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The Internet: It's the only place where new content appears constantly, social shares find their way around the globe in a matter of seconds and advertisements appear in front of the people most likely to pay attention to them. It seems like the whole thing runs on autopilot, but there have to be humans at the helm, right?
Not necessarily.
Sure, there are still people creating content and designing the websites you see online, but behind the scenes, technology has taken the reins on certain parts of the web—particularly where advertising is concerned. Welcome...to real time bidding! Read on to find out more.
Real time bidding (RTB) uses programmatic advertising technology to put ads in front of audiences at the exact moment they’re relevant. Technology can take care of the ad-bidding process quickly and efficiently, and it's able to place bids on ad space anytime, anywhere.
When ad buying is handled manually, it’s easy to waste impressions because there’s only so much people know about their audiences at the time ad space becomes available. RTB, on the other hand, allows for more automation—robots spend time familiarizing themselves with the behaviors of consumers and instantly know which impressions are going to be the biggest wins for their brands.
Ultimately, RTB is a win-win benefit for all sides of the advertising process, as it allows for more efficient buying and selling across the board. Basis facilitates programmatic advertising and real-time bidding from a unified platform. We're excited to show you all that Basis can do—connect with us and get started today!
A company is only as good as its leaders. Recently, low unemployment rates have made finding and retaining the best leaders difficult for businesses. When unemployment rates are low, the excess of opportunities usually leads to increased rates of job hopping.
Job hopping isn’t ideal, because employee turnover is expensive. It also means that more leaders are being hired externally, rather than cultivated from within.
Independent research firm, Bersin & Associates, states it quite perfectly: “It is hard to find a company which has survived many economic cycles that does not have a sophisticated leadership development strategy in place.”
At Centro, we know that leadership development is an antidote to today’s job-hopping culture. A good leadership development program will boost employee engagement, reduce turnover, and increase an organization's ability to deal with gaps in the talent pipeline.
Here are our top two tips for cultivating and retaining leaders:
1. Invest in self-improvement.
Self-improvement is one of Centro’s core values for a reason: “lasting happiness is achieved through continuous personal growth.” In other words, the success of our leaders depends on the opportunities we provide for learning and advancement.
LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report found that 93% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers. Further research shows that 80% of employees consider high skills training a top benefit.
Ongoing training and development programs can help your team become more skilled in every part of their job. Providing additional opportunities for continued education is also a great way to prime team members for leadership roles.
2. Create a plan.
If your employees aren’t sure how, when, or why to take advantage of self-improvement programs, then those programs aren’t being fully utilized. It’s important to create a strategic plan around leadership cultivation, in order to track the progress of each individual.
For example, Centro made the investment to boost our own leadership development program based on the teachings of the Conscious Leadership Group. Our leaders are enrolled in a 10-module program that includes reading materials, in-person coaching, online courses, and cohorts with peers. Content includes topics such as hiring for fit, value alignment, emotional intelligence, and the power of feedback.
Investing in people follows one of the oldest rules in the book: You get what you give. We’ve seen that every dollar we put into our leaders comes back to us in measurable benefits.
Curious about the perks and benefits of working at Centro? Learn more about our total compensation package here.
If you’ve ever participated in a race of any kind, you know that most people typically don’t wake up the day of the event and start running (or at least you know that it's usually not optimal to do so). Instead, it's crucial to strategize, obtain the right gear, and prepare accordingly for the journey to come. A similar strategy can also apply to campaign optimization.
Make a Plan
Similar to training for a race—it helps to break-out optimal timeframes and set milestones that indicate future campaign achievements and ramp-up time. Plan thoroughly beforehand so that you're as agile as possible once the campaign begins.
For example, establish campaign checkpoints - and what constitutes success for each checkpoint, ahead of time.
There are multiple parameters within a campaign that contains valuable information—trying to analyze all of them at once can become overwhelming. Assign just a few of these parameters to each checkpoint to highlight them more effectively.
Use Available Resources
Have you ever tried tracking your speed, distance, and heart rate using an analog watch? It’s complicated! That's why apps and smartwatches were created—to measure those things automatically, so you can focus on the task at hand.
