Summary

In this episode of the Strategic Expert Show by Millionaire Makers, Matthew welcomes Jessica Chase, an expert in programmatic advertising and multi-touch attribution. Jessica shares her extensive experience in digital advertising, beginning with her work at 1-800 Contacts and later guiding companies through the complexities of programmatic media. She explains the intricacies of programmatic advertising, highlighting its value in building brand awareness, targeting specific customer personas, and avoiding common pitfalls like inefficient ad spend. Matthew and Jessica discuss how programmatic media integrates with other forms of advertising and its evolving role in the face of privacy regulations.

Matthew
Welcome back to the strategic Expert show by millionaire makers. Today, we’re going to be diving deep into the world of programmatic media. If you’re wondering what programmatic media is, why it’s becoming a game changer in the marketing industry, and how you can start leveraging it for your business, this episode is going to be for you. Our guest today is a passionate expert in programmatic advertising and multi touch attribution. With a deep understanding of complex ad tech environment, she thrives on helping advertisers navigate and excel in this space. With many years of experience, she’s guided companies to efficiently allocate their ad dollars, ensuring they are directed to the best possible places for success across the entire marketing funnel. Her expertise lies in helping advertisers avoid common pitfalls, such as wasting ad dollars on targeting the wrong users who don’t fit their demographics or Personas. She enjoys working closely with the advertisers to refine their targeting strategies and improve the efficiency of their ad spend, ultimately driving better results. Her commitment to her clients and her family, combined with her diverse interests and extensive experience, makes her a standout figure in the world of programmatic advertising and marketing. Please welcome Jessica Chase. Jessica, it’s great to have you on.

Jessica
Thank you for having me.

Matthew
All right, Jessica, can you walk us through a little bit of your background for sure?

Jessica
Yeah, I’ve been in online advertising in general for about 20 years. I started on the client side at 1800 contacts.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
Contact lenses online, and I was the marketing administrative assistant there. And so I kind of got to see into the world of all kinds of marketing since I helped everybody on the team. And when I worked there, it was in about 2002 to about 2010. So marketing was largely traditional at that point. We were kind of into like paid search and affiliate. Affiliate was really big back then, but we did a lot of like website optimization and making sure that when users got to our website that they had a good conversion journey. So I got into website optimization for a little bit, was working with the developers to use tools that you could see what the path was on the website and where people were falling off, whether it was errors or just issues with the user experience, and was helping with that for a while. And then I got into the world of acquisition marketing and was working with paid search and SEO and affiliate. I did help our traditional team that did a lot of traditional tv and traditional mailers, like magazines and newspapers. And I don’t know if you remember Valpak, but it was like, like a coupon that was mailed out yeah, yeah. And then I kind of just found my way into the affiliate industry. Back then I was working, I ran their affiliate program for a few years and they had 3500 affiliates at the time. And so that kind of helped me understand the publisher side of things, because affiliates are really just people who are, and now they kind of call them influencers, right. Are just people who create content and they have websites that they would like to monetize their content. And so now, yeah, they’re called influencers, where people are monetizing content on TikTok and Instagram and all the things. But back then it was a lot of mommy bloggers and coupon websites and, you know, the Internet was a very.

Matthew
Different place back then.

Jessica
It was, and there was a lot of fraud going on and anyways, so I was in the affiliate industry for a while. I went and worked for an actual affiliate, somebody that did cash back on credit cards.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
Also be considered an affiliate looking to monetize traffic is a bank that’s doing cash back for their clients.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
I was responsible for working with advertisers on negotiating what kind of cash back they were willing to give when somebody made a purchase on their cardinal. Costco still does that. So I kind of learned the publisher side of the business pretty in depth. And then I worked for a large international marketing agency called Rakuten and they ran omnichannel advertising. So they ran programmatic paid search and affiliate, and then they had a multi touch attribution tool that would analyze the full funnel of the journey and help stand how many touch points were in the journey, how long their sales cycle was. So some clients, their sales cycle is two weeks. Sometimes their sales cycle is three months to a year.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
So Google Analytics doesn’t do the best job of judging that type of long sales cycle behavior. And so really interesting to see different clients and what their sales cycle was and how many touch points it took across programmatic search and affiliate to generate optimal sales based on spend. So that was really fun. And then I’ve really been on my own after that, just really focused on programmatic for about the last ten years.

Matthew
Awesome. So you’ve been around the block for sure.

Jessica
Oh, for sure.

Matthew
You definitely know your way around, around the marketing environment. That’s, that’s really cool. So let’s, let’s get into programmatic media a little bit. Like, what is it? Because when you first, when you first, you know, raised your hand that you were interested in doing this podcast and said that was what you did, I actually didn’t know what it was.

Jessica
Yeah. So, yeah, that’s kind of what brought me to get abovethefold.com is I. I really saw that advertisers were really overvaluing the bottom of the funnel a lot when I was at Rakuten.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
And the reason for that, if you think about it, is Google has built a reporting platform around what they do. So Google built Google Analytics around their paid search platform and their advertising platform in the nineties.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
Marketers still use it. And I kind of learned a lot about this when I was at Rakuten. And I was like, you know, it really is easy to just kind of go into paid search and affiliate because it captures all of the credit at the bottom of the funnel. Right. I worked an affiliate for years and I got all the credit in my marketing department because what do people do at the end of the end of their conversion journey on a website? They put a coupon. They put a coupon.

Matthew
Right.

Jessica
So. And a lot of advertisers try to remove that coupon box because they don’t want to remind the client to go find a coupon and then take their margin down. But they still. A lot of clients are really reliant on coupons. So they. A lot of advertisers haven’t figured out a solution around that.

Matthew
But I’m sure some of it’s inflated, too. Knowing that they’ve got a 10% coupon, they inflate their price by 10%. So they’re really not hitting their margins.

Jessica
Yeah. Or they do, like a unique code. Now, wherever I. You know, every user has a unique code. But anyways, think about the marketing journey and how there’s, you know, on average, there’s ten to 20 touch points in a user journey. And Google Analytics will take credit for the last click.

Matthew
Right.

Jessica
Not even the last view.

Matthew
Yeah. It’s last click attribution.

