Author: Ka Mo Lau

People-first marketing is both an approach and a set of marketing strategies that focus on personalizing customer touchpoints across channels to drive engagement and maximize campaign performance.

The proliferation of digital channels, devices, and platforms have led to a vast shift in consumer behavior and expectations. Gone are the days where advertisers can mass send out generic marketing messages aimed at everyone–which in reality, cater to no one.

Consumers have gained more control over their own journey to purchase, which means brands and advertisers need to do a better job of identifying and reaching the right audience at the right moment. Understanding who your specific target audiences are, as well as their needs, wants, and pain points help put each customer at the forefront of your marketing strategy.

Targeting the right audience, however, is just one part of the equation.

Executing a people-first strategy also means understanding how to capture your audience’s attention with the right message. To activate the $6 billion dollars spent on targeting technologies like DSPs and DMPs, brands and advertisers need to focus on delivering a personalized message that captures their audience’s attention at the right time in their customer journey. Delivering a personalized creative is key to truly engaging consumers, instead of just marketing to them.

The main concepts of advertising have been around for over a century, but the emergence of programmatic creative and the creative management platform (CMP) is a phenomenon that is much newer.

A number of companies have seen incredible results from creative management platforms, including Anheuser-Busch, the biggest brewer in the world, and Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG), the second-biggest hospitality company in the world.

Programmatic creative technologies combine well with programmatic buying, data management platforms (DMPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs). In this ad tech stack arrangement, the CMP is the creative arm of a data-driven campaign strategy.

We’re going to explore seven ingredients that can make up the perfect creative management platform that aligns with your programmatic creative strategy. If you’re still learning about what a CMP is, check out the video below before you review the list.

As a CMP vendor, we have participated in many requests for proposals (RFPs) for Creative Management Platforms (CMPs). The same goes for dynamic creative and programmatic creative. But we still often hear from organizations that don’t have an RFP or RFI template for a CMP.

At this year’s Digiday Programmatic Summit, participants were asked to jot down their greatest challenges in programmatic advertising. The response was enlightening.

Here’s the breakdown of top programmatic challenges:

• Telling the difference between vendors (30%)
• Reconciling creative and programmatic (30%)
• Time required to improve campaign performance vs. client’s budget (10%)
• Cracking data budget (10%)
• Duplication of audiences (10%)
• Managing campaign cost (5%)
• Terminology discrepancies between digital and TV departments (5%)

Normally on this blog we try to not talk too much about Thunder. But today I’d like to address these challenges, and show you how Thunder is working everyday to help you overcome them.