In the same way—leverage technology whenever possible throughout campaign execution. For example, Centro's comprehensive digital media platform, Basis, has three optimization engines that can help achieve KPIs. Basis' Optimizations Suite includes:
Stay Flexible
We all know that even the best-laid plans can go awry. Whether it's inclement weather at a race or an unexpected situation popping up during a campaign—a realistic planner should identify what conditions they have control over ahead of time, including a set protocol for how to handle or escalate any issues that may arise during a campaign. Keep communication lines open, and have open conversations amongst your team, in order to reassess, evolve, and improve your optimization strategy on a regular basis.
Crossing the finish line is a joyous experience—optimizing campaigns and achieving advertising goals should be too! Connect with us to learn more about how Basis can help campaign performance, here.
‘Ask the Expert’ is a series that breaks down the tools, tech, and trends you’ve been hearing about in the trade pubs and around the office. We ask our in-house experts the tough questions and write up the answers in bite-sized pieces for your reading pleasure.
This month’s topic? Connected TV (CTV). We brought in Basis Technologies VP of Media Innovations and Technology, Noor Naseer, to give us the breakdown.
CTV consumption has already grown significantly these past few years. It continues to grow at a rate that makes the shifts in consumption more actionable for advertisers to buy against.
Nearly 70% of all internet users are currently using CTV. And CTV ad spending is soaring in kind, passing $25 billion in 2023 and forecast to hit $40 billion by 2027. Even for those who aren’t actively watching it, chances are likely that they’re equipped to. The same eMarketer report forecasts that more than 85% of households already have a CTV device in their household.
MVPD stands for ‘Multichannel Video Programming Distributor.’ While the term may sound unfamiliar, it’s likely that many consumers have signed up for one or know someone else who has. These distributors provide access to multiple TV channels through a single service. The first iterations of MVPDs that most consumers are familiar with are cable and satellite providers, like Comcast Xfinity, Charter Spectrum, DirectTV, and Cox.
The current iteration of MVPD that has led the term to recirculate is ‘Virtual MVPD’. The addition of the word ‘virtual’ is in reference to new cord-cutting options that provide access to content channels without needing to supply a data transport infrastructure, à la coaxial cable, satellite or fiber.
Like so many things in today’s digital advertising landscape, the CTV advertising space can best be described as fragmented. There are many disparate ways to consume connected content. Accordingly, many advertising opportunities may need to be strategically considered and bought disparately.
One popular means of consumption is through streaming VOD, or ‘Video on Demand.' To date, some highly popular VOD services strictly generate revenue through a subscription model and do not offer advertising opportunities. Examples of providers that don’t run ads include Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
However, there are plenty of VOD providers and streaming players that do have advertising offerings. Popular ad-supported options include Hulu, FuboTV, Sling TV, and Roku.
While there is still a significant amount of inventory in the paid TV space, the slow diminishment of available inventory has TV ad buyers paying more for the same type and volume of inventory they’ve paid for in the past. Simultaneously, forecasts are showing that 10s of millions of traditional TV consumers are expecting to cut the cord in the next few years. This means that the volume of traditional, linear TV inventory will continue to decline.
With the continued decline in traditional TV inventory, the time to start testing and learning in the CTV space is now. CTV advertising is a great fit for advertisers for whom massive reach and branding goals are essential. It also has additional benefits paralleling the traditional TV space, like mostly non-skippable ads, 100% viewability, and viewer dedication to a single piece of content. Advertisers also have the flexibility to enhance targeting through buying based on the audience, as opposed to building their buy strategy against programming or content type.
Digital video advertising enables an advertiser to leverage sight, sound, and motion without constraining their buy to the confines of the TV screen format. Research suggests that this inventory type will continue to steeply increase. eMarketer and IAB reports indicate that more than half of digital video ad spend will be driven by video ads featuring original content.
With a volume of inventory and ad-supported spaces that far outnumber CTV, digital video can enable much more granular targeting. Digital video advertising also implies a ‘hands-on-keyboard’ element for the user experience. This allows the consumer to more immediately engage with the brand on a deeper level than they otherwise would be able to in a TV-viewing environment.
A media planner should start by evaluating the consumption habits of the audience they are seeking to reach. For instance, if an advertiser has brand awareness goals to reach a demographic that primarily consumes traditional paid TV, it might make less sense to heavily shift dollars into alternative digital video strategies. Conversely, if the target audience is heavily made up of cord-cutters and video consumers, there will be many digital video tactics worth considering.
After taking screen-based habits into consideration, the buyer can delve deeper into the combination of ad formats that will resonate best with that audience. Popular programmatic formats include full episode players, in-stream, out-stream, and in-banner. If the target audience skews younger and consumes a lot of social content, the planner may want to consider preparing vertical video assets as well. From there, more targeted video strategies and tactics can be determined based on the goals and objectives of the campaign.
Basis has solutions both for digital video and CTV. Buyers can access and discover CTV and video ad inventory by private marketplaces and the open exchange. Inventory can be aggregated a few different ways. One popular means is by audience type, such as ‘homeowner,’ ‘in-market auto shopper,’ or ‘travel enthusiast.' It can also be organized by the type of content the viewer has consumed, such as sports, news, comedy, home improvement, etc.
Learn more about Connected TV advertising with Basis
AI-powered bidding is one of the most popular and valuable applications of artificial intelligence in advertising today, yet it’s an extremely complex technology to master, so few people truly know how it works and how it improves Adwords campaigns. It all becomes clear and easy enough to utilize, though, if you have a basic understanding of the options and how they operate. Here’s an overview of everything you need to know about AI-powered bidding algorithms to take advantage of the benefits.
Automated bidding is designed to help advertisers set bids without resorting to guesswork. Google Ads offers a variety of bid strategies designed to help you meet specific business goals. Say, for example, you have a target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goal and want to maximize conversions. You can utilize Google’s target CPA bid strategy to meet your goal. This allows Google Ads to automatically make changes to bids using machine learning insights.
Smart Bidding is a subset of Google automated bidding that offers conversion-based bid strategies: Target CPA, Target ROAS and Enhanced CPC. This allows you to make targeted bid decisions for each auction your ads enter. These automated strategies use a number of important signals to make bid decisions, including device, location, time of day, remarketing list, language, operating system, and more.
Currently, Google offers six main automated bidding strategies advertisers can use to work towards key business goals. Here’s a brief overview of how each work for PPC bid automation:
| Strategy | Description | Goals |
| Maximize Clicks | Helping you get as many clicks as possible with your budget | Increase website visits |
| Target Impression Share | Automatically setting bids with the goal of showing your ad on the absolute top of the page, on the top of the page, or anywhere on the page of Google search results | Increase visibility |
| Target CPA | Automatically set bids to get as many conversions as possible at a target cost-per-action (CPA) | Get more conversions with your target CPA |
| Target ROAS | Automatically sets bids to help get as much conversion value as possible at a target return on ad spend (ROAS) | Met a target return on ad spend (ROAS) when you value each conversion differently |
| Maximize Conversions | Automatically sets bids to help you get the most conversions for your campaign within your budget | Get more conversions while spending your budget |
| Maximize Conversion Value | Automatically sets bids to help you get the most conversion value for your campaign within your budget | Get more conversion value while spending your budget |
Adwords artificial intelligence is just one form of AI bidding technology. There are many other PPC bid automation tools with advanced bidding algorithms for ads. To get a fuller understanding of how AI-powered bidding algorithms work, here’s a walkthrough of the QuanticMind bidding process:
All AI bidding technology begins by determining the optimal value of each keyword you bid on in a campaign. There are different metrics the technology can use to determine this, such as impressions or conversions. QuanticMind uses a revenue-per-click (RPC) model - determining how much to value each keyword based on the potential revenue they drive. Using all relevant business data and bid landscape data, the RPC model generates machine learning algorithms to understand millions of interactions and how they might impact performance.
After assigning value to each keyword, QuanticMind determines how changes in CPC bids might impact clicks and costs. Using bid landscape data, it maps out what click volume might look like for each hypothetical cost. This array of bids is fed into QuanticMind’s decision engine where it’s used to determine final bid amounts.
Next, the algorithm determines the best bid for each keyword based on the performance goal you specify. This works much like the goal-oriented strategies you select with Adwords artificial intelligence. For example, if your goal is to maximize profit margin, the overall maximum margin for a group of keywords is determined by finding the CPC with a maximum margin for each individual keyword.