Jessica
Yeah. Not even the last view if it was a tv ad. Right. Like, if somebody saw a tv ad and they went directly to the website, Google would still take attribution for that because a lot of times what happens when somebody sees a tv ad is they do a search, too. Google wants to capture that credit. And they’ve been the kings and queens of, like, taking credit for all the marketing for years. And I saw this happening at Rakuten. And although it’s a challenge, I truly believe that marketing is awareness driven. Right. People need to know about your brand in order to take action. They don’t know to go do a search unless they see a tv ad.

Matthew
Especially if they’re, especially if they’re actually, you’re trying to get them to have that brand recognition because you can function within Google search, but that’s a catch as catch can. They’re just going to look and click on whoever’s at the top of the search when they go look for it versus actually searching for you. So there’s a difference between searching for your products and searching for you here.

Jessica
Exactly. And I did a poll on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago that said, is awareness more important or is clicks? Yeah, and it was very interesting. It was about 50 50. But marketers have been very click reliant for many years and for some reason they only care about the click. A lot of that has to do with. It’s an easier way to attribute it.

Matthew
Yeah. You can justify your existence. I’ve made this argument so I can understand it because, and it’s one of the reasons I like Google over some of the other platforms is it’s a lot easier for me to go to a client and tell them, you know, we got this many clicks, it turned into this many sales, it turns into it feels what feels like a very scientific justification. But I think you’re about to unravel my arguments.

Jessica
Yeah. And not only you and not only clients, but CFO’s and CEO’s, a lot of times they’re just like, well, what data platform are we using to track this? And the only thing a lot of people have is Google Analytics. And I just want to make people smarter and I want to make them better marketers. And so where programmatic really comes in is at the top, in the middle of the funnel.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
And it’s more to drive awareness to then drive those searches at the bottom of the funnel. Right.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
We go back to that question of, is awareness more important or is clicks more important? And again, you can’t really get the clicks unless people know about your brand. So yes, you’ll continue to get the clicks of people that know about your brand and your current customers. And, you know, but if you really want to grow your market share and you want to grow your awareness, that’s where programmatic really fits in well to the equation. Which is why when I was at Rakuten, we had a multi touch attribution tool that would say, are you putting too much money at the bottom of the funnel just because Google Analytics is saying that’s where you’re getting the most clicks.

Matthew
Right.

Jessica
Should you put like 50% of your spend at the top of funnel for awareness and 50% at the bottom of the funnel so that you can make sure you’re growing your business. Right.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
So that’s where I really was like, this is so cool. And I really want to, like, go out on this mission to help advertisers understand this attribution journey and, you know, make sure that they’re not putting too much money at the bottom of the funnel. And it has been honestly, like, extremely challenging because of what you just said, that people love Google because Google shows the clicks.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
However, I still am having a lot of fun doing it. And so I do recommend that advertisers put at least 50% at the top of the funnel in programmatic and 50% at the bottom of the funnel. I think they’re putting way too much money at the bottom of the funnel. And I, I actually work with a lot of multi touch attribution companies, marketing mix modeling companies that have verified this data and have shown that a cost per lead at the bottom of the funnel can be over $1,000 when you look at every touch point in the journey, whereas at the top of the funnel, it can be 50. And that’s not going to be shown in Google Analytics. That’s only going to be shown in a marketing mix modeling statistical analysis. But that’s what I really educate my clients to do when they do start programmatic advertising is help us help you find a marketing mix modeling company that can help you see the full picture with views in the journey. Because Google doesn’t include views or impressions. But what programmatic is, is it’s highly targeted ads at the top and middle part of the marketing funnel. And what it allows advertisers to do is it allows advertisers to say, this is the demographic that I want to target, this is the customer Persona that I want to target. I don’t want to do spray and pray advertising anymore and waste a bunch of money. I really just want to focus in on my client, my ideal client, and find net new customers within that customer Persona. On tv, radio, podcasts, display native and video inventory. Okay, so let’s say that there’s, you know, a, a company where their target demographic is, you know, people who make over a million dollars because they’re looking for investors or something.

Matthew
Sure.

Jessica
That’s, that’s a very niche audience and you do not want to be serving ads to users who can’t invest. Right. If you’re an investment company, there’s no point in serving ads to like 90% of the population.

Matthew
Yeah. And all you’re going to be doing is wasting ad dollars.

Jessica
You’re just going to be wasting. And so what we, what programmatic does is it says, let’s just focus on your, your customer Persona, or we can also take anonymized data. We don’t see it, it’s hashed. Um, but we can take your customer data and we can create lookalike audiences off of it to find new users that look like that data. Or we can get people to repurchase. So it’s not only focused on net new users, but yeah, it’s really just highly, highly targeted marketing to your upper mid funnel so that you can grow your business, so you can gain market share and not just focus on the people who are searching for your brand navigationally.

Matthew
Absolutely. And this kind of brings to mind, um, something I heard a long time ago, I, that supposedly there’s some psychology behind this, that you basically have like three pegs in your mind for everything you’re trying to keep, uh, keep track of. So if you want to name three doctors, you could probably name three doctors, you probably couldn’t name a fourth. You can name three lawyers, three, you know, three of whatever the company is, three grocery stores you typically go to and have a hard time name. Like your mind keeps track of two to three of a category. And so when you’re talking, doing awareness and keeping people aware of your business and brand, that’s kind of trying to occupy one of those three spaces to make sure whenever they think about you or think about your product you’re in. There is kind of what I’m taking away from what you’ve essentially just laid out for us.

Jessica
Absolutely. It’s finding net new people that you wouldn’t have found if you were doing other types of marketing. And it also helps grow the bottom of the funnel, too. So we don’t recommend people turning on programmatic unless they’ve got paid search live. Because when somebody sees a connected tv ad on a smart tv, or they hear a podcast ad, they’re going to go do a related search or they’re going to go directly to the website. So you’re going to see a lift in SEO, paid search, direct traffic, as well as even sometimes social. Right. Because people may be on Facebook while they’re watching a tv ad, or, you know, they could be on any, any channel.

