Harmony between social and programmatic can be rare. However, the teams behind the channels often have the same goal: delivering the best media experience to engage customers and drive purchase intent.
Havas Media Group (HMG) announced that it has formed a partnership Spaceback, the social display platform, to bring the creativity of social advertising to programmatic on a global scale.
This partnership will allow marketers to distribute social experiences using programmatic infrastructure, adapting any posts from across the major platforms in just a few seconds. This will benefit clients as the agency begins to integrate social and programmatic.
By capitalising on the effort and investment put into messaging and creativity for social and translating it across programmatic, this partnership changes that. Programmatic activation increases the scale of paid social investment, benefitting from real-time engagement insights and amplifying high-impact units at speed across display and video.
Casey Saran, CEO and co-founder of Spaceback said: “In the future, meaningful media will power all media plans, not just social plans. Our new partnership with Havas unlocks the true potential of programmatic and will inspire brands around the world to revisit their siloed approach to media channels.”
Havas Media Group has also completed the organisational transition of its digital expertise into biddable teams. Now, experts across programmatic and social operate hand in hand to deliver more meaningful media experiences within and beyond social walled gardens.
James Gyngell, Global Managing Director of Partnerships at Havas Media Group said: “Spaceback awakens the programmatic experience with highly engaging social content, a long-awaited innovation for an industry running the same types of ads for over 15 years,” said “Spaceback provides the technology, and our re-organization provides the structure and talent needed to forge a new frontier for brands.”
What about the negatives?
If a company does not have as much experience with social as it does other types of programmatic, it may struggle to create effective campaigns. However, in 2019, eMarketer predicted that by 2021, 57.6% of money spent on programmatic ads would go to social media. Keeping up with competitors is hugely important in this case.
Due to coronavirus, the pre-pandemic estimates were incorrect, with the programmatic digital display ad spending growth estimate for 2020 (17.5%) being revised downward in October to 9.4%. However, social media is unlikely to lose popularity at any point in the near future, so it seems programmatic social ads will continue to be a success.
In our siloed industry it is truly a positive to see the forging of relationships between the different areas. Hopefully we continue to see an increase in partnerships similar to this, as I’m sure they will be a driving force to undo the silos and result in positive, useful relationships.