In the next step, QuanticMind looks at historical performance data for bid modifier opportunities. This includes leveraging location, device, audience, and other important dimensions to create bid adjustments and improve results. Using the same machine learning and AI bidding technology, bid modifiers for location, device and audience are automatically adjusted through the automated bidding platform. This kind of automation is extremely valuable because it ensures you only bid exactly what you need on various dimensions to meet your advertising goals. This improves campaign efficiency and efficacy, driving higher ROAS.
One problem that makes people nervous about using bidding algorithms for their ads is the potential for mistakes. AI bidding relies on data inputs to make informed bidding decisions. What if there’s a problem with the data? The algorithms could end up making less-than-optimum bidding decisions based on this. With manual bidding, you always have an account manager checking performance and ensuring there are no data quality issues.
QuanticMind addresses this problem with built-in anomaly detection for AI bidding. It uses several techniques to compare forecasted cost, revenue, clicks and CPC to actual results. If performance starts to deviate from expectations, bidding is automatically paused until the issue is addressed.
Lastly, these final optimized bidding decisions are applied to Google Ads. These highly optimized bids are based on all relevant historical performance data, business goals, and more. If your business has additional data you can use to optimize bids throughout the day, these will also be applied retrospectively. Examples include inventory data or other limitations to costs, leads, or revenue.
All these processes take place in the background. PPC managers are free to monitor and adjust changes to bids and accounts, but it’s possible to optimize everything with high-quality business data and AI bidding technology.
There are lots of benefits to using bidding algorithms for your PPC ads:
Smart Bidding is able to understand how different bids might impact conversions. Machine learning algorithms are able to learn from data and a wide range of parameters to understand potential performance. This capacity goes far beyond what a regular PPC manager or even a team of data scientists could manage.
Automated bidding is capable of making optimizations based on the latest insights at the time of bidding. This includes dimensions such as location, intent, weekday and time of day, demographics, site behavior, operating system, and more. AI bidding is capable of making targeted bid adjustments at the time of auction to maximize the value of these data insights for bidding. Advertisers who don’t take advantage of bid automation are unable to effectively target valuable micro-moments when people turn to search engines because they’re looking to buy.
AI bidding allows you to select a targeted marketing goal to control how the algorithms make bidding decisions. It also allows you to customize performance control settings, including selecting the right attribution model for you.
AI bidding technology makes it easy to get a snapshot of your bid strategy status and performance. You can also easily create bidding experiments to see for yourself how strategy changes might impact performance. Forecasting capabilities illustrate how many conversions your ads might receive for different CPA targets.
Artificial intelligence is a valuable tool for Adwords advertisers today. AI-powered bidding algorithms make it possible to make targeted campaign decisions, improving budget spend while meeting business goals. Google Ads offers a number of internal AI bidding features that encourage businesses to try out automation to see the benefits for themselves. But third-party tools like QuanticMind actually have advanced capabilities that allow advertisers to maximize the benefits of AI bidding and machine learning. The fact that businesses need to utilize AI PPC bid automation in 2019 is a given. The next thing to figure out is which platform has the right features and the most value to help you meet your advertising goals.
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time-consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!
What Marketers Are Moving In-House in 5 Charts [:03]
In-housing continues to be a hot trend and, programmatic buying is the most anticipated function marketers are bringing in-house this year. How are marketers gaining more control, who are they working with to streamline the process, and what functions are they not prioritizing to bring in house?
How Advertisers Are Untangling the Programmatic Supply Chain [:02]
Under pressure to prove the value of their programmatic ad spend, advertisers are becoming increasingly selective in choosing their ad-tech partners. With thousands of ad-tech middlemen littering the landscape and seemingly more entering daily, marketers are quickly realizing the need to be smarter about the outfits they partner with. (Hi, have you heard about Basis by Centro?)
A Reality Check on Advertising Relevancy and Personalization [:06]
Recently a number of articles have popped up calling ad personalization into question, most notably one from the Wall Street Journal. Forbes contributor David Doty builds his case for why personalized digital experiences continue to be necessary to prove ad relevance and purpose for audiences.