Matthew
That’s long been my argument against billboards with clients. I’ve worked in the attorney space and I’ve made an argument against that. You know, I’m like, well, whenever you’re in the car. Nobody’s looking out the car window anymore, you know, except for the driver. Everybody’s on their phone or watching tv, you know, like, or listening to a podcast, different things like that. They’re, they’re not really watching the billboards much, but the billboards have their place, like you said, for awareness that, you know, everybody knows those, the attorneys who have 100 billboards along the freeway. Everybody kind of has that beaten into their brain a little bit.

Jessica
And it’s just another touch point, right. And when you layer on more touch points, conversion rate increases. So whether it’s billboards or digital, out of home, you know, tvs in the airports or whatever it is, you know, it’s, it’s just another touch point that can put somebody overdem over the line to where they actually submit a lead or they actually, you know, make a purchase.

Matthew
See, I love that. The way you just said that was absolutely fantastic about the, the more touch points, the better the chance of closing the person. Yes, that, that actually takes me back to some sales training. I’ve done that. You know, most people try to make a sale on the first call and the first connection, and that usually doesn’t happen. It’s like 3% of all sales will close within the first call, 5% close within the first two to three, but like 80% of sales close between contact .5 and like twelve.

Jessica
Yeah, no, that it, you’re speaking exactly to marketing touch points, right?

Matthew
Yeah, I think they go hand in hand. You know, this, the, when I got sales training on it, it was focused around follow up and, you know, once somebody’s clicked on the ad, once somebody’s called you, you need to chase them five to twelve times. But I think it’s absolutely, I think marketing can automate and facilitate some of those touch points within a business organization and a sales organization to where the sales reps don’t have to do everything to maintain some of those touch points, right?

Jessica
No, you are speaking to it perfectly. I oftentimes describe it like a soccer team or a basketball team. And like, Google always gets credit for the goal or the, the shot.

Matthew
Google’s the Kobe Bryant, the Michael Jordan.

Jessica
Yeah, but like, what about all the other team players that helped, like the client actually get there? Right?

Matthew
I like that. That’s a great analogy.

Jessica
It takes quite a few touch points sometimes to get the user to actually purchase, especially if they’re a net new user. Like a lot of users that are like searching for you, they have to know about you from something. But if you’re finding a net new user. They have to be warmed up for a while across a couple of different touch points, whether it’s billboards or tv or, you know, social media or whatever, before they actually feel comfortable enough to say, okay, I’m going to go ahead and make a purchase with you or submit a lead to you. And it allows for a lot of education as well.

Matthew
Yeah, I’ve seen the funnel work in reverse, actually, too. Just I’ve worked in the legal space a lot, and a lot of times you get people who just go, Google search, criminal defense attorney, they’re not looking for anybody in specific, but once they’ve found you and talked to you, then they end up on your marketing and looking at your Facebook and your Google, my business profile and some of these other places, you know, like, they’ve had that first touch point. Okay. I kind of like this guy. Let me look into them and see what their record is. So I’ve seen the funnel actually work in reverse where you still need that marketing if you didn’t have it. Like, they may not come back around for that second phone call and try to actually close a deal.

Jessica
Yeah, yeah. And that’s retargeting is really important. You know, retargeting may go away with cookies going away.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
But there are some identifiers out there that can likely help with that. And we can kind of get into that when we talk about kind of the evolution of programmatic. But I also wanted to mention that billboards can be programmatic. Digital, out of home can be programmatic, which, like, they can even show ads and like, taxis and airports. And that’s programmatic as well. As well as retail media is on the rise. So retail media is for anybody that’s selling in a major retail big box store, like Target or Walmart, things like that. Walmart, Home Depot, there can be a lot of correlations done to say, like, is this advertising impacting in store sales? Uh, we can actually tie to the in store systems. Okay. Aspects now, from a programmatic perspective. And they actually have the ability to show, like, tv tvs in the stores. That’s kind of digital out of home inventory. Right. But you can kind of tie the impact back to the ads within stores as well. So retail media is kind of a big thing in the programmatic industry right now.

Matthew
Okay. Yeah, that rings a lot of bells for me. You know, I was recently working with a farmer who produces, like, salsas and Chipotle peppers, things like that. And a lot of their media that we were trying to drive was driven around getting people to go into the stores and make purchases, much more so than making an online purchase of this was, you know, calling out, hey, we’re now in these five stores in California where in this place, like, you know, go check us out at your local kroger, Walmart or whatever. It was a lot more geared towards actually making sales for their end user, which was the stores, much more so than, you know, trying to get individual customers to go to Amazon or their website, which was, it was a different model that I was, you know, it was new to me, and it was an interesting thing to explore.

Jessica
And Walmart has a lot of proprietary inventory for people who are running in their stores that want to do these type of campaigns. Like, they’ll run campaigns on their website as, like, display inventory and things like that. So if people are running in Walmart stores, they should be running on their website and in their app.

Matthew
Their app is huge for that now, because now they’re at Walmart’s moving into scan your stuff with the app and walk out. You don’t even have to check out anymore. Yeah, you’re literally on your phone, on the app looking at it. So, yeah, it’s gonna. That’s a killer place to advertise if you’re trying to get somebody that, you know, come buy something that you have there.

Jessica
Yep. I think retail media is going to become bigger in the programmatic industry. But the cool thing about programmatic is it captures your id at one time, and then it can serve you ads across mobile desktop, your smart tv, your podcasts. So it’s kind of touched on this.

Matthew
Before when you called it omnichannel, where.

Jessica
It was important to have an omni channel strategy, for sure. So when we run tv ads for people on a smart tv, we capture the people who are completing a view of the tv ad, and we serve them ads across video, display, native, various ad formats so that they see those regular touch points like you and I were talking about with the soccer team and the basketball team.

Matthew
Okay, so this. This also gets into some of those streaming. I haven’t personally messed with the streaming stuff, but I’ve seen, you know, like, Hulu ads and things like that. Yeah, perfect.

Jessica
So Hulu has their own platform, I think Disney plus now. But the cool thing about running with, like, a programmatic agency like ours is you don’t have to go to, like, Hulu and Roku and every single publisher and negotiate one off ad buys.

Matthew
Right.

