To Spend or Not to Spend on RTB, That is the Question

Many analyst firms estimate that Real-Time Bidding (RTB – the ad buying process where bids are placed on impressions in the milliseconds before an ad space loads) will represent 20% of all digital display ad spend by the end of this year.

For media planners and buyers, this method of running campaigns is getting more and more interest as clients continue to ask about it and look for greater precision and efficiencies in their media buys. It behooves us to evaluate how well it drives the advertiser’s objectives. So, how much should we spend on RTB when planning a campaign?

Welcome to Navigator, a new Centro planning tool our services team uses to help agency customers strategically allocate campaign budgets between site-direct/insertion-order and RTB inventory. The Navigator dashboard determines the percentage of budget that should be allocated toward a campaign’s branding and direct-response (DR) objectives. It also recommends what percent of that branding budget should be allocated to standard desktop display, mobile/tablet and video platforms across multiple site categories. This helps planners make better and faster decisions on how much to invest of ad budgets based on the target audience media behavior and the advertising category.

Enabling Better Budget Decisions
As the digital media landscape continues to become more complex, media planners need to provide advertisers with smarter rationale in campaign recommendations – especially for emerging methods like RTB advertising. Navigator is yet another step Centro is taking to deliver quality insights from our years running campaigns for more than 1,000 agencies.

Navigator utilizes algorithms developed from Centro’s proprietary database of campaigns conducted for clients – more than 20,000 in our decade-plus history. We’ve blended this with comScore consumer behavior data to create instant budget allocation recommendations. With some data input, planners can gain insight with this powerful decision-making tool for pre-planning campaign development within minutes.

Here are additional details on its features:

• Allows easy input of RFP details such as objective, budget and target (gender, age and income)
• Provides suggestions on what site categories would be best, based on budget, flight, advertiser vertical and target
• Enables details and information to be transferred to an e-mail or PowerPoint presentation