Programmatic USPs Need Auditing And Testing

One of ExchangeWire's 'inside sources' shares views views on why they are bored of the same old 'USPs', and why rigorous testing of media platforms is required if  the lofty claims of enthusiastic sales professionals are to be taken seriously.  

‘Proprietary DSP’, ‘custom bid algorithms’, ‘custom audiences’, ‘unique inventory’, all familiar programmatic USPs to you dear readers, but whenever I hear these sayings I get a sense of dread come over me.

It all started when media vendors decided they needed some hotshot marketing and sales guys to get their operations off the ground. They got a marketing team who can paint a story which made sense to planner buyers and then employed some highly motivated 20-somethings to get out there and spin that story to the point where the planner buyers feel obliged to book with the vendor (I call this media bullying, but appreciate that is a strong term to use).

Fast-forward to 2014 and this is still the same. As the market evolves there are less USPs to go round so what you end up seeing are very similar presentations day in and day out. 

The question ‘so what makes you different from X, Y and Z?’ must have been asked thousands of times over the past two years and off the back of them questions you see some very unnecessary iterations to product offerings.

Ok, so we’re all bored of the same USPs and the same presentations but what can we do to improve this? 

We need some open and rigorous testing frameworks in place by an independent third-party to

A) Validate the USP claims and B) Test vendors against one another.

However, there are two big stumbling blocks here:

1.) Marketers and their intermediaries are tasked with results and often test budgets are in short supply.

2.) Fair testing is very difficult in digital media (which has been of benefit to a number of vendors in the space).

What it all boils down to is that an agency or client should not give a sh*t about a custom algorithm, unique data, etc.

What they should really focus their attentions on is testing these vendors to see if they deliver bottom-line business growth, as after all, that is what they’re trying to achieve.

If we were to see these tests in an open and fair forum we could then stop getting frustrated over the authenticity of the (often made up) USPs.

So let’s get testing!