Ron Amram has been in the brand marketing business for about 20 years. In the 2000s he was media director for Sprint’s prepaid cellular group, mainly figuring out where the carrier should spend its ad dollars—print, outdoor, digital, or broadcast. TV was always at the top of the pyramid. A TV campaign was like “the Air Force,” Amram says. “You wanted to get your message out, you did carpet bombing.” But TV wasn’t cheap, nor did it solve “that age-old question: Half of my marketing is working, half of it is not, and I don’t know which half.”
About 10 years ago, not long after Google went public and Yahoo! was still worth upward of $50 billion, attitudes shifted. Digital search and display ads had the potential to reach TV-size audiences at a fraction of the price. “People thought it was going to change everything,” Amram says.
The euphoria escalated again around 2010 with the arrival of programmatic advertising, a typically banal industry term for what is, essentially, automation. The ideal programmatic transaction works like this: A user clicks on a website and suddenly her Internet address and browsing history are packaged and whisked off to an auction site, where software, on behalf of advertisers, scrutinizes her profile (or an anonymized version of it) and determines whether to bid to place an ad next to that article. Ford Motor could pay to put its ads on websites for car buffs, or, with the help of cookies, track car buffs wherever they may be online. Ford might want to target males age 25-40 for pickup-truck ads, or, better yet, anybody in that age group who’s even read about pickups in the past six months.
This story is from the September 28 - October 4, 2015 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the September 28 - October 4, 2015 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Instagram's Founders Say It's Time for a New Social App
The rise of AI and the fall of Twitter could create opportunities for upstarts
Running in Circles
A subscription running shoe program aims to fight footwear waste
What I Learned Working at a Hawaiien Mega-Resort
Nine wild secrets from the staff at Turtle Bay, who have to manage everyone from haughty honeymooners to go-go-dancing golfers.
How Noma Will Blossom In Kyoto
The best restaurant in the world just began its second pop-up in Japan. Here's what's cooking
The Last-Mover Problem
A startup called Sennder is trying to bring an extremely tech-resistant industry into the age of apps
Tick Tock, TikTok
The US thinks the Chinese-owned social media app is a major national security risk. TikTok is running out of ways to avoid a ban
Cleaner Clothing Dye, Made From Bacteria
A UK company produces colors with less water than conventional methods and no toxic chemicals
Pumping Heat in Hamburg
The German port city plans to store hot water underground and bring it up to heat homes in the winter
Sustainability: Calamari's Climate Edge
Squid's ability to flourish in warmer waters makes it fitting for a diet for the changing environment
New Money, New Problems
In Naples, an influx of wealthy is displacing out-of-towners lower-income workers