ARF: The Price Consumers Put On Their Data [:03]
A new study by the Advertising Research Federation found that U.S. consumers have been pulling back the reigns on how much personal data they’re willing to share. The report examines what types of data consumers and willing to share and how much they value that data. The survey found several percentage point drops against what consumers were willing to share compared with the previous year.
Beyond the Cookie: Publishers Flirt With Generating Identity-Based User Content [:05]
With new data-privacy law requirements, publishers are looking for new ways to collect data about their consumers. The newest way is called authenticated consent which enables publishers to collect users’ consent based on identity-based signals rather than cookies, and make the user experience more consistent across multiple publisher platforms and devices in the process.
Privacy Evolving [:02]
Google recently released a study that showed that 52% of monetization drops when there are not cookies, while also announcing their release of a privacy sandbox aimed at limiting the amount of personal information that is exposed while creating some targetability. Watch for revisions in the IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework, which will include standardized messaging templates for consumers as well as more granularity to communicate user privacy preferences.
Why Brands That Have Sense(s) Will Have the Strongest Identities [:04]
As consumers adopt new ways of consuming media, are brands prepared to adapt for a future in which multi-channel will evolve into multi-sensory marketing? This article explores moving beyond what we see and how it makes us feel, and into what we hear, smell, taste, and touch.
TV Broadcasters Are Hot on Addressable – But CCPA Might Hamper Their Plans [:06]
The California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) may very well disrupt audience-based TV advertising before it has a chance to take off. CCPA is considered one of the most developed state-based privacy laws and companies like WarnerMedia are trying their best to explain the value exchange of data collection to customers now. This way, they will not have to retrofit products with consent agreements in the future, but will it be enough?
VR Ads in 2019: What’s Working, and What’s Not [:06]
Venture Beat previously highlighted the keys to a successful VR campaign, noting that ad performance, turnkey distribution across platforms and live in-market demos were vital components. Now they’re looking to share new observations including why brands are moving towards more immersive ad experiences and how to fit goals to the format across stages of the purchase funnel.
These Are the Shady Tricks Shopping Sites Use to Get Your Money and Info [:03]
1 out of 10 shopping sites employ “dark patterns” to get consumers to spend more time, share more info, and spend more money on their sites. While some of these dark patterns seem obvious, others are a bit sneakier in how they pressure or even shame a user to perform a desired action. Read the article now, before it disappears in the next 5 4 minutes!!
The last 18 months have seen massive change for social media. The introduction of new platforms, new features on existing platforms, strategic partnerships, and shiny new advertising tools happen at lightning speed. Data regulation and concerns continue to impact the ways in which advertisers can activate across social channels, and the balance of consumer attitudes and user engagement remains finicky.
Yet, there’s a reason why social advertising revenues continue to rise at double-digit rates year-over-year.
In this webinar, we explore why our clients continue to invest in social platforms (and why we continue to recommend them). We also cover the ways Centro is proving out the ROI of paid social as part of the overall paid media mix.
In 2019, the paid search bidding process is more complicated than ever. Making accurate and optimized keyword bids is only the first step. There’s also a growing number of bid adjustment options you can utilize to improve the efficacy and efficiency of your campaigns. Automated Google PPC management appears to be the most comprehensive solution to take advantage of these benefits. Intelligent bid management is not only preferable to manual CPC calculations, but it’s also completely essential.
In general, automated bid management involves optimizing your cost-per-click (CPC) for marketing campaigns. This can be done on different advertising verticals, including PPC and display advertising. Automating the bid management process offers a number of benefits for advertisers. Here’s an overview of why every business needs intelligent PPC bid management today:
Google Ads is constantly introducing new dimensions that advertisers can use to optimize their campaigns. There’s dayparting, devices, geographic locations, demographics, audiences, and more. Within geotargeting, there are neighborhoods, zip codes, cities, regions, and states. With audience targeting there’s also remarketing, affinity audiences, in-market audiences, similar audiences, and more. You can use these dimensions for direct targeting or simply adjust bids to prioritize certain audiences and locations. To take full advantage of this, you could end up making more than 10,000 bids on a single account. This is only possible if you can keep up with data analysis and discover all these opportunities as they arise.
It doesn’t matter how many data scientists you have on your PPC team, or how much time/money you spend on bid adjustments - there’s no way to take full advantage of these data opportunities using manual bidding. Intelligent bid management uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to process large volumes of relevant bidding data.
