Why Purpose-Built Marketplaces Matter for Marketers
Today’s digital landscape is brimming with buzzwords like “full-funnel campaigns,” “omnichannel,” “data-driven,” “personalization,” and more. These concepts promote the idea that marketers can achieve all their goals with a single, unified approach. However, while these ideas sound appealing, the reality is that one-size-fits-all solutions often fall short, especially when it comes to achieving distinct objectives like performance and branding.
This is where purpose-built marketplaces and technology come into play. These specialized platforms are designed to cater to specific marketing goals, whether it’s driving immediate actions or building long-term brand awareness. In particular, it makes infinite sense for there to be separate marketplaces tailored to performance and branding objectives. By focusing on the unique demands of each objective, marketers can achieve better outcomes.
All marketplaces must fulfill four fundamental functions:
- Access to inventory (or supply)
- Access to data
- Bring intelligence to that data to inform proper buying decisions (bidding)
- Deliver meaningful ad experiences that, in the process, allow for product discovery and value realization
Let’s discuss how performance-driven marketplaces, which tend to be largely mobile-centric given the centrality of mobile in consumers’ lives, handle each of these steps differently from branding-focused marketplaces.
Access to Supply
The first crucial function of any marketplace is to provide access to supply, which fundamentally differs depending on the marketing objective. In a performance-focused marketplace, the objective is clear: drive specific actions, or prompt the consumer to make an app download or purchase. The supply or inventory here predominantly includes gaming apps and other mobile environments where users show higher propensity to take immediate action. Such apps or gaming environments rely on full-screen ads and conversion-oriented placements as common tools to encourage engagement and prompt actions.
On the other hand, a brand-focused marketplaces has a broader objective: boosting brand share of mind and attention, while reaching as many eyeballs as possible. Brands like BMW or McDonald’s aren’t just looking to drive clicks; they want to ensure their message reaches prospective consumers, during product or service discovery, across multiple devices and channels – including Connected TV, mobile, desktop, audio platforms or even on out-of-home screens. The inventory in a brand-centric marketplace is more diverse, covering a wide spectrum of content topics or genres, and encompassing a wide range of formats that blend in with the app content. They need to leverage various screens – both big and small, at home or on the go – to maximize visibility and engagement.
Leveraging Data
While data governance, ingestion, and enrichment might remain the same across the two different marketplaces, the use of specific signals or the kind of consumer intelligence derived from them varies significantly between performance and branding objectives. Device IDs have traditionally been used to link users to their traits. With privacy regulations and restrictions in advertising, though, these device IDs are no longer available to marketers.
Performance-focused marketplaces will evolve to focus on signals that are contextual in nature, like user interaction within mobile environments, and traits derived from it. Marketers are interested in how much time users spend in an app, how they engage with the content, and what triggers them to take action. For example, in a gaming app, data might reveal how long a user plays before they’re likely to click on an ad, at what periods of the day they are most active, other device usage patterns, and more. While decoupled from device IDs that are precise, this granular-level contextual data, coupled with machine learning intelligence, provides essential fuel for optimizing bids and targeting the right user cohorts to drive conversions.
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Brand marketplaces, on the other hand, focus on linking user journeys across multiple channels. Just like the performance marketplace, the lack of third-party cookies on the web makes it difficult for marketers to link data or unify customer views. However, the goal here is less about immediate actions and more about understanding how and where users are consuming content and discovering brands, which helps in placing ads where they’re most likely to be seen by the target audience. Contextual signals, including content consumption patterns on mobile and bigger screens like CTV, when paired with household signals like IP addresses, provide the building blocks to create a unified view of the consumer across multiple screens, even in the absence of cookies.
Intelligence from Data
In a performance marketplace, the intelligence derived from data is used to optimize bids for specific actions. The focus is on acquiring users at the lowest possible cost per acquisition (CPA). This often involves real-time bidding based on user data, with the aim of maximizing conversions within a given budget. In the absence of identifiers though, marketplaces rely on their machine learning expertise to combine contextual signals or moments observed over a period of user activity to build audience cohorts that paint a better picture of a user’s interests or intent. This allows bidders to understand, with better degree of confidence, what type of users they are seeing in the case of ID-less requests.
Similarly, brand buyers have restricted visibility into key audience segments, such as demographic- or interest-based audiences, that were the lifeline of behavioral and ID-based targeting. Take the example of a brand like Burger King or KFC that might like to launch a new line of plant-based meals targeting millennials. The need of the hour is to recreate demographic- and/or interest-based audiences for the specific use case. This might be with a cohort like “Millennials who are working professionals and lead a healthy lifestyle” — but without the use of IDs. Additionally, the marketplace should be able to help marketers extend these traits across the user’s journey on multiple channels.
Creative Formats and Ad Experiences
Finally, a marketplace must help marketers deliver meaningful ad experiences. The use of creative formats and a campaign’s mix might differ between performance and branding objectives.
The creative formats in performance marketplaces tend to be interactive and designed to capture attention quickly, making them ideal for mobile environments where users are on the go. Creative formats like full-screen videos, playable ads, or rewarded videos are preferred means to engage users, leading to informed clicks and high-quality downloads
Brand marketplaces, on the other hand, focus on broad reach and long-term engagement. While formats are important, it’s the creative storytelling that leaves a lasting impression. Sequential advertising is popular, with buyers running ad campaigns across multiple channels. Ad formats index heavily toward video as a medium to boost attention, and ads are designed to increase brand recall through guaranteed video completions, on channels like mobile and connected TV.
Ultimately, purpose-built marketplaces lead to purpose-built results. In a world where mobile is central to consumers’ lives and where digital interactions are increasingly fragmented across devices and channels, purpose-built marketplaces are not just a nice-to-have—they’re essential. They enable marketers to connect the dots between supply, data, intelligence, and creative in a way that is aligned with their goals, ultimately leading to better outcomes for both performance and branding campaigns.