Jessica
What we do, we have access to every app on a smart tv, every website on the open Internet and every app on a mobile device, every podcast. And so marketers used to call, like, random websites, like, New York Times.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
Can I get a placement on your website? And now it’s like, you don’t really need to do that. You just. And when you do that, honestly, it’s more expensive.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
Because New York Times is going to upsell you. They’ve got their own sales team and they’re going to be like, this is our minimum.

Matthew
And I’ve kind of made this argument. Even in the digital space, when people are like, oh, we need to boost a post. And I’m like, do not boost a post through the front end of Facebook. Like, it is. It is the one way. You will spend way more money. Facebook takes advantage of it, and you’re not going to get what you’re after.

Jessica
Their cpms are going up quite a bit.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
Um. Whereas in the programmatic industry, the cpms have remained pretty flat. I mean, they’ll go up a little bit during the holiday timeframe, more demand. But I can’t believe the cpms lately coming out of Facebook. Like, it blows my mind.

Matthew
It’s going up and up. And I think the algorithms and for people who don’t know what CPM is, this is. I. I kind of wrap my head around this probably about six months ago or so. Facebook does not charge in the same way that Google does. They give you the same statistics. And this is where I feel it’s a bit deceptive because they will give you a cost per click, but it’s a calculated value. They’re not actually charging you per click like Google does. Google shows your ad to as many people as it can, trying to get the clicks, but it charges you based on how many clicks you get. Facebook does the opposite, where it charges you per thousand views. And that was, like, a different way for me. That was a very different way of looking at this. And, like, I have to think about Facebook as a digital billboard, because that’s essentially what it is you’re paying for.

Jessica
Programmatic is similar.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
Programmatic media is bought on a CPM as well.

Matthew
Yeah. So that. That CPM is a different way of looking at it. And you have to be really careful not to get sucked into that bottom funnel, because it’s tempting. It’s tempting to get back into. Oh, well, they said this is the cost per click on Facebook. Why is my cost per click going up? It’s actually because your cost per. Your CPM is going up and your CPM is what’s driving everything else. So you need to optimize for.

Jessica
Remember, the thing to remember with CPM is it’s. It’s based on views, right?

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
It’s not really a click based metric. And this is why the Google Analytics thing doesn’t really work with those type of campaigns, because it doesn’t track views, but views generate awareness.

Matthew
Right.

Jessica
They’re still important. And so it’s kind of.

Matthew
I would agree. They’re very important. Um, and one of the things I found when looking at, you know, how do I optimize CPM? Is content getting stale? Yes.

Jessica
Oh, yes. You have to refresh your creative regularly.

Matthew
Correct. And you don’t really have to do that on a PPC ad. Like, you know, I’ve. I ran the same PPC ads without the cost per click. Going up with a client for six months or a year longer. Cause it’s really only, you know, especially if you’re doing lead based. So, like, let’s say an attorney. The person’s only looking for an attorney when they need the attorney right then and there. So it’s not like they’ve seen a ton of attorney ads floating around. They’re. They’re only seeing the ad pop up on Google, which is very different than Facebook. Facebook will serve it. And this is. I was actually having a conversation, uh, two nights ago with a client about this, that, uh. Cause they were. They were utilizing another company that had some credit with to do some Facebook meta ads. And the data we were getting back was all the impressions. And the one number I wasn’t getting back from the company that we’re supposed to get back now is the reach. Because I was trying to explain to them there is a difference between reach and impressions, because we may see that the reach really isn’t changing, but the impressions shows that Facebook’s serving the same ad over and over and over, and we’re not getting clicks because of that.

Jessica
Yeah, frequency capping is very important, and there are a lot of companies that will just let the frequency go. Like Hulu, for example. Think of Hulu. You see the same ad over and over and over and over.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
That means that they’re not frequency capping. So we typically say to show, like, one ad a day, and then on our campaigns, we will typically put a viewability layer on as well, which is why we’re called getabovethefold.com. we want to be shown above the fold on a lot of websites, and it’s called ability metric. And you can.

Matthew
That makes sense.

Jessica
It definitely limits your reach. Right. But it makes sure that you’re showing in really key areas on websites and apps and just making sure that, yeah, you’re layering on frequency capping because it can get out of control how many ads are being served to people. And you can waste a lot of ad spend.

Matthew
And this is the same within the PPC, especially on meta. You know, I typically do not allow automatic posting within meta when I’m running those ads. I want to get in and control it because there’s certain places that you’re just wasting ad spend on. If you’re advertising in the right hand column on Facebook, you’re probably wasting your money. If you’re, you know, if you’re doing skippable ads, you’re probably wasting money because everybody’s going to hit skip 5 seconds in. So it’s things like that where I agree with you, you definitely want to try to control some of where you appear. It’s going to diminish how many views you get. But you’re also going to be trying to get some of that quality. Yeah, more quality, higher intent, which is great. I think I’ve got a better handle on kind of what you’re doing. So I’d like to get into some of, like, the key components. Like, how does this actually work? Let’s say somebody comes to work with you. Like, what platforms? How are you designing this out? Yeah, yeah.

Jessica
I think we can kind of get into this, like, with the evolution and growth of programmatic because it really started in the early two thousands and it was really just like, okay, this is automated systems buying and selling ad space, right?

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
And then in 2009, when I really started getting into programmatic advertising, real time bidding was invented.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
That, that enables advertisers to bid on impressions in real time and based on user data, which is why programmatic has to be on a CPM basis, is because we’re truly bidding on impressions across the entire open Internet and every app there is.

Matthew
So explain that to me. Real time versus not doing it. Real time. Can you explain that to me? What does that mean?

Jessica
That means that at any given moment, multiple advertisers can bid on a single impression of publisher inventory. So the goal is to win the ad, right. With the highest bid. So if you think about it, it’s kind of like the stock market. The goal is to put the right price in to win the key users. Right. So if I’m trying to win a user that makes over a million dollars a year, and I’m trying to win the impression for investors, I need to make sure that I’m bidding with the right price for that key user on, on various publisher websites. Does that make sense?

