Abstract
This article describes how a programmatic advertising course was developed and taught for undergraduate students. Depending on the resources available when the course was offered each time, different approaches were taken, which were the client–agency approach, consulting approach, and custom learning approach. The course content consisted of seven units: introduction to programmatic, programmatic ecosystem, programmatic creative, programmatic process, programmatic measurement, programmatic optimization, and programmatic future. Each unit is briefly summarized in the article, along with a sketch of course materials and final thoughts on teaching the course in the future.
Keywords
Programmatic advertising refers to digital advertising that is sold and bought automatically using software, data, and algorithms (Interactive Advertising Bureau [IAB], 2014). Programmatic advertising has evolved rapidly in recent years and has penetrated considerably into most types of digital advertising, such as display, video, native, search, social, and mobile advertising. According to Magna (Mandese, 2018), programmatic spending was estimated to account for 65% of total digital advertising spending in the United States in 2018, and that percentage was projected to increase to 84% in 2022. With the rise of connected TV, programmatic buying in TV commercials is growing fast (Taylor, 2019). As the trend continues, it is important for advertising students to master the knowledge and skills related to programmatic advertising.
I started introducing some concepts of real-time bidding (the early and still primary form of programmatic buying) in my interactive advertising course right after IAB UK (2012) released a video on the evolution of online display advertising. This video covered many concepts, such as ad network, ad exchange, demand-side platform (DSP), supply-side platform (SSP), and agency trading desk (ATD). They are all key players in the programmatic ecosystem, although newer players such as data management platform (DMP), creative management platform (CMP), and ad verification services (AVSs) have since emerged.
A new course on programmatic advertising was proposed in our recent curriculum revision, and the course became official in the summer of 2017. I developed and taught the course in the spring of 2018 for the first time. I revised the course and taught it again in the spring of 2019. To meet the needs of graduating students, I taught it online in the summer of 2019. I have taken different approaches to teaching the course, both in the classroom and online, and I also continue to update the course with new information from academic and trade publications, interactions with industry professionals, and feedback from my students. Our department provided financial support for me to obtain necessary industry expertise, and my colleagues shared their connections with me. All of this was essential for course development. I have learned a great deal from teaching the programmatic advertising course over the past 2 years, and I have some experiences to share.
Course Approaches
When I first taught the course, my goals were for students to not only understand the programmatic ecosystem, the roles of major players, and best practices in programmatic buying but also get hands-on experience in executing programmatic buying. The goals were similar to those when I taught Google AdWords (now Google Ads Search), where students joined the Google Online Marketing Challenge and developed and executed search advertising campaigns for local clients with a budget of $200 (later $250) from Google. Students were excited to see real-time campaign metrics and to optimize the campaign for better outcomes. I thought it would be ideal for students to carry out programmatic buying on the dashboard of a DSP. I secured a client with a budget of $5,000 and an agency that had managed many successful programmatic campaigns. The agency happened to use the Trade Desk, which is one of the largest independent DSPs, and its Trading Academy offered a certification program. As a result of working with the agency, my students were each granted a complimentary login to study video lessons and earn certificates. At any rate, we had good partners to kick off the new course.
Client–agency approach
During the course, students worked in teams of three or four to develop executable campaign plans, including the campaign objectives, target audience, multiple sets of display ads, initial budget allocation across platforms, and key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics. Student teams also developed tagging plans for measurement, conversion tracking, and bid weighting in collaboration with the client’s webmaster. The client came to brief my class, and students presented their plans to the client and the agency’s programmatic director for feedback. The best plan was selected and then revised by the agency before activation. It turned out that the agency could not give us access to the DSP dashboard because it was running live campaigns for their clients; instead they managed programmatic buying and optimization on our behalf. In the middle and at the end of the campaign, the programmatic director shared progress, adjustments, and final outcomes with students via video conferencing and in the classroom. I selected articles and cases from WARC, a leading database of advertising and marketing information, for students to study for programmatic campaign development. In addition, students watched the video lessons from the Trading Academy to earn certificates. This client–agency approach worked well in that students actively learned about programmatic advertising though working with the client and agency professionals.
Consulting approach
Before offering the course for the second time, I noticed that consulting firms were helping many companies establish their own capability to carry out programmatic buying internally in partnership with specialized services. IAB (2018) published a report on in-house programmatic and related issues. I thought it would be beneficial for students to get a big picture of where programmatic advertising is going. To this end, I took a consulting approach to teaching the course in that students were required to think and work as “consulting teams.” In addition to the development of a programmatic campaign plan as before, they were required to first complete a business plan for a hotel chain of their choice (e.g., Hilton, IHG, Marriott) to establish a hybrid structure, where some programmatic functions would be insourced and others would be outsourced. Both types of programmatic functions, potential outsource partners and selection criteria, and the workflow of the hybrid structure would be included in the business plan. In-depth research was necessary because all company information had to be real, including the profiles of recommended partner companies. To add new perspectives to the course, I secured four guest lectures by Michigan State University (MSU) alumni working in programmatic advertising in Detroit and New York. These guest lectures were arranged so that each guest would talk about an issue that was related to the course projects, and students found answers to many questions from these professionals. In addition, the career paths of these alumni were equally interesting to many students, as they saw firsthand how MSU graduates have become accomplished advertising executives. Near the end of the semester, a few students told me that they already landed a full-time job or a summer internship in programmatic advertising, and another student told me she would continue her graduate study in business analytics partly because of taking the programmatic course. Nothing is more rewarding than seeing the impact of a course on students.
Custom learning approach
When the course was offered online in the summer of 2019, I took a custom learning approach. There were no team projects because students were off campus and could not easily collaborate on team projects. I chose to have them work individually. The major assignment for each unit was an essay, for which students could select any three issues they thought were most important based on the lectures, assigned articles and cases, and certificate video lessons. A quality essay was defined as an analytical piece that blended key concepts from the course materials with the student’s own thinking, with at least three references. Grading criteria included issue selection, key concepts, individual thought, and writing quality. Studying for the certificate video lessons allowed students to learn the viewpoints of professionals on various aspects of programmatic advertising and best practices, whereas the essays helped students form their own perspectives on major issues. This approach seemed to work well in that it promoted custom learning for individual students. Even if several students explored the same issue in their essays, each analysis was quite unique. Such a custom learning approach certainly needed more commitment from students to achieve the best learning outcomes, especially in the summer.
Course Content
The summer course represented my latest appreciation of the content a programmatic advertising course for undergraduate students should cover. It consisted of seven units: introduction to programmatic, programmatic ecosystem, programmatic creative, programmatic process, programmatic measurement, programmatic optimization, and programmatic future. Each unit covered several issues and integrated industry situations, professional perspectives, and best practices. The following text contains highlights of these units.
Introduction to programmatic unit
It compared the differences between programmatic media buying and programmatic advertising, reviewed the evolution of display advertising and the gradual formation of the programmatic ecosystem, and examined the levels of programmatic adoption in different types of digital advertising. A review of the short history and current status of programmatic advertising helped students settle in for further exploration.
Programmatic ecosystem unit
This unit explored the mechanism of programmatic buying, including real-time bidding, major players and their roles, and additional transaction types (e.g., automated guaranteed, unreserved fixed rate, invitation-only auction, and header bidding). Major players included publishers, SSPs, ad servers, ad exchanges, ad networks, DSPs, DMPs, ATDs, and AVSs. Super DSPs like Google Ads and Google Marketing Platform, Facebook Ad Manager, and Amazon DSP were also covered as they own and operate (O&O) advertising inventory on their platforms, as opposed to typical DSPs that do not own advertising inventory. Programmatic ecosystem is very complex and ever changing and thus is always a challenging course topic.
Programmatic creative unit
Programmatic creative was made a unit partially because of students’ interest. Unlike conventional campaigns, where most ads are created in advance, programmatic advertising allows the campaign to serve personalized ads to individuals and households. This unit reviewed early literature on the use of genetic algorithms to design banner advertising in the early 2000s, creative management platforms (CMPs) and dynamic creative optimization (DCO), and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in recommendations as ads. CMPs store and deliver predesigned multiple ads per target specifications at scale, whereas in DCO, digital assets (i.e., ad elements) are assembled, reassembled, and delivered in real time based on consumer information and feedback. Relevant privacy issues were explored to promote the proper use of creative techniques.
Programmatic process unit
It examined the six steps of a programmatic campaign: planning, integration, safeguarding, activation, measurement, and optimization. Planning covered decision-making on campaign objectives, target audience, targeting methods, media platforms, and ad formats. These decisions would affect which programmatic players (e.g., DSP, DMP, ATD) were selected to establish a local system to carry out the campaign, which was detailed in the step of integration. Safeguarding was made a separate step because of the importance of selecting brand safety and ad verification services. Activation dealt with the issue of the readiness to launch the campaign, including the collection of necessary data. Measurement and optimization were the last two steps of the programmatic process but were covered in separate units because of the large amount of content. This unit emphasized that the programmatic process was not necessarily linear because some steps might be iterated or taken out of the sequence.