A third-party bid management tool like QuanticMind by Centro is also uniquely positioned to utilize other important data to make more precise bidding decisions. Google relies solely on data from the search bid landscape and other Google properties to make bids. Our solution considers this and other relevant business data, such as:
Making full use of available data helps advertisers make more targeted bidding decisions to optimize their campaigns and beat the competition.
Google automated bidding and third-party bid management tools can make informed decisions faster than individual PPC managers ever could. And the truth is the bid landscape is constantly changing. Even if you make accurate bids based on the latest data insights, it will quickly become irrelevant because of changes in the bid landscape. Industry trends, seasonality, and competitor changes all impact how much you need to spend targeting keywords and audiences to reach your business goals.
Google bid management technology is able to quickly react to these market changes by analysing data inputs in real-time. It’s possible to make daily micro-changes to your bids to take full advantage of changes in competition, seasonality, and the market landscape. Some third-party bid management tools also have intelligent forecasting capabilities. This employs historical performance data, seasonality, and more to predict how bidding decisions will perform long-term.
Automated bidding isn’t just about maximizing campaign performance overall. Intelligent PPC bid management can help you make targeted changes to your strategy to work towards specific business goals.
Google Smart Bidding offers many different automated bid strategies:
Enhanced cost-per-click (CPC): Designed to help you increase conversions while staying in control of your keyword bids. This is available at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level.
Maximize Conversions: Allows you to maximize possible conversions within a set budget. Available at the campaign level.
Target cost-per-acquisition (CPA): Designed to help you get more conversions at your target CPA. Available in campaigns and ad groups.
Target return on ad spend (ROAS): Allows you to meet a target ROAS while valuing each conversion differently. Available at the campaign, ad group, or keyword level.
Maximize Clicks: Designed to increase the number of visitors to your site.
Target Impression Share: Automatically sets bids with the goal of showing your ad on the absolute top of the page, on the top of the page, or anywhere on the page of search results. Designed to increase ad visibility.
Target Search Page Location: Designed to help your ads show in one of the top positions in search results, increasing visibility in the process.
Target Outranking Share: Designed to help you beat competitor ad rank and increase ad visibility in search results.
Using the bid strategy that best aligns with your business goals allows you to make more specific optimizations to meet said goals. Some Google bid management platforms also allow you to target specific marketing goals at the account level instead of campaign level. This is called using a portfolio bidding strategy. Portfolio strategies are advantageous because they optimize keyword-level bids to reach overall marketing goals.
Using all valuable market data including competition and seasonality to make bidding decisions ensures you only spend what you need on specific keywords to reach your marketing goals. Improving keyword bids as well as dimension and audience targeting allows you to improve budget spend efficiency.
Say, for example, you want to allocate more of your budget targeting in-market audiences because they have a lower cost-per-conversion (CPC). How much should your bid adjustment be? 10%? 15%? 20%? To answer the question with manual CPC, you’d simply need to test out different bid adjustments to see which drives the best results with the least spend. You’ll have to spend some time spending your budget inefficiently in order to get the answer. And by the time you do, the market landscape may have changed entirely.
Google bid management technology uses AI and forecasting capabilities to figure out just how much you need to bid on specific keywords or audiences to reach your advertising goals. Using technology like this to reduce wasted ad spend frees up more of your budget that you can then reinvest in new keywords, ad groups, and campaigns.
Manual CPC bidding offers advertisers one main benefit: complete control over keyword bids and bid adjustments. But in the age of AI and automation, this benefit only serves to leave advertisers behind their competitors. The bid management process is too complicated, with too many options to accurately and efficiently handle manually. Meanwhile, the competitive landscape is changing so quickly that even the most talented PPC teams could never keep up with these opportunities as they arise. But intelligent Google bid management technology can.
Beyond making quick bidding decisions, Google bid management technology has a number of additional benefits as well. Accurate forecasting and automating time-consuming tasks frees up more time and budget for PPC managers to work on other important initiatives, such as identifying new audiences or growth opportunities.