Matthew
It does. It kind of actually took me back to my own explanation of PPC advertising to somebody once when I was trying to explain to them some of the metrics of like top of page rate, some of these other things where essentially, and this is the weird part I think about advertising is a lot of people think, oh, I put out this much money, I get this much impressions or this much clicks back, it’s really hard to sometimes think about it, that it is an auction environment. You are all like all these companies because you are technically a product of the platforms you’re advertising on, even though you’re like, well, I’m a customer and I’m serving them. You’re not their actual customer. In a weird way, you are a customer, but you are a product of Google, a product of Yelp, of Facebook, of whoever you’re advertising on, and they’re actually serving you to their customers.

Jessica
Yes.

Matthew
And so you’re, you’re trying to bid to be in that place. So when, you know, I’m telling somebody, well, your top of page rates 14%. That means that, you know, for every time somebody does a search, one out of eight times you’re going to be in that top slot because the other eight times somebody else is going to be there.

Jessica
Yeah.

Matthew
And, you know, it’s, it is a weird thing to wrap your head around because it’s, it’s a very complex environment, I think.

Jessica
Well, and you also just don’t want to be like that person that’s like, well, I don’t want to pay a high CPM. It’s like, well, you want to pay like, the right CPM to get the right.

Matthew
You want to be high enough.

Jessica
Yeah, but you don’t want to be too high. But you don’t want to be too low because there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of competition. And so you want to make sure that it is complex in the sense that you want to make sure that you’re showing the right amount of ads to the right user at the right time.

Matthew
This takes me back to manually bidding on PPC ad clicks. Yeah. And looking at like, okay, well, what’s the average top of page bid? And manually adjusting for that? But if you didn’t pay attention to that and all of a sudden the rate dropped, you could be paying 2030 $40 above what everybody else was paying because you were doing manual bidding on everything.

Jessica
Yeah.

Matthew
And that makes a big, big difference.

Jessica
Yeah. And, I mean, AI has helped a lot with that in the past few years. Like, everybody’s like, got the AI buzzword or whatever lately, but programmatic has been using AI for like, nine or ten years. Um, but it’s even so much so that now some of the, the demand side platforms, the dsps are saying, like, AI is not making the best decisions all the time. Like, yeah. Really need a human to guide these decisions because we’ve done all this analysis on AI, and it doesn’t really know how to make the best decision.

Matthew
Sometimes it, it does one thing really good, and if it gets outside of that, it can’t handle it.

Jessica
Yeah. So AI kind of scares me a little bit because I feel like it’s just everybody’s like, oh, it’s smarter than humans, but it’s, it really needs a human to guide it.

Matthew
Right. It’s, I think it’s faster than people and, you know. Cause somebody else could probably do the same analysis. But it’s still one of those things that AI still does need to be guided. It does need to be analyzed and understood. We don’t have general intelligence AI at this point. If that ever happens, that might be a different story. But right now, AI is very selective and it’s only as good as what it was programmed and built to do.

Jessica
Exactly. Yeah.

Matthew
So you brought up a term that I’m curious about, which is the dsps. You know, what is the difference between a DSP and SSP? Like, you break that down for me.

Jessica
Yes. And you are not the only one that does not know this. Like, I run into marketers, like very seasoned marketers all the time that do not know the difference between. I’m going to go into, like, DSP, SSP, ad exchange, and DMP.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
So this is so, okay. They all kind of work together. But I’ll start on the supply side just because we’ve kind of talked about that a lot already.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
The supply side would be like what I used to work with on the affiliate side of the business. Right. So anybody that’s really generating content. So some really big publishers that you would know of are like Fox News and CNN and any news organization. Right. So they’re creating content on their website and they’re trying to monetize that content because newspapers won’t exist and news platforms won’t exist without advertising.

Matthew
Correct.

Jessica
Just how it works. So a supply side platform allows a publisher like that to come in and sell digital advertising on their website. Then what a demand site. Well, then there’s an ad exchange. So an ad exchange is a place where advertisers and publishers can buy advertising space. A demand side platform takes all the supply side platforms and all the ad exchanges, and it puts it in one place so that clients and agencies can buy from multiple ad exchanges, multiple supply platforms. And then within the DSP is a data management platform, which is really largely just a bunch of aggregated data.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
Is separated into like different segments. So let’s say people who make over $100,000 or whatever. So it’ll, there’s a lot of different data companies like Oracle and XL eight and things like that, and credit card companies. And they take all this data, they aggregate it, and then they put it into different segments that you can target. So that would like income level or in market for this thing. Or they’ve like purchased something. They purchased something for a baby in the last 90 days. So they’re in market for baby stuff right now.

Matthew
Sure.

Jessica
So that’s what a demand or that’s what a data management platform is, a DMP and you can access in the dsps.

Matthew
So if I’m following you here, the SSP’s are the individual advertisers or individual platforms, let’s say Hulu, like you said, CNN, Fox, some of these places. And then the DSP or the demand side is something that allows you access to all them because we talked about this, where you could go on to Hulu’s ad platform and Google and Facebook, and you’re individually managing all of these where it sounds like a DSP is what allows you to manage all of them at once.

Jessica
Yes. Although it doesn’t allow you to manage Google and Facebook because they’re walled gardens.

Matthew
Of course.

Jessica
Garden. Facebook is a walled garden. LinkedIn is a walled garden.

Matthew
But within your space of these other platforms, it kind of allows you access.

Jessica
Yes. So most publishers and most websites are not walled gardens.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
But like most inner, most website on websites on the open Internet are not walled gardens.

Matthew
Correct.

Jessica
But those particular ones, you can’t manage within a DSP because they have their own management systems.

Matthew
Yeah, they. And some of them are terrible. I have my feelings about some of them, for sure. Facebook in particular.

Jessica
Yeah.

Matthew
And so then the data management allows you access to look at the data and understand, you know who you’re going after.

Jessica
Yeah. And allows you to do real time bidding within the platform on key users. So it, it’s kind of like a, like an e trade if you can think about it. But it’s like bidding on impressions instead of stocks.

Matthew
Okay, interesting. Yeah. This is a different world for me. You know, I do come from a strong background in PPC advertising and the Facebook and meta and that, and that side of the world, but this is a different world to kind of think about. It seems even more technical than I’ve always thought PPC was.

Jessica
This is, it is extremely technical. And I think worlds are colliding a little bit with all the privacy things going on. Like Google’s going to be phasing out third party cookies, supposedly this year, but this has been going on for a while now.