Programmatic measurement unit
This unit emphasized that while measurement will not start until a campaign is launched, what is to be measured must be defined prior to the launch of the campaign. This is because the item to measure may require specialized location data vendors, as in a case where location data is essential for a mobile advertising campaign. This unit also examined campaign objectives, KPIs, and metrics, and stressed that all KPIs are metrics but not all metrics are KPIs for a given campaign. Basic concepts covered in this unit were benchmarks and thresholds, macro and micro conversions, conversion tracking and conversion rate, attribution models, data types (first-, second-, and third-party data), and use of online and off-line data.
Programmatic optimization unit
Programmatic optimization refers to the practice of implementing the insights from programmatic measurement to improve an ongoing campaign. The beauty of programmatic advertising is that the advertising and its agency specialists can tweak almost every aspect of an ongoing campaign, any way they like, in light of their interpretation of key metrics. This unit covered major aspects of optimization, including audience, location, platform, device, inventory, and safety. For example, audience optimization can be implemented a couple of weeks after the campaign is activated and responsive audience members are known. The composition of responsive audience members can be analyzed, and the lookalike modeling may be used to identify new segments to broaden the coverage of the campaign. Effective frequency can also be estimated and used to cap the frequency of ad views, especially to optimize the message weight of cross-media campaigns.
Programmatic future unit
This was the last unit of the course. It is important for students to understand that programmatic advertising is relatively new and not without problems. This unit focused primarily on three top challenges: tech tax for publishers, ad fraud for advertisers, and annoying ads for consumers. The seriousness of these challenges was demonstrated with the latest statistics, ongoing trade efforts were reviewed, and future solutions were explored. For example, blockchain was introduced as a technology that allows people who do not know each other to trust a shared record of events. It has the potential to interrupt or even displace the existing programmatic ecosystem by reducing or eliminating many intermediaries in the buying process. Also, this unit looked at how AI is being integrated in programmatic advertising to mitigate the levels of annoying ads. All of the discussion helped students see a better future for digital advertising with newer technologies and higher standards.
Course Materials
Materials for the course included a textbook, articles, and cases from WARC, and video lessons for certificates from the Trading Academy. The textbook I recommended to students was Programmatic Advertising: The Successful Transformation to Automated, Data-Driven Marketing in Real-Time (Busch, 2016). It consisted of 22 chapters authored by professionals and academics and covered a wide range of issues. Required course materials included articles and cases from WARC, and each of the seven units listed five articles and one case for students to read. Most of the articles and cases were published within the past 2 years. Other required materials were video lessons from the Trading Academy, which were largely interviews of professionals on various programmatic issues. Thanks to the generosity of the Trade Desk, our students were able to get complimentary access to these video lessons. After students completed watching all the video lessons for a certificate, which lasted 3 to 5 hours, and passed an exam (with 80% correct answers), they earned a certificate in programmatic advertising. As of the summer of 2019, five certificates were available, including Professional, Practitioner, Specialist, Strategist, and Connected TV. My students were required to earn all the certificates for the course. The diverse course materials enabled students to digest, select, and integrate to form their own knowledge and nurture their new interest in digital advertising.
Final Thoughts
The programmatic advertising course provided interested students with much-needed knowledge and skills in one of the fastest growing areas of digital advertising. As programmatic buying has transformed the way digital advertising is sold and bought, its impact has gone beyond buying itself to shape the practice of digital advertising planning, the structure and functions of advertising agencies, and the relationship between clients and their advertising partners. In this sense, all advertising students should have some exposure to the topic of programmatic advertising, even if they do not take a programmatic advertising course.
The programmatic advertising course made a nice addition to my undergraduate teaching portfolio. My research interest has been in digital advertising issues since 1994 when the first banner ad appeared on the HotWired website, and I have taught interactive advertising courses since 1998. I have also taught a web analytics course that explores the effective use of Google Analytics, a powerful tool I first adopted in 2006 for the Journal of Interactive Advertising that I cofounded (Leckenby & Li, 2000). The three courses covering interactive advertising, web analytics, and programmatic advertising supplement each other in terms of subjects, and in combination they cover many important aspects of digital advertising in adequate depth.
No doubt, these courses need to keep bringing the latest theories and best practices into the classroom. The reality is that inventive technologists and creative advertisers always find better ways to meet the needs and wants of consumers in a competitive marketplace. For our students to have a successful career in the ever-changing business of advertising, our curriculum must keep abreast of industry advances and new research findings and explore the next wave of innovation in brand communications.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material1 - Supplemental material for My Experience in Teaching Programmatic Advertising
Supplemental material, Supplemental Material1 for My Experience in Teaching Programmatic Advertising by Hairong Li in Journal of Advertising Education
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material2 - Supplemental material for My Experience in Teaching Programmatic Advertising
Supplemental material, Supplemental Material2 for My Experience in Teaching Programmatic Advertising by Hairong Li in Journal of Advertising Education
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental materials are available online with this article on Figshare.
References
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