Successful advertising is a joint venture

High-quality advertising helps users and yields profit. It secures a harmonious user experience, and audiences will be less prone to block advertising. This benefits users, advertisers, and the media. But how can we secure high-quality advertising?

High-quality advertising is based on high-quality content. For example, the DNA telecommunications corporation has a long history of trusting a content strategy with a focus on corporate decision makers, says Elina Mansner, DNA’s marketing director. Another example is the Finnish gaming company, Veikkaus; according to Suvituuli Tuukkanen, Veikkaus’s vice president for brand, marketing & customer loyalty, the company bases its campaigns on extensive research and tests its concepts on consumers in advance.

“Of course, we work with excellent partners for content production. The best knowledge and skills both inside and outside the company is what we always look for,” Tuukkanen adds.

High-quality digital advertising requires profound understanding of the customers and their behaviours: advertisers want to reach their exact target group in exactly the right place and exactly the right time. This is a challenge for the advertising media.

“Targeting is increasingly important to us. The more accurate and targeted data we have about the target groups, the better. For example, knowing that we will reach corporate decision makers through a certain medium is not enough for us. What we want is to reach the target group that decides on a specific matter, in a specific time frame,” Mansner says.

Successful targeting is a result of close cooperation between the advertiser and the media. It should not make the users anxious; instead, it should make them feel they have the best possible service in the various phases of the purchasing process.

“We should be able to take advantage of combined data. We don’t want to show the users the same advertising they saw before the purchase. Instead, we should be able to show them something new that is related to the purchase.  For example, no ads for flights when the user has already bought the flight tickets, but ads for car rentals and so on. This is achieved by combining the customer’s data, the media’s data, and technology,” Alma Media’s Senior Vice President for Media Sales and Marketing Tiina Järvilehto says.

Viewability for adverts

In addition to content and targeting, high-quality advertising involves viewability for the advertising content in the target group’s feed. Viewability is also a result of group work. The advertiser with relevant partners can, for example, ensure that the advert sizes are within the kilobyte limits. The media, for its part, can influence viewability through positioning and the number of advertising spaces, site structure, and distribution technology.

“An important feature of programmatic advertising is the distribution chain; in other words, the number of different systems the ad passes through. A number of problems can be avoided by securing the distribution chain and optimising the purchases through viewability and advertising on high-quality sites,” Järvilehto continues.

For the marketing profession, high-quality advertising requires more knowledge about computerised data and a comprehensive understanding of digital marketing.

“Computerised data is our friend, and technology helps us to do our jobs well,” Mansner says.

Increasing knowledge of computerised data and its uses is, ideally, also a result of close collaboration. Open and transparent sharing of knowledge and experiences benefits all parties.

“At Alma Media, we want to educate the advertisers about data-driven advertising and programmatic purchasing regularly. However, the whole industry is in the initial stages of learning how to take proper advantage of computerised data. We continue to see enormous technological advances that keep providing us with more and more developed solutions. That is why we, at Alma Media, focus on investing in data know-how and advanced use of technology,” Järvilehto ends.

Share article