Next week, PerformanceIN will be joined by Rakuten Marketing’s strategic client services manager, Christina Tsiripidou, for a free-to-join webinar demonstrating how brands can successfully utilise display to “soar above their performance benchmarks”.

Programmatic will be the central focus, as Tsiripidou will allay concerns over placement and transparency, revealing how basic steps can be made to implement the strategy to great advantage to your overall ad spend.

Ahead of the webinar, entitled ‘How to Successfully Maximise Your New Display Investment’, PerformanceIN caught up with Tsiripidou for an overview of the benefits of the ad buying method, and the success the network achieved for footwear brand Boxfresh.

Hi Christina, first off, give us a quick overview of your role at Rakuten Marketing…

Christina Tsiripidou: My role as strategic client services manager sees me working across an exciting portfolio of luxury, entertainment, sport and retail brands. This allows me to combine and apply learnings from various verticals to further the success of all my clients. I help marketers enhance their display programmes and ultimately, achieve their business and performance goals and overall vision. I report to our clients on what’s working and what isn’t and the trends I’m observing. I also advise on changes to our programmatic tactics to maximise their investment. Our team recently completed our certification on attribution, which has enabled me to offer our partners further insight into the role that programmatic plays in the overall customer journey to purchase – looking beyond post-view and post-click conversions.

In your experience, are you seeing a hesitance for brands to get involved in programmatic advertising?

CT: Rather than hesitancy I would say that brand marketers are sometimes uncertain about how to best activate programmatic strategies in an environment that is constantly evolving and innovating. Last year truly was ‘the year of programmatic’ with many brands investing heavily in the space. That being said, with issues around brand-safe environments, fake news and reliable viewability measurement, brands do express concern around the right application of programmatic. Through monitoring site lists and clicks for ad fraud and maintaining blacklists we are able to offer reassurance. Operating with a policy rooted in full transparency of campaign performance, placement and viewability metrics (through attributed reporting), we scale reach and efficiency from what really does and doesn’t work for each individual brand.

Where do you think complexities and lack of clarity in the industry stem from?

CT: Our industry has not matured as fast as the technology at our disposal has. Additionally, many brands fail to fully define objectives, understand the features of each tactic available to them and identify the correct measure of success they should focus on. These are all of paramount importance to the success of any and all display campaigns. For instance, for customer acquisition, it is not always about ROAS. Instead, you want to look beyond last-click conversions and focus on driving new site visitors – as well as monitoring how these turn into new customers and their lifetime value. Similarly, for retargeting, you want to ensure you continue to talk to your customers post-sale – only then will you begin to drive engagement and loyalty.

Tell us about the success you saw with your client Boxfresh?

CT: Boxfresh was struggling with brand awareness because consumers did not associate it with any particular personality or strong benefit. Boxfresh partnered with us with the goal of attracting new customers by communicating the brand identity boldly and effectively. By deploying a suite of effective cross-channel display solutions, we were able to reach the brand’s target consumer at all relevant touch-points. Our adverts outperformed benchmarks and delivered very healthy ROAS. Display also helped shorten the length of converting journeys and had a positive effect on other marketing activity. I will be covering our success with Boxfresh in detail in our webinar.

Are there any simple steps brands can take to get the advantage of programmatic?

CT: In my experience, there is an infallible approach which can be reduced to 6 simple – yet often overlooked – steps. Join our webinar and I will tell you all about these steps. Entitled ‘How to Successfully Maximise Your New Display Investment’, the free-to-join webinar will take place on Thursday, November 16 at 14:30 GMT. Register today as availability is limited!