Insights from the Programmatic Trailblazers will feature video interviews with some of the brightest minds in programmatic, ad-tech and digital who will be sharing their insights, discussing trends, and addressing challenges within the industry.

An elevator pitch for your session: Why should people come and see you at the Programmatic Summit in 2024?

Ben: I think people should come and see me talk about in-housing media because a lot of the conversation around in-housing to date has been all around in-house creative functions and I suppose the media component of in-housing isn’t something that’s always talked about or even done by that many companies. So, if you’re looking for an interesting insight into how Treasury Wine Estates went about doing this, I’d certainly love you to come along.

Why is it important to have an event like the Programmatic Summit?

Ben: I think in the world we spend so much time in the weeds and creating campaigns and knee deep in data, and I think it’s incredibly important that we take time out from the day to day to meet with our colleagues and peers, discover what’s happening in the industry, learn from other practitioners, and just generally feel a sense of greater connectedness to the wider programmatic community.

What are your top three words describe programmatic in 2024?

Ben: I think my top three words could be applicable to all media. So, transparency, simplicity,
and performance.

The transparency part is one that’s particularly problematic for programmatic and continually requires us to be vigilant and find new new ways to be more transparent.

I think simplicity is an area that programmatic has really struggled with in the past.
And a lot of that comes down to how we talk to ourselves to non-programmatic people.
And often it’s the non-programmatic people who are paying our bills and the ability to provide clean, simple information on how we trade and why we trade to the people who aren’t experts in this field is more important now than ever.

And I think performance both from a short term, immediate sales revenue, generating point of view and a long term, brand-building impact. How do we how do we show that programmatic as a bio mechanism is achieving the brand objectives that that the industry needs us to achieve. So I think those would be my three key takeaways.

What do you think the biggest challenge for programmatic is going to be in 2024?

Ben: Look, I think the biggest challenge for programmatic in 2024 is going to be getting our fair slice of the media pie. I think as audience signal continues to deteriorate as cookies deprecate at the end of this year I think there’s gonna be a tendency and perhaps a fear from brands that they’ll be pulling money into channels that they deem safer, aka walled gardens. And I think it’s incredibly important that the programmatic industry demonstrates its value and how its responding to these shifting audience and data signals to ensure that we’re still getting the rifle slot to ensure that we’re helping brands meet their brand objectives.

Why are you passionate about the subject that you are speaking about?

Ben: I’m really passionate about talking about in-house media. I think for a long time agencies have held the keys to the castle and brands have had to rely on those agencies to provide that that transparency and that performance without always having access to the to the core data.

And I think now, more than ever, brands are choosing to take control of their own destiny,
getting more transparency, more accountability, and faster turnaround. And I think it’s an incredibly exciting time for the in-house media world and to be a small part of that of that trend is quite exciting for me.

So, I think in-housing for media – it’s a really exciting time and I’m really excited to talk about it and the the benefits as well as some of the drawbacks as well.

Why are you such an advocate for in-housing and what do you think stops other people from making the leap?

Ben: I think for us, the reason that we decided to bring media to in house were three key pillars we had… The transparency of data, the proximity to our data, and then the speed of campaign creation and access to data as well. So, from transparency, accountability and speed – I think three incredible benefits from in-housing media that you don’t always get from outside agencies.

I think, unlike in-housing creative, media can seem quite scary to many brands. If you’re in-housing creative, the conversation tends to kind of rotate around labor costs and maybe some software additions for the designers and creators and the tools they’ll be using. It can be quite easy for the conversation to get quite complex quite early and a lot of brands, probably because of the many years of them talking to their agency, it seems like quite a complex ecosystem to replicate in an in-house setting. When you strip it all back and go with an MVP model to start with, it is more than achievable and over time a lot more brands will realise that it’s more than just in-housing your social or maybe some retail. In some cases it provide a better outcome by in housing all of the habitable media, instead.

Also just ensuring that if you are gonna step into this space that you don’t need to go from zero to a hundred. The the best way to do this is to simply start small, go incremental, set yourself some goals, and then eventually you’ll find you’re doing a lot more than you thought you probably could have done when you first started out.

The Programmatic Summit – in Melbourne on Thursday, 29th February 2024 and in Sydney on Thursday, 7th March 2024 – will bring together 650 of the smartest minds in the digital marketing and advertising industry.