During a previous conversation with Tejinder Gill, General Manager, India of The Trade Desk, the industry veteran was ruing the fact that India still had a long way to go to catch up with other world markets when it came to the latest developments in programmatic ad buying, though his evangelizing of Decisioning, as well as efforts by other experts, is changing the status quo.

According to Gill, in India, most people traditionally associate programmatic with moving away from the standard manual insertion order process to direct negotiation between the buyer and seller, wherein the buyer and seller decide on the price of an impression.

What is Decisioning?

Decisioning is a set of processes that help advertisers hyper-personalise customer experiences so that they can reach them with crucial messaging at the best time through the best channels.

Data by McKinsey has shown that this level of personalization can deliver up to 5-8 times the ROI on marketing spend, and lift sales by 10%.

Ashish Duggal, COO of digital agency Chimp&z Inc points out that while programmatic advertising is on the rise in India, it has been observed that brands lack the knowledge of the decisioning model.

“With the decisioning approach, brands have greater control over the filters they select to target their ideal audience. While both programmatic and decisioning are effective, the brand strategies sought in each situation differ. Programmatic is a short-term solution while decisioning is a long-term strategy that adds a human touch to the entire experience,” he elaborates, adding that with their combined expertise and data, an agency will assist a brand in utilizing both techniques to its advantage.

As a consequence, the brand's advertising campaigns will yield considerable benefits.

Future Proof

Programmatic is evolving, as Vaibhav Odherkar, Co-Founder and COO of POKKT observes. “We are now transitioning from a simple protocol-based RTB method of advertising, which helped condense everything into a single dashboard, to audience buying. Machine learning and data analysis are being heavily used to comprehend the user. Less upfront data is now given of the user due to growing privacy concerns. This is one of the few situations where ML and Big Data are effectively combined,” he says.

Siddharth Devnani, Co-Founder & Director, SoCheers, agrees that Decisioning is considerably widening the scope of programmatic media buying. “Traditionally, media buying has been about the transaction or the trade, whereas with customer experience taking the centre stage, it can no longer be restricted to that.”

“Over the last few years, user-centric programmatic has been the most effective technique to drive ROI, hence it has been used more prominently. Now, however, we have to re-innovate taking into consideration the privacy-driven challenges in the ecosystem,” he says, adding that Decisioning adds a workflow to the entire process of media buying. It helps to seamlessly bring together business strategy and brand goals, along with an omnichannel approach for customer acquisition.

Indian Outlook

“The majority of the western markets are already on Decisioning. In India, we are on a positive trajectory wherein most of the CPG brands are leading digital media buying through Decisioning,” says Gill, noting that Programmatic gives advertisers flexibility, better decisioning, transparency, greater visibility into media buys, and more control on how to execute them.

“Decisioned buying leverages every data point available to purchase each ad impression based on its value. The more data advertisers have, the better decisions they can make to buy against the right supply that helps them achieve their business objectives. In doing so, decisioned buying aligns marketing spend with business objectives and through better precision and targeting, advertisers are able to better achieve business outcomes. All marketing dollars should be effective in driving better business outcomes,” he says.

“Regarding digital advertising, India has always been one of the most developed countries. Our business is active in 13 nations, and POKKT is glad to report that the Indian market and ecosystem are, without a doubt, the most developed. When it comes to adjusting to any significant innovation in digital advertising, we are first among the other nations,” says Odherkar, concluding, “It is better than markets like Japan and comparable to, say, Singapore. Utilizing data partners, DMPs, viewability, fraud tools, etc. in addition to programmatic tools. We can state with confidence that we employ the greatest solutions on the market today.”