We’ve had plenty of answers from the best and brightest in advertising. This first article on the offline impact of programmatic is followed by debates on the best method of programmatic targeting, and how to integrate programmatic and TV advertising.

So, let’s ask the experts…

What tools and techniques can demonstrate the offline impact of programmatic spend?

sameer modha

Sameer Modha, head of data at DigitasLBi:

This varies hugely by category; the ideal thing is to find a data source of individually-linkable, category-wide, reasonably large-scale sales data to measure against.

In CPG, the loyalty card ‘panels’ and also sometimes the home-scanning panels (especially modern ones like Infoscout) are ripe for this. In cars, people with high frequency location data like Facebook have ‘location lift’ type products, where they can tell if the ad exposure got people to go to e.g. a car dealership.

This works for any category where the point of sale is visible from space, but not for things in multi-storey shopping centres etc. Open programmatic finds this hard because it only has sporadic ‘kidnap victim’-type location data – where you occasionally see location during an ad-call.

jack glanville

Jack Glanville, programmatic analyst at Journey Further:

Control grouping is key. You can assess the impact of programmatic performance on store footfall by turning activity on or off by region, while keeping all other marketing activity constant (that’s the hard part!).

However, there are specific identifiers which can link individual store visits to specific programmatic campaigns: in-store Wi-Fi and e-receipts, for example. There are also certain programmatic providers who can track footfall via latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates after an ad has been served.

jim hawker

Jim Hawker, owner at Threepipe:

For offline influence we normally use footfall analysis as our preferred technique. There are a few different approaches out there but this gives more data than the dedicated landing page or voucher route and doesn’t require large overheads or technical integrations, making it an ideal way to step into this realm successfully and pragmatically.

alessandra di lorenzo

Alessandra Di Lorenzochief commercial officer, Media and Partnerships, at lastminute.com group:

It’s very hard to attribute online marketing activities to offline spend – and this is an industry-wide problem that will be difficult to solve. The most obvious way – albeit a little old fashioned – is to use promotional codes. Deterministic capabilities have yet to be developed, but there are a number of software options out there that can help with a certain degree of accuracy.

Given that we’re an online player, this isn’t a challenge that directly affects us at lastminute.com group. But we are always on the look-out for solutions to help our clients, particularly with attribution of sales from our channel in the airport.

kristina kalpokaite

Kristina Kalpokaite, head of paid media at Summit:

We work with our clients to measure point-of-sale data and footfall for locally targeted campaigns that drive store visits and optimise towards in-store revenue.

Our proprietary predictive engine…[integrates] in-store sales and visits as well as offering a deduplicated revenue view for our retailers.

More on programmatic: