I have come across startups and larger businesses in the Middle East who use online methods such as social media and Google Ads to promote their services and products to end-users either B2B or B2C and I think it’s a good thing. However, it has its downsides too. When you are trying to promote products and services through digital marketing but are not getting conversions, there is definitely something that has to be changed with regards to the system used or the type of strategy in place.

Having been in the digital, smartphone and advertising industry for over 8 years and having worked in the Middle East for approximately 5 years with brands spread across different verticals, I feel that there is a lot of improvements that can be made with regards to digital content execution and content marketing. Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are the two countries that need to start adopting the future of digital advertising – which is Programmatic.

Put simply, programmatic ad buying is the use of software to buy digital advertising spaces across millions of places. Instead of going through the process of traditional advertising which includes requests for proposals, quotes, human negotiation, and tenders; programmatic ad buying is more seamless and faster.

There are so many businesses in Bahrain which could benefit a lot from programmatic advertising, where they could increase their brand awareness and boost sales and revenues to 45% whether it’s online or offline.

Why do I recommend Programmatic Advertising to businesses in the hospitality, automotive and fashion and the education industries, ministries—and even schools?

1. Gain access to a wider audience that is anywhere between 40M to 150M across various regions and demographics.
2. The cost of leveraging these kinds of ads is far different from Google Ads and early adopters of this technology have the chance to make more money through sales.
3. When it comes to business, all that matters are numbers and your quarterly numbers can be huge if you execute programmatic advertising.
4. Access to 50+ brand data providers, 60,000 data attributes and over 1 million profiles globally

Traditionally you would have manually prepared ad tags or insertion orders, which can be labor-intensive. With the execution of programmatic buying, optimization experts have more time for leveraging and improving ads rather than going the whole route of sending proposals, quotes or tenders.

Humans will always be needed to plan and optimize advertising, but programmatic advertising will mean there will be fewer ad buyers buying spaces that are far more valuable and high converting compared to basic CPM and CPC methods. Is it successful? And why?

Quite simply: Yes. It’s tried, tested and super-efficient. EMarketers noted that there were numerous researches which have estimated that the US spends money on programmatic ads which accounts for 84% of all digital display ads spending. Furthermore, 74.5% or $24.25 billion of these sales are through private marketplaces or direct setups. Some of the leading programmatic advertising solutions are Oracle, BlueKai, SmartyAds, MediaMath, and Criteo. Running such kinds of ads is not for everyone and requires the assistance of optimization experts to ensure that bids and buys are not going to get wasted by placing them on platforms that have less conversion potential.

Nigel Quadros
Digital Marketing Team Lead
AMG Digital