Matthew
I’ve seen a couple of things with that. There’s certain retargeting trends that I used to do that lately have been having issues, or your campaign gets flagged is violating some term that wasn’t there before. Like, it seems like there’s some changes moving.

Jessica
I think they rolled it out to like 1% of the population in January or something. So I think they’re definitely doing testing and they’re definitely being held accountable to making things more privacy focused.

Matthew
Apple’s known for this too, that the Apple privacy features were a massive impact on marketers.

Jessica
Absolutely. And Europe also.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
Europe and California have lamented a lot of privacy restrictions. And I really do feel like this is something that all online marketing is going to be facing in the future. But one of the dsPs, the trade desk, they came out with their own identifier in about 2018. I think they foresaw the cookies going away and things like that. So what they do, and Google within their privacy sandbox, I think maybe coming, I don’t know if they’re going to come out with their own id or not, but, um, I think they’re just trying to find a solution for cookies. Yeah, the trade does came out with something called the unified id 2.0, um, out in 2018. And it’s, it’s not something that only the trade desk is leading. Like, they made it, they made it its own thing for a reason, because I think that they saw that Google, like, built Google Analytics around Google and like, it’s a conflict of interest. Right. So it’s like completely open source unified id 2.0. And what it does is it leverages encrypted email and phone number data and it creates a unique identifier for people. It’s kind of like a cookie, right. But a cookie is triggered in a different way than that. Okay, but what, they’ve partnered with a bunch of publishers and data providers like ad brain and Liveramp and Oracle and tap add. So that they can create this new id.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
And 3.1 billion devices on it so far.

Matthew
It’s a good data set.

Jessica
Yeah. Extremely awesome.

Matthew
Okay. That makes a lot of sense.

Jessica
I think that that stat has actually doubled in the last year to probably 6.2 billion devices.

Matthew
Wow, that’s really, really interesting. And I know there’s a lot of politics around tracking and data, data usage. I mean, we’re headed into an election year. There’s going to be a lot more that comes out about that, just like there always is. But it is interesting.

Jessica
It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Google and with all online advertising, honestly.

Matthew
Yeah, it’s going to be really, the world of advertising is constantly changing. And this is something I think some people don’t always realize is for somebody to be really good at this, you have to chase it constantly. It’s, it’s like a really big deal. It’s, it’s. The algorithms change daily. Sometimes there’s updates that come out, like, just to read all the updates that come out from Google and meta that come into your inbox. Like, that’s hours of work. Just to keep track of that.

Jessica
Yeah. Try to keep track of what Google’s doing with their privacy sandbox. Like, what are they doing?

Matthew
I would love to know exactly, but.

Jessica
It’S cool, it’s cool that companies like the trade desk are coming up with a solution for it and that they’ve been working on it for like, I mean, six years now. So I don’t think that, like, we should be super worried. I think there’s still going to be a lot of targeting available. I don’t know if site retargeting is going to be what it once was, but I think that’s more of a reason why clients really need to make sure that they have a solution for first party data. Yeah, because, like, we can take first party data, we can upload it into the platform, we can create lookalike audiences off of it, we can retarget it. So it’s really important for advertisers to have a solution to, like, have their first party data in a place where they can use it for their marketing in the future. And I think that that’s become kind of a rude awakening recently.

Matthew
I would definitely agree with that. So let’s say a company wants to do this. What is interested in getting into programmatic media? This has intrigued me. What are they looking at? What are the steps if they’re trying to get into this? What kind of a base budget do they need because I’m sure there’s people like mom and pop shops are probably going to have a hard time doing something like this. Like you said, if they’re not running PPC ads right now, it doesn’t make sense. What actually do they need to have in place? What kind of budgets and revenues typically is like a minimum? Like what, what is the best use case for programmatic media?

Jessica
Well, we don’t, in general, we don’t recommend that people get into programmatic media unless they can spend at least 10,000 in overall marketing.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
And we recommend that they at least have Google on, like I said, because if we’re, if we’re showing a tv ad, somebody’s going to go do a search.

Matthew
Right.

Jessica
They’re going to go directly to the site or they’re going to do a search.

Matthew
Correct.

Jessica
So it’s helpful if they have a good SEO strategy because they could convert through SEO or paid search. However, there have been some cases where clients have come to us and they have no base of a website and they’re just a startup. And we’ve taken clients from zero revenue to profitability and even finding investors with programmatic advertising, which does make sense because.

Matthew
Like you said, you’re doing the top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, and that stuff still filters down to the bottom of the funnel at some point. So that that is still a good place to start.

Jessica
Yeah. And this particular client had really important, like, geo element to it where they really needed to focus on certain geos that would help them grow their business.

Matthew
Okay. Okay.

Jessica
Like, like you were able to focus their ad spend on certain geo fences.

Matthew
Right. Right.

Jessica
That were really, really important for their growth.

Matthew
And that’s been an interesting, geofencing has been an interesting development in the last few years.

Jessica
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know how long it’s going to be allowed due to privacy issues.

Matthew
I mean, for a while there, you could get down to really, really nitty gritty, you know, as like a law firm. You could really tighten down to like, okay, I want to be really tight around like courthouse and pick up all the ip addresses going through the courthouse because that’s, that’s an obvious, those are going to be your clients.

Jessica
You still can do that. Yeah, for now.

Matthew
For now. We’ll see how long it lasts. But while it’s going, we’re riding the party train.

Jessica
You can still literally draw like a shape around a courthouse and only serve those people. Tv ads, podcast ads, display ads. But with that being said, the reach on that is going to be really low.

Matthew
It’s very tiny. Yes.

Jessica
Amount of people that go into the courthouse, but you can do it.

Matthew
Right. So, no. Okay. So I think that’s a really good use case where, you know, you guys can start with really anybody as long as they kind of hit that need. Because there is a, what do you call critical mass in advertising spend that you really have to spend a certain amount to get the right amount of data, right amount of numbers and stuff out to be able to make changes.

Jessica
Yeah. And it takes time to ramp up. Like that client that we took from zero revenue to profitability, that took like six months to a year for them to get an investor. But they were patient and, you know, that was really their goal. Their goal was to get an investor. So everybody has a unique goal, you know?

