specialise like data management platforms such as Lotame’s. It is definitely a crowded market and we are acting as an ad network that is buying and selling. But this is facilitated by AI (artificial intelligence).

Where are most of your clients?

We are a US-based firm and our major clients are in the US. We operate in India as well and have a lot of start-ups as our clients. We find them easy to cater to because they are millennials and it is easy to explain things to them compared to the chief marketing officer of a large consumer product company. Millennials come from the Google, Facebook generation. We have a client, Leela Hotels. They had never used programmatic in the past, only Google ad words. It was a mindset. So when we came in we said, go after the international market. We fixed up with Expedia so that Leela should appear if people are looking for a hotel from overseas.

Do marketers worry about brand safety?

If a brand appears with porn or objectionable content or infringed content, it is not good. It is the responsibility of the programmatic company to ensure that the ad does not appear next to inappropriate content. We work with other companies to ensure that. When we get an ad requirement from a publisher we capture information where the users are, scan the content, scrape it in real time. This is all machine learning. We can’t rely on a physical person to verify content and serve ads. The scraping allows the ad to be served at the right location. We work with a couple of Israeli companies and one British company on figuring this out. And there is a strike-out policy if there are bad ads or bad content. We won’t serve the ad and alert publishers. So one is we check the content in real time and vet the website before monetisation. But still ad requests can be manipulated—someone can ask for an ad for Rediff and serve it on Santabanta.com. You will come to know only post-execution. And that too requires a lot of digging.

What are the typical concerns from marketers? What is needed in conjunction with programmatic to make it work?

In conjunction with programmatic we could do social media. Typical concern—Mera ad kidhar dikhega (where will my ad be seen). They want to see their ad in real time, but we can’t deliver that unless the audience matches the site. Programmatic delivery is 100 per cent transparent but post-delivery not pre-. Marketers are used to seeing their ads when, say, the home page of TOI or NDTV opens. In programmatic the ad will be delivered only when the audience is there. There will be bidding by various people and then the ad is served. Many of the clients just don’t want to try new things, they are happy with whatever the earlier manager was doing. So this is the education phase, it needs time.

What is the cost of programmatic?

It is cheaper because it is not guaranteed space. Say, you make a $1 bid for X time to Y time. If there is no one else you get it. It is a buyer’s market. Inventory is not endless; you need an audience with that inventory.