ASIA PACIFIC — Mindshare, the global media agency network part of GroupM, has launched China’s first-ever programmatic premium trade desk for Nestlé .
With programmatic experiencing rapid growth in China, one of the key questions that brands are grappling with is whether buying programmatic means simply buying remnant inventory. The challenge for brand programmatic implementation in China is clearly how to leverage the targeting benefits programmatic provides without sacrificing inventory quality.
“Programmatic has many buying models. The programmatic direct model can most definitely be based on premium inventory and this is the approach we took for Nestlé after understanding what the brands needed from a business and media standpoint,” explained Charlie Wang, Mindshare Head of Digital Beijing.
Mindshare and GroupM consulted on finding the best technology vendors which would answer Nestle’s specific needs developing a tech stack that partnered with Miaozhen DMP and ReachMax Trading Desk Platform.
Through Miaozhen DMP, a combination of 1st party brand ads data, owned digital assets, as well as 3rd party media data are consolidated into a single data datawarehouse. This serves as the brain that tells the trading desk platform which impressions to buy and not buy. Then through ReachMax, Nestle can buy OTV premium inventory on top video channels like Tencent, Youku, Sohu, and iQiyi.
The premium trade desk is the first of its kind in China, with major publishers opening up premium inventory to programmatic. This access to inventory for programmatic targeting becomes extremely valuable when it comes to major publishers like Tencent, which have a wide spectrum of relevant consumer touchpoints such as Qzone, QQ IM, Tencent Video, and Wechat. With Tencent’s big data, technical expertise, as well as programmatic execution excellence, they are able to better target Nestlé consumer that visit the Tencent ecosystem.
“Programmatic will be the defining trend for all digital media in the future. Nestlé used programmatic direct model to buy pre-roll ads on the Tencent Video platform, because they recognize the value of Tencent Video’s audience. Programmatic buying helped Nestlé to buy more on target inventory on Tencent, hence increasing overall media efficiency. At the same time, Tencent’s dedication to technology innovation is further validated by Nestlé’s great campaign performance on the Tencent Video platform,” commented John Dao, General Manger of Channel Business Department from Tencent Online Media Group on the campaign.
The setup of Nestlé’s trading desk took half a year, from small-scale trials to now running multiple programmatic OTV campaigns across all Nestlé products in China. The results have been phenomenal, because programmatic at its core enables a brand to buy more on target, plus the ability to frequency cap and run dynamic creatives across all media touchpoints. Since the induction of programmatic OTV, average 3+ reach has increased by 10 points across all markets, both 1st, 2nd and 3rd tier cities. This gives Nestlé more bang for the buck in the form of incremental reach using the exact same budget as non-programmatic buys.
“Nestlé have been pushing programmatic on the global front. The challenge in China is finding the right local technology partners and deep programmatic operations expertise. Mindshare helped us in building the right technology stack for a programmatic trading desk. Following a programmatic direct model, we can still maintain a direct relationship with our media partners keeping the entire programmatic process very transparent, as well as increasing media efficiency and effectiveness,” said Kris Yang, Nestlé Head of Media.
