At Precision Reach, our clients in the agriculture industry ask this question more and more frequently. They want to know which approach to use to get the most bang for their bucks.
The answer: programmatic and endemic advertising can work together. It’s not a matter of either/or.
Endemic advertising focuses on placing ads in media that is relevant to the content. Using this approach, your ag-related ad would appear on ag-related sites. Farm Journal, for example, offers endemic advertising on the industry’s leading agriculture sites, such as AgWeb, Drovers, The Scoop and Dairy Herd.
Programmatic advertising, on the other hand, is the automatic buying and selling of ad space in real-time on tens of thousands of websites and apps. Programmatic campaigns driven by first-party data don’t wait for your audience to visit a specific endemic property. Instead, it places an ad instantaneously as soon as your audience visits a site, whether or not it’s contextually related to your message. In other words, rather than hoping your target viewers see your ad, programmatic advertising finds the viewers where they are.
A Matter of Value
An endemic approach lets you choose sites that are relevant to your ag audience, perhaps one they subscribe to or visit regularly offering content about farming or ranching. Your ad for an ag-related product or service makes sense within the context of these sites. The audience expects to see them there.
This approach has obvious value, but what about the farmers who don’t visit the endemic site? How are you reaching them? How many of them are you missing?
Flexibility First
Precision Reach-executed programmatic ads reach a first-party audience wherever they go online. Your ad isn’t just waiting for them to visit the ag-related site you’ve chosen. Instead, it’s meeting them wherever they visit online, which is especially important when trying to maximize reach a niche audience.
Using programmatic advertising also opens up significantly more ad space options. You’re not restricting your campaign to just the endemic sites that seem to be most relevant to your audience. You can, however, define the range of sites you want to include. At Precision Reach, we run programmatic ads to a hand-picked list of 8,000 brand-safe online properties that includes news, weather, sports and business websites and apps. This list provides our clients with flexibility while also ensuring their ads are placed in a safe online environment. Our programmatic ads can reach more than 90% of farmers in your target audience segment. While endemic properties are, without question, very valuable to agri-marketers, none offer an opportunity this comprehensive in terms of reach and frequency.
Find the Right Mix
So, you can see that endemic and programmatic advertising are able to work together to reach your target audience, each offering certain capabilities. It’s not a question of one or the other but, instead, how best to allocate your budget to get the results you want. While agri-marketers are probably more accustomed to endemic advertising, they should also consider increasing the percentage of programmatic ads they buy to increase their ROI.
Why? At Precision Reach, we surveyed 38 agri-marketing professionals and found that, on average, they allocate only 25.4% for programmatic advertising. Meanwhile, a recent survey of 100 farmers conducted by Farm Journal revealed that they spend 63% of their online time on non-ag platforms. Programmatic ads enable agri-marketers to deliver their message where farmers and ranchers spend 2/3 of their time digitally.
As agri-marketers, we have an opportunity to get that bigger bang for our buck by allocating an appropriate amount of our budget to programmatic advertising. By finding the right balance, we’ll be more successful in optimizing return on ad spend.