Matthew
Correct. And the high level of the funnel needs to have that understanding. You know, I’ve, I’ve broken that down for clients before. I’m like, look, Google Ads, paid ads, you, it’s pay to play, so you are going to have to have a budget for it. But it is the short term, low hanging fruit. You know, if you’re doing a click to call ad, you spend x amount of money, you got x amount of calls. It’s, it’s very straightforward. Where SEO, this programmatic media, social media content, those things actually do work, but they take months and years. You know, if you’re trying to get ranked number one on SEO, depending on your market and what you’re going after, that can take years of fighting to get to that spot. Once you’re there, it’s highly valuable, but.

Jessica
You should see an impact from programmatic media on month three. But it does take some time to ramp up because sometimes these are brand new users. And extending the amount of touch points that are needed to convert by adding in upper funnel and mid funnel elements. Sure, you’re going out and you’re reaching these net new users, they need more warming up, they need more time. Therefore, our campaigns need more time to show value. And I always recommend that the client looks at like a baseline value before they started running us. And then they look at like month one, two and three and say, like, what did my CRM inputs look like? Or sales after running with you for three months? Like, you should know.

Matthew
Absolutely, I 100% agree with that. And I’m not trying to discourage anybody from doing it. You know, it takes time. No, it’s, it’s worth it. You have to, you can’t play just a short game. You have to play both the long and the short game, if you really want to grow, because I think the long game is actually more beneficial. So this stuff you’re talking about with programmatic media, SEO, some of these things, once you get to where that’s working really well, the value of that, like you were talking about that base cost after those few months, once you’ve kind of sat it out and worked through it, it should be getting better and you’re actually doing much better than you were before. I know one of my previous clients, I worked with them for a long time, just putting in a little bit of SEO every week, not a ton, but consistently doing it. And I’ve been away from them for eight months now, and they’re still in the number two spot for one of their services.

Jessica
Yeah.

Matthew
And I’m like, that value of that, they don’t have to run ads anymore and they actually haven’t been running ads in that area. And they’re still getting clients, still getting revenue, because when somebody goes and looks for it, they’re in that number two, number one spot and holding that position, and they’ve held it for eight months with nobody maintaining it. There’s nobody in there right now continuously pushing the SEO. So I think you’re right that there’s a value to programmatic media.

Jessica
There’s also so much to test. Yeah, right.

Matthew
That’s a big part of it, too. Those first few months, there’s a lot of testing, a lot of, you know, what works, what doesn’t, especially new users.

Jessica
Well, and you don’t want to jump around too fast because, like, I think marketers are really trained to have this one to one roi in like 5 seconds.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
With programmatic media, it’s like, if you’re going to test connected tv, which is smart tv, you should keep that on for like, three months and see, like, impacts. And then it’s like, well, what if I want to test programmatic podcasts? Well, then you should take another three months and test that.

Matthew
Yep.

Jessica
Like, probably. I wouldn’t probably test them all in at one time. Like, you can and you can see an even bigger impact, but if you want to see them each siloed, then you’re going to have to take some time to do some testing that makes sense.

Matthew
And it does, you know, when you’re talking about doing the testing and things like that, that really, that goes to something I believe in, that you really should be doing that. Um, and it is a business strategy. If you really think about it, instead of going after that one to one ROI right away, think about companies like Uber, who, and Amazon, who lost money for years before they got profitable, that they, they were building that base knowing eventually this will be profitable. Or, you know, I think about the loss leader that people do in marketing and sales, where we’re going to sell something at a loss because now we’ve got you as a customer, now we have your data. Now we can remarket to you and upsell you to these better things that are actually going to make us money. So were actually going to take a little bit of a loss here on the anticipation that its going to get better. Youre going to figure out some data.

Jessica
Yeah. And we also just want people to think about, like, are they putting too much money at the bottom of the funnel, too? Or could they spend some of that at the top of the funnel to generate awareness and, you know, end up growing their company with the same amount of ad spend?

Matthew
Right, exactly. There’s a total element to that. Because if people have that awareness of you, and like you said, you know, if they’re typically, if they see a tv ad, they’re going to do a Google search. So you, I would make an argument. You do need some SEO. You do need some, some stuff so that when they do the Google search, they find you. Because if they do the Google search and only find your competitors, you have a problem.

Jessica
Right.

Matthew
And I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten cease and desist letters for this from other people before and other competitors because we showed up ahead of them for their own name.

Jessica
Yep. And the client, 1800 contacts.

Matthew
Oh, yeah, you get that nice cease and desist letter. You’re using our name on your PPC ads. And I’m like, no, we’re not. And the, the client will be like, are you doing this? I said, no, we’re just better at this than they are. And so Google’s recognizing us as a leader in this industry. And so when somebody searches their name, Google ties their name to the product and we come up for the product, so we’re actually listing higher than them, and they’re just pissed we didn’t do anything wrong.

Jessica
One cool thing you can do within programmatic is you can actually, when somebody searches for a competitor’s name, you can show a tv ad, a programmatic podcast ad, a display native video without them even knowing. Yeah, we’re reading about competitors names. Or if they search, you can actually show programmatic ads or listens without the competitors even knowing.

Matthew
And I kind of did this a while and, and this is one of those tricks that I feel like, is going away a little bit, or. I’ve certainly had issues with it more recently within, you know, this is still within the PPC platform, but doing display ads and the retargeting is other people’s websites.

Jessica
Yeah.

Matthew
So doing that, and I’ve. I’ve had issues with this is why I’m thinking, you know, when you’re talking the cookies and some of these privacy issues, I think some of that’s changing, but it’s been a great tool to raise awareness and the cost per click is pennies on the dollar, but, yeah.

Jessica
With most DSP platforms, they won’t allow you to do that.

Matthew
Yeah. Unless Google’s starting to have issues with it.

Jessica
Unless you get permission to get pixels on those websites. Yeah, but you can go around that by saying, well, when somebody’s reading about this competitive name or term or I. When they’re searching for it actively, I want to show a display ad or a native ad or a tv ad to them.

