the marketing attractions podcast

Conversations on How Nonprofit Attractions Drive Attendance Through Marketing

Using a DSP to Help Plan Your Attraction’s Digital Marketing

We talk with a DSP rep to get the most up-to-date approaches on how to use a DSP to plan your next programmatic ad campaign.

We discuss…

  1. What media channels attractions can really buy programmatically in 2024
  2. A few tactics to buying streaming TV and radio on a local level
  3. What you can’t buy with a DSP (Meta, YouTube)
  4. Why it’s important to communicate with your DSP rep and/or campaign manager as you begin to plan your digital media budgets, strategies and tactics

A big thanks to Jake Ponce de Leon from Simpli.fi for joining the show.


This podcast is produced by attend media.

attend helps nonprofit attractions drive visitation through paid media. Download our free guide to media planning for nonprofit attractions at our site – attend.media

Episode Transcript:

You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their missions through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attend Media. All right Jenny, today’s topic using a DSP to plan digital marketing. Yeah, I love this. We’re not really telling our clients what is a DSP? What is permanent. I mean, we will answer those questions, but I think everyone listening or nonprofit attractions are the most part. Know what programmatic media is or they at least know there is a line on them on their plan for programmatic media or programmatic display, but we’re really going to talk about what you can’t do in 2023 going into 2024 today. What’s realistic and then also how we can really use the tool for planning because I think this is where maybe a lot of agencies or even advertisers think they don’t have access to some of this behind the scenes data, but there’s a lot of really useful information that you can get from a DSP to actually plan your media and set your budget right up front versus just saying, well, the minimum spend is X. So that’s how much I’m putting towards it. Yeah. And to make sure that we do have the most up-to-date information, we actually brought in a DSP rep. His name is Jake Ponce de Leon. He’s from Simplify. Let’s get into it. All right, we’ve got Jake from Simplify joining the Marketing Attractions Podcast. Jake, how you doing? Welcome to the show. Great, Ryan. Thanks for having me. Appreciate the time for me to share a little bit more about the programmatic space today. Absolutely. So why don’t you give like a 30-second, 60-second intro on you and yourself in Simplify? Yeah, absolutely. So, again, Jake Ponce de Leon, I work for Simplify. I work in the programmatic space on the vendor side, specifically DSPs. And I’ve worked for several in the past and I work for one now. You said a magic word there. DSP. So why don’t we set the stage, get some of these terms out of the way? What exactly is a DSP? So DSP, like all the other pronouns we have has a definition to it. It’s demand-side platform. And that’s just simply a platform for advertisers to buy on for digital programmatic advertising. So Simplify would be one of them. Do you have any competitors in the space? Yeah, other competitors in the space to be a basis, trade desks, stack-adapt. There’s probably about 10 major competitors in the space for us in the DSP space. Got it. So this is a web base. I’m going to a website, account name, put in my credit card, or do some type of billing, and I can execute ad campaigns right from this interface. Yep, absolutely. And yeