Programmatic marketing: Are affiliates ready to accept the future?

In the world of digital marketing, ‘programmatic’ is a staple part of any brand’s strategy for both awareness and customer acquisition. In the world of igaming however, it remains relatively unknown by many and the new kid on the block for others, why is that? We have to ask ourselves.

Programmatic technology hit the world of ad tech around 2010, replacing legacy ad network buying models with automated real-time bidding (RTB) and algorithmic decisions to drive improved performance for brands. This means advertisers got more advertising impressions for less money and much better performance, hallelujah!

So instead of the ad networks buying inventory from publishers for one rate and just selling it for another, machines now placed every available advertising impression into a real-time auction. This meant that advertisers only paid for the impressions they wanted, at the right time and in front of the right eyeballs.

This rendered all the legacy ad networks redundant and they quickly shut down. Giants such as Specific Media went from hundreds of millions in revenue to closed doors within months, as they failed to pivot and evolve.

Media owners also started to sell far more of their inventory and create greater yields, the industry was truly revolutionised in the blink of an eye. Advertisers started flocking all of their media budgets away from the networks to Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) and publishers frantically connected their inventory to the Sell Side Platforms (SSPs) to automate the selling of their inventory. Expensive steak and wine lunches were no longer needed to attract the best advertisers and generate much greater revenue from their inventory.

Despite all of the above happening some 15 years ago, the igaming industry has failed to keep up and is stagnated with archaic customer acquisition methods, that have failed to adopt modern technology. SEO and PPC remain the predominant channels for FTDs outside of brand marketing, with many still using not so ‘clever’ display advertising networks, as the rest of the world did in the 2000s. Which is obviously expensive for advertisers and delivers sub-par performance compared to what is possible. So, what is it going to take to invoke change?

SEO triggers

The recent Google updates are acting as a real trigger for most, with SEO rankings falling and thus traffic, affiliates and operators are forced to seek new traffic methods to supplement the decline in SEO. I’m sure many people reading this will be saying “it’s because of the advertising restrictions” but unlike Google, Meta and other channels, programmatic is relatively free of any of the restrictions you encounter with such traffic sources.

Platforms like Lift offer global traffic at huge scale across desktop, mobile web, app, native, video and even connected TV. Regulated, unregulated or even crypto are all fair game in the world of programmatic advertising, with 100’s millions of eyeballs available to be converted into new depositors. Therefore black, grey and white hat marketers are all able to leverage this technology on either a self-serve or managed basis. I have personally seen igaming affiliates who have been reliant on PPC and SEO for over a decade, test programmatic recently and quickly decide to pivot their whole business to this new traffic source, for all of the above reasons.

Lack of evolution

So, this again begs the question, why hasn’t the rest of the igaming industry evolved as a whole and embraced modern technology and traffic sources? Given igaming is one of the fastest growing industries in the world?

I believe this is predominantly due to a lack of education and understanding, especially when the old-school networks are still so active and generating vast revenues for themselves, they really do not want to see change. However, if they do not evolve, the industry may just do so without them, which could spell the same end as the likes of Specific Media.

I have, however, seen some less than ‘genius’ methods adopted by companies to entice people into programmatic, where big budgets are secured on day one and blown in a matter of days, burning the market before it even gets started. This is the worst thing you can do when embracing this technology, it is machine learning-based and needs time to build data and optimise, without that you are simply going to waste your money. If you are going to venture down this path, you must be working with someone who is the technology owner and knows what they are doing, which unfortunately at the moment there are very few.

Lending hand

It is however up to these new-age technology companies to help educate operators and affiliates, whilst assisting them in coming off the ad network drug, to a supply that gives a much greater bang for their buck.

One only has to read the quarterly reports from the likes of Better Collective and others to see how much they’re doubling down on such technology, to not only help drive their share price up, as they establish themselves as more of a ‘technology’ company than an affiliate network but because it is helping drive huge returns for them.

The most valuable asset a lot of companies hold is their first-party data, yet most are not even capturing it, let alone activating it properly. With programmatic, media owners and operators can capture or ingest all of their first-party data and segment it into relevant cohorts i.e. players in Canada depositing more than $100.

They can then activate this data for either retargeting to increase LTV’s or use sophisticated ‘look a like modelling’ algorithms to find other players of similar behaviours across the web. This, in turn, helps generate these new players for a fraction of what it would cost on the open market. Adding dynamic creative opportunities on top of this alongside cross-device etc it becomes a no-brainer.

I hope this piece on programmatic can help start the education process not just on programmatic but also on other modern technologies. This will then help reduce igaming companies’ reliance on outdated and expensive traffic sources.