Viewpoint Programmatic media – simplicity is key
I Peadar Drislane business director - Seika Media Peadar has over 20 years’ experience in the media industry, having worked with a host of global brands as well as some of the biggest media agencies in the UK. His expertise covers AV planning and buying, specialising in the toys and games and youth market.
www.seika.media peadar.drislane@seika.media
began my career in Media back in 2000. Back then, the media industry was dominated by television, with shows such as Coronation Street pulling in viewing figures in excess of 15m per episode. This gave advertisers the perfect platform to generate mass awareness of their products to a huge audience in a very short space of time. Radio, outdoor advertising, newspapers, magazines and cinema were also hugely influential and were a mainstay on almost all media plans. The past 20 years has seen dramatic change in how media agencies operate and how media campaigns are planned and implemented. The reason for this is the emergence of the digital age and how media is now consumed. The growth in online media has been phenomenal. With this level of growth and scale, it can seem a daunting prospect when approaching the online world, but it is the perfect landscape for clients to reach their target audience at a much more granular level. In order to maximise this opportunity, programmatic media provides the tools to navigate the online space and identify the environments in which we can connect with consumers with relevant and targeted advertising and minimise wastage. Initially, the term ‘Programmatic media’ can be confusing, with things like Demand Side Platforms (DSP) and Supply Side Platforms (SSP) to get to grips with, as well as Open Market Place and Private Market Place. At Seika Media, we believe that simplicity is key, and aim
to make the use of programmatic media as smooth and transparent as possible. To do this, we identify and vet tens of thousands of domains and curate them into bespoke PMPs (Private Market Places), so that all of the websites are entirely relevant for any particular target market. We then allocate one deal I.D to this so that we can monitor and optimise the campaigns on a daily basis to maximise the successful outcome of each one. Daily optimisation allows us to use budgets efficiently and effectively to achieve specific KPIs, on average increasing campaign performance by at least 20% across the board while keeping the client in complete control – choosing from display, video, connected TV, in-game, audio, digital out-of-home and YouTube, all within a brand-safe, curated programmatic marketplace of the world’s leading publishers Also with the aim of making digital media simpler, we offer two ways to buy with a choice of self-serve campaigns (where the agency/ brand uses a demand side platform) or a managed service (where we buy the campaign on the client’s behalf via a brief). We report back with complete transparency on the domains used, the price and the performance as regularly as needed, acting as an extension of the client’s internal team. In both cases, we set up Microsoft Teams chats so that clients can message us or have a video call when it suits them. Programmatic media should be viewed as an integral element in all campaigns, as it enhances digital footprints by reaching audiences at unprecedented scale.
The Hot Toy lists: US vs. UK
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very autumn, US and UK major retailers publish their “Hot Toy” lists. These lists, ranging from ten to over 100 toys, say a lot about how the buyers for these companies read their markets and what they believe will bring the biggest return on investment over the Christmas buying season. Choosing which toys consumers will fight for is a serious business - compiling a Hot Toy list is not for the faint of heart.
Richard Gottlieb CEO, Global Toy Experts Richard is the founder and CEO of Global Toy Experts, a consultancy to US and international toy companies. He is also the publisher of Global Toy News, a web-based magazine founded in 2009 that covers toy industry news and provides resources to the toy industry. Richard co-hosts The Playground Podcast and publishes The Toy Intelligencer report.
The licences, brands and toys chosen can say a great deal about popular culture in a country. Do The US and the UK, which share the same language (mostly) and much of the same culture, make identical choices in toys? To find out, I sifted through 350 toys from six retailers: Amazon, Walmart, Target and Toys R Us in the US: Smyths and Hamleys in the UK. The four US retailers had a total of 321 listings between them. Hamleys and Smyths had 29. For starters, I wanted to know where buyers on opposite sides of the pond agreed. Only four of the 29 (14%) UK listings also appeared on at least one of the American retail lists. Below are the toys the two countries agreed on: (For comparison, I converted the GB pound to the American dollar.) Spin Master Cool Maker Stitch & Style US - $31.39 Target; UK - $29.11 Smyths Fisher-Price DJ Bouncin’ Beats US - $44.99 Target; UK - $37.51 Smyths Moose Little Live Pets – Mama Surprise US - $59.00 Amazon; US - $59.00 Walmart; UK - $72.79 Smyths Hasbro Play-Doh Ice Cream Truck US - $94.99 Amazon; US - $94.99 Target; UK- $111.72 Smyths
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UK pricing was lower on Cool Maker Stitch & Style and D.J. Bouncin’ Beats. US pricing was lower on Little Live Pets and the Play-Doh Ice Cream Truck. That was where the similarities ended. The biggest difference between the two countries came in the use of third-party licences. In the US,; third-party licensed toys made up an impressive 30% of all toys on the combined US lists. In contrast, 17% of the UK toy listings were licensed. There were 26 different third-party licences on the US lists; everything from Jurassic World and Star Wars to Bluey and CoComelon to Encanto and Gabby’s Doll House. The UK list contains four third-party licenses: Buzz Lightyear, CoComelon, Peppa Pig and Jurassic World. Disney licences dominate the US toy scene, making up a remarkable 18% of all the listed toys on the US list. Contrast that to the UK, where there was only one Disney-licensed item on the combined UK lists. There were also differences in which brands dominated. Mattel was a significant player on the UK and US lists. The company accounted for 17% of all UK and 12% of all US listings. Contrast that with the US lists where Hasbro had the second-largest number of listings on the US lists (Mattel was first). Hasbro’s toys accounted for 10% of all US listings. Surprisingly (at least to me), there was only one Hasbro listing on the combined UK lists. MGA’s Mermaze Mermaidz Color Change dolls were a major presence on the Amazon and Target lists. They made up 5% of all listings but were not listed on the two UK lists. Do one country’s buyers have it right and the other wrong? No, they are just responding to their respective markets. It is interesting, however, that when you look closely, two countries so culturally similar are so different – particularly regarding how they play. Or at least how retail buyers think they do.
