The Power of Strategic Programmatic Advertising | Natalie Bruno

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, marketers, media buyers, and business owners. I am David McBee. Our guest today is Natalie Bruno, Director of Revenue Strategy at January Spring. Natalie has a proven track record in driving growth and engagement through both creative and data-driven campaigns. With her expertise in developing comprehensive digital strategies that align seamlessly with business objectives, she excels in building and leading high-performing teams. Always ahead of the curve, Natalie stays current with industry trends and leverages the latest technologies to create truly engaging user experiences. Natalie, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Natalie Bruno: Hi David, thanks for having me on. David McBee: Thank you for being here. Would you please maybe just tell our viewers just a little bit about January Spring and the role that you have there? Natalie Bruno: Yeah, absolutely. So at January Spring we like to think of ourselves as a digital transformation company. So we actually coach and assist publishers, agencies, and resellers across the nation. We teach them and coach to them on how to sell digital marketing, specifically programmatic, and how to create successful campaigns for their advertisers. David McBee: Specifically programmatic, I love that. I'm really excited about this interview. All right, well let's just dive right into that. Okay? When you're creating a marketing strategy for a client and you want to include programmatic media and targeted ads, what does that look like normally? Natalie Bruno: Yeah, absolutely. So typically where a lot of people go wrong sometimes is they're like, "Oh yes, programmatic sounds great. It's highly targeted," but then they don't put some of the work on the back end that needs to be done in order to make sure this campaign is successful. So we talk through how they're going to measure the success of the campaign. What are our goals? What are we trying to achieve from the campaigns? So we can make sure that the creative that's developed matches those, right? And so what we essentially do is we really help them map out what their customer journey looks like, and what those messages and those targeting needs to look like in order to make a successful programmatic campaign. And then from there we put everything together, get the assets together and help launch it, and actually utilizing Simpli.fi. David McBee: We love that. What would you say are some of the most common mistakes that people make when they're including programmatic in their digital strategies? Natalie Bruno: I would say part of it has to do with launching the campaign without deciding how they're going to measure the success or even communicating what success looks like to the advertiser. So agencies will tend to get really excited. They'll sell programmatic advertising, they'll create these beautiful ads, but then they haven't really thought through the process with the advertiser on how are we going to measure the success of this? What specific products or goals am I trying to achieve with this advertising? Because in 2024, there's thousands of ways you can target people from regular demographic targeting all the way to specialty segments. And so if you aren't very, very sure on who it is that you're trying to target, what you're trying to say, then that can kind of get lost in the mix. And so you have this great campaign, but it didn't hit the mark because you weren't strategic on how are we going to measure the success and what am I hoping for it to achieve? David McBee: People think of programmatic as upper funnel, right, as awareness and branding, but you're talking about actual KPIs. So how do you leverage the audience data to prove that the campaign is working? Natalie Bruno: So a couple of different ways. So I have been pushing a lot of our advertisers to use more of their own first party data. So there's so many different ways now where you can actually take your own customer information from your CRMs, upload it into the system, target them. A new capability that has just come out with you guys that I was really excited about is the lookalike audiences. And so going in and saying, hey, if I know that this is my customer, and especially if you're something like a restaurant or a retail store where you know that those customers need to come back in addition to getting new customers, what better way than to take that data, target those individuals, and then create lookalike audiences of those individuals, because then that's going to be the most likely people that are going to come in and purchase. And then within using geofence conversion zones to measure the foot traffic that you were able to drive, plus all the other research tools that we utilize at our company, there's Placer reports that will actually measure increases in foot traffic based off of cellular data. That basically shows us like, hey, these campaigns that we're putting together, they're strategic and they're actually driving an increase in foot traffic, which at the end of the day, that's what the advertisers want to see. They want to see that the money that they're putting into their marketing is actually bringing in sales into their shores. David McBee: I love that you brought up the foot traffic. I feel like it's one of my favorite things about programmatic. And as a guy who came from a paid search background, I really loved that measurement of clicks, but I mean, what's better than foot traffic? How many of your clients are leveraging that? Do you have any examples? Natalie Bruno: So I would say quite a few, especially people who have, I would say high frequency reoccurring traffic, so restaurants, retail stores, things like that where they have a large amount of traffic coming in. Obviously that's not going to work for people like home services and things like that, but within those entities that have high volumes of foot traffic, it is working very, very well. And especially what we have seen even recently is this has been a really, really hard year when it comes to just the economy and things like that. And so we were able to take stories that normally wouldn't be success stories, like, oh, well, we only increased 2% in foot traffic, but then we're able to see competitive reports where their competitors who weren't doing programmatic actually saw declines of 15, 20% in foot traffic. So even having that small increase that we were able to measure really showed how programmatic advertising helped keep their business afloat in a really challenging economic era. David McBee: I love that story. That's really good. All right, let's shift gears a bit and talk about streaming TV advertising. A lot of businesses are under the impression that TV advertising is just too expensive, "I'll never be able to do that." And then you've got the big TV advertisers who are really hesitant to get into digital. So how do you convince advertisers to take that leap into streaming TV advertising? Natalie Bruno: Absolutely. So I would say really just painting the picture that it saves them so much money. When you're out there and you're trying to do these large buys over DMAs, most businesses, they aren't attracting people over a large DMA, so they have a lot of waste that's happening with those buys. And so with the ability to do streaming TV and say, "Hey, I only want my ads to show in these zip codes because this is where I know that my customers are coming from," or, "I only want to target these specific demographics because these are the people that are highly likely to be my customers," it allows you to have so much higher ROI than just crossing your fingers, using the surveys, and trying to pick certain shows in hopes that whoever might be watching at that time could be a customer. The great thing with streaming TV is it's only showing an ad in front of the person if they're actively watching it. And I also remind people that these are non-skippable. So a lot of the issues that we had with traditional TV was when the DVR came out and people would record and then fast-forward through, we don't have to worry about that now because especially these Hulu placements and just high value placements are non-skippable. They typically only have a couple of commercials at a time, so not these really long commercial breaks where people are programmed to get up and leave. And then you also have the fact that these people are a lot more engaged in what they're watching, and so they're a lot more likely to go through and watch these commercials. And that's been proven just with all of the analytics that we've driven from that, seeing increases in organic search, seeing the increases of double screen watching essentially where you're watching the program, but people are on their phones actively searching for the products as they're seeing it. So the fact that you can have half of the investment that you would have to spend on traditional, if you were to put that into a streaming TV buy, your ROI would be tenfold on that. David McBee: I love that you mentioned the second screen. Are you doing anything where you deliver a streaming TV ad and then sequential messaging to reach them on their phone or another device? Natalie Bruno: Yeah, so we do have story placements, as I like to call it, where we have the first touch that's coming in through the television, and then we have that next message that we're doing in the form of retargeting. So we do have that pathway that we're trying to drive people down, trying to make sure that they're seeing that specific messaging that we want them to see. And then we also are trying to make sure that the creative that we're doing for OTT and for streaming has some sort of engagement after the fact. So whether it's a QR code or whether it's a special placement that we're asking them to go to and see, we're trying to make it very engaging because people are used to being more engaged with their advertising now, and so they are starting to expect that from brands. David McBee: They are. All right, Natalie, if you had a crystal ball and you looked into it to discover the future of digital media, specifically the topics of programmatic and streaming TV, what do you think you would see? Natalie Bruno: I would say that we're going to continue to see a lot more AI involved whenever it comes to optimizations, placements, things like that. And especially everything that had been going on with cookies and things like that, even though it kind of got put to rest recently, people realized how important it was to be capturing their own first party data and to be utilizing it. Right now, if I were to guesstimate a number, I would say probably only 10 to 15% of people actually use all the data that they're collecting from their customers. And as we go into 2025, 2026 and forward, I really see that rising a lot. I see people taking that data that they're collecting, making more informed choices on the types of marketing efforts that they're doing, and really honing into that data, making sure that their targeting is a lot more strategic than they have in the past. And so I'm really exciting to see what that does in regard to ROI and increased revenue whenever it comes to those individuals, and what that brings in from digital marketing. David McBee: You paint a very bright picture of what programmatic is going to look like. I like that. All right, I think I want to ask you one more question. If someone's watching this interview and they haven't really done programmatic before, they've been kind of stuck in the world of social, and SEO, and Google AdWords, what advice do you have for them? Natalie Bruno: I would say to get yourself with a partner. Obviously I'm going to say partner like myself because that's what I do here, but find a partner that can help educate you on the different types of programmatic that there are out there. Because it can be kind of daunting because like I mentioned earlier, there's 9,000 ways that you can target people, but it's all about taking small bites at a time. You guys have a great training platform that you guys walk people through. It's simplified. It helps to educate people on what programmatic looks like, and what it's capable of doing, and the types of targeting. And then there's so many different kinds of education that you can do even after the fact to understand all the different types of targeting that are available. But making partnerships is huge. One of my favorite books that I've read recently is called Beyond Digital, and it talks about creating these ecosystems. It's impossible for you to be an expert at everything. So being able to make partnerships with people that try to stay informed in their fields is just going to help everybody grow at a much higher rate and especially when it comes to things like programmatic marketing. David McBee: It's interesting that you brought up a book because I always ask every guest if there was a special book or a podcast that they feel is instrumental in their success. Is that the book you want to shout out or do you have another one in mind? Natalie Bruno: So I am a very avid reader, so I am constantly reading. And so for me to say that there's one specific book that has shaped my mind, that would be a fib, but I would say this is the one I finished reading most recently. I highly recommend people to grab it. It is a very, very good book. It talks about how we have to look beyond just trying to be active within in the digital space. It also has to do how we're creating images for ourselves as well. So I highly recommend picking it up. But I say if you want to stay up to date at all in our very, very changing digital marketing world, you have to be constantly reading. David McBee: I agree with that and that's why I asked that question to everyone, so awesome. Well, what is the best way for people to get in touch with you, Natalie? Natalie Bruno: Yeah, so I am very active on LinkedIn, so you can find my profile there, just Natalie Bruno and I'll pop right up. I also have missnataliebruno.com where I have a lot of pieces, and of course, januaryspring.com. David McBee: Well, Ms. Natalie Bruno, thank you so much for being my guest today. Natalie Bruno: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching Simpli.fi TV. Please help us out with a like, a comment, a share, a review. And be sure to follow or subscribe to be informed of new episodes. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.