What is Programmatic Advertising? (2018 version)

OME is spending more and more on programmatics as a type of media and our classic job board spend is pretty flat (for reference - LinkedIn still increasing significantly, social way up, future/early talent probably our biggest growth sector which crosses all media/platforms).

However - I think we need to define the phrase Programmatic Advertising as it is used in many different ways by many different people (not necessarily wrongly)

So I want to define what it will now mean for OME and its clients

Programmatics is performance based advertising that we can manage via our automated technology and/or human intervention. Based on performance of adverts/campaigns - spend can be managed in the most efficient/effective ways. Its all about quality analytics with skilled interpretation and active campaign management.

What does this mean?

This means that job boards, aggregators, LinkedIn, social, behavioural/re-targeting can all be programmatic

its a methodology or approach not a type of media.

Account Management

A classic question I get when in a new business meeting or just chatting with clients - is "What's OME account management structure?" and "how can it meet our needs?". And I think they expect me to have an answer that goes into detail of layers of acc mgmt/SLAs/Process etc and I don't. Let me be clear - we have a couple of docs which go into detail about these things but I think they are just at best - a start - or at worse - window dressing.

Let me explain why:

1. All clients are different
2. Even clients who look/sound/feel alike are all completely different
3. Nobody knows at outset of exactly how service intensive an account will be (OME's largest billing client would not be in top 5 of hours spent by team in servicing)
4. We have 84 current clients and approx 15-20 major ones - three have OME staff onsite - many have weekly meetings - more have monthly - one we didn't see in whole of 2017 (international and it just didn't happen through no fault of client or us)
5. Most have SLAs - vast majority have never referred to it since it was signed
6. Majority of clients want a personal friendly efficient value driven service - the rest want that but without the personal friendly bit.

So what I'm saying is - when a client engages with a business like OME - still independent/nimble/bespoke - they are doing so as they believe that we will offer the service to match their need - not to have to match their needs to our service.

Our job is to make sure our service offering is robust yet flexible and highly matched to what they need/want.


And the happy ending (so far) is that plenty (enough!) clients seem to like too!