As more advertisers continue to adopt intelligent PPC bid management solutions, it will only become more essential for success in 2019 and beyond. Google continues to roll out and promote automated solutions for advertisers. But there are also a number of third-party bid management tools that can give PPC managers the extra edge they need to beat out the competition, even when everyone starts using automated bidding in the years to come.
Our people are a large part of what makes Centro such a great place to work. We’re excited to introduce you to some of Centro’s most interesting people in our newest blog series, as they share their ‘Centro stories’ and a variety of experiences that have impacted their work and life.
As VP of Product Development at Centro, Steven Jones is solving a variety of technical challenges for the ad tech industry. He is known not only for his speed to market, but also for his ability to anticipate market and consumer needs.
Read on to learn how Centro’s product provocateur is developing the industry’s most comprehensive digital media solutions.
Noor Naseer: There are a lot of ad tech and DSP products on the market right now. How do you set Basis apart when leading the product development process in a frenzied marketplace?
Steven Jones: At Centro, we have a unique perspective when building this tech for the marketplace because we have experienced a lot of media buying and planning pain first-hand. We are aware of the many challenges that go along with running a business as it pertains to digital media spend.
When we introduce Basis to folks who haven’t encountered software like ours, their reactions make it clear that we’re pioneers in this realm of ad tech. Clients often realize that they’re juggling many disparate software solutions to deliver on what Basis can offer. Our challenge is to break it all down in a way that makes it easy for customers to see the complete value that Basis delivers.
We’re also uniquely positioned because we offer services that complement our product. The fact that we can offer the right level of service and support to help an organization is a unique opportunity—pure product companies in ad tech don’t have that.
NN: Even when a product offers complete value, there’s pressure to introduce incremental enhancements and functionalities in order to keep customers excited. How do you decide what you’re going to do next?
SJ: That’s the classic product problem. We get requests from every corner, internal and external. It’s a challenging balancing act—and it’s not unique to Centro, every product person struggles with this.
The short answer is that we make strategic investment decisions about features. If a feature is only going to make one customer happy, we can’t prioritize it. However, if a feature is going to affect 50% or more of our customer base and positively benefit most future customers, then it’s a no-brainer. That’s the relative prioritization exercise I go through—it’s an investment decision we’re asking the business to make, while also considering how we can create a positive impact within the industry as a whole.
All of these decisions feed into a long-term strategy. Ultimately, working at the enterprise level involves reassuring our current and prospective customers that we’re not only a provider, but also a partner, ready to commit for the long-haul.
NN: Sometimes you must anticipate customer needs versus waiting for them to tell you what they want. How do you account for consumer needs that haven’t been vocalized?
SJ: Exercising good interviewing techniques is critical to quality product development. Our motto is ‘keep drilling’—if we hear a customer requesting ‘X,’ we’re never satisfied with their initial ask. We force ourselves to ask questions like “how will that help?” and “is there a better way to accomplish this?”
Most of the time, users identify challenges they’ve recently encountered—because they happened recently, so they’re top of mind. We can give that some credence, but our goal is to uncover the real problem and then try to identify where that problem is prevalent. We’re constantly seeking out patterns—the user may not directly state what the problem is, but if we can identify a noticeable pattern, we can optimize the solution.
NN: You’ve led product software development at several different companies. How has your approach changed since being immersed in the ad tech industry?
The difference is that we’re building something that hasn’t existed before. So when we go out and validate it with people, we sometimes run into confusion. Someone might say, “I’m not even sure what you’re asking me. I’ve never seen anything that does something like this before, so I don’t know how to respond to it.”
It’s our responsibility to ask deeper questions like, “I know you put a pacing view in your spreadsheets, and you spend hours of your day going through all this data. What do you think of our version of that?” Then they have something to compare it to.
This particular effort takes longer because we’re teaching people to think differently about how they can work more efficiently at their jobs. We’re going to continue to do that, because we want to help our users work smarter. I don’t know if any other vendors in the space are thinking like that.
NN: What’s it like working as part of Centro’s leadership team? What kind of leader do you strive to be?
SJ: What’s been really great at Centro is that every time I have suggested that we zig instead of zag, I’ve received nothing but support. This is an incredibly supportive organization.
In January, I wrote on my board that I’m going to be much more provocative this year. That’s the word that I hope is characterizing my leadership moving forward.