Matthew
Yeah. And I don’t think Google allows you specifically, like, the individual sites. Typically what it’s doing is it’s saying these types of sites and it allows you to put in your competitor sites, but Google’s just categorizing it as, okay, you know, if you’re a car dealership and you put in anybody who goes to the Ford or the Mitsubishi or the Nissan, you know, I want to show them my Toyota dealership like ads, but you’re putting in these people. So I think it is very similar. But I have noticed Google’s starting to have an issue with it. So programmatic media might be the way to go to get around that. Like you said, sometimes rules change. We have to find ways around it.

Jessica
Yeah. So there’s a lot of sensitive categories in Google, like, you know, health related categories, cannabis categories, weapons and programmatic is really good for. For those sensitive categories. If you have no other way to advertise, that’s.

Matthew
That’s really good. Good to know because there are certain ones. You know, I’ve had plenty of people that come to me or, you know, I bumped into cannabis companies, CBD companies, and they really have a hard time advertising because Google and Facebook won’t allow them.

Jessica
The only company that I’ve had an issue advertising is for Kratom, because it’s just like, straight up, not regulated.

Matthew
Yeah.

Jessica
Like, even the dsps won’t allow you to advertise that. But for most sensitive categories on Google, we’ve been able to advertise for them.

Matthew
That’s actually really good to know. And it’s even helpful for a marketer like me, because if I bump into somebody like that, I’m going to make that they’re, you know, they’re in that industry. I can now make a recommendation to somebody like you, look, we need to employ this. This is how you’re going to be able to actually get some traction, get some money going, because the other way, like, the other way people have tried to do it is they’ve tried to get around Google and if you get busted doing that, you’re done.

Jessica
Yeah. Like, they turn you off forever.

Matthew
They turn you off forever. It’s iP. Like, they ban you in ways that it’s not even funny.

Jessica
Yeah. We partner with a lot of different, like, paid search agencies and SEO agencies just to layer on top of what they’re doing to. And a lot of times we’ll even have like a joint call as joint partners just so that we can help with like the top, mid part of the funnel and, and they can still help with the bottom of the funnel.

Matthew
Awesome. So where do you feel like programmatic media is going? Like, what’s, what’s future trends? What’s something coming out that’s kind of exciting that you’re like, okay, this is going to be the next big thing.

Jessica
Yeah. I mean, I think retail media, like I talked about is going to be really big.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
I think more and more people will want to do, like, premium placements on, you know, certain publisher websites. I do think, like, hot topics in the future are going to be related around privacy, just, you know, Google going away and what is the solution for that? And so I think the trade desk has an awesome solution in terms of what their id does, their unified ID 2.0.

Matthew
Okay.

Jessica
And I think a lot of clients are really going to need to focus on first party data and making sure that they have like, a really good seed audience to build their advertising off of because I think, I think that’s kind of the future of programmatic advertising, is just really capitalizing on that first party data, but that’s really reliant on the customer, the client, capturing that data and making it targetable to agencies and dsps and things like that.

Matthew
Sure.

Jessica
So I think a big focus on just these solutions related to cookies are going to be really top of mind in the coming years as well.

Matthew
Awesome. Jessica, I appreciate you having, having come on today. I’ve learned so much out of this. I feel like I got a better understanding what it is and how it can be effective as a strategy. I definitely could see it becoming a part of, you know, even the business I’m doing and the customers I work with in the future. I think this is really important for marketers to understand and business owners like the impacts of what you’re doing, especially at that top of funnel. And this is something that goes back to, you know, for me goes back to sales analytics and CRMs. And this is why I keep track of data within like a salesman even. And I love how much sales and marketing kind of cross principles. You know, you should be keeping track of your funnel as a marketer and as a salesperson because you may find you have too many people in the top of your funnel that arent getting through. So you got the wrong people in the top of your funnel. Or you may find out, hey, were getting really good at, you know, anybody who gets down to the bottom of the funnel, they convert really well, but we’re not getting enough, which really means your top of funnel isn’t big enough. And that’s where somebody like you comes in that can make that top of funnel bigger, that can open up avenues that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Jessica
Yeah. And just gain that market share.

Matthew
Yeah, 100%. So I really, really appreciate that. Jessica, where can people find you if they’re looking to, if they’re looking to get into this or explore it or want to get a consult with you, where can they find you? Your company? How do they get ahold of you?

Jessica
So I’m [email protected]. as well as I’m pretty active on LinkedIn under Jessica Chase, comma, MBA. And then we have a fun TikTok channel called programmatic ads. Okay, probably the best way is just on the [email protected].

Matthew
Dot awesome. And I will say people should go follow you on LinkedIn. You do great content over there. I came across one of the other posts the other night and it was, it’s meaningful and impactful. It was actually something I was reading that was, I think it was your one about, you know, when life derails you from what you think it’s supposed to be. And it was a meaningful, that post. I just want to say that post was meaningful to me because it was actually something I was going through myself at the moment. So to actually read, you know, your experience with it was like, okay, this is great. And we’ve had a LinkedIn expert on here in one of our previous episodes. So LinkedIn is definitely something I’m trying to encourage people to utilize more. So I definitely want people to go find you there, you know, go get on. Getabovethefold.com dot. I really think you, you are going to be a really big help to a lot of, a lot of agencies and a lot of companies. So we want to send as much business as we can your way.

Jessica
Oh, thank you so much. I think. I think the future for programmatic advertising is bright. And, I mean, I think it’s, it’s headed in a really exciting direction. So just looking the helping people, for sure.

Matthew
100%. I agree. I mean, this, when you’re telling me all this stuff, I’m like, this is the stuff I think most businesses struggle with is this front level, like, and marketers do. I know, you know, from my experience, it’s so much easier to default back into Google Ads and Google Analytics and PPC, and I think most people do because it’s easier to wrap your head around. But what you’re doing supports you. Yeah. And so you can do this. You can do this side of it that most people struggle with, which makes you highly, highly valuable. So I really appreciate you being on this podcast today. This was absolutely a great show.

Jessica
Thank you for having me. It was really fun.

Matthew
Awesome. All right, guys, if you need anything, please get a hold of Jessica and please continue to watch, like, and subscribe. Share this with anybody you think could use this information, and we’ll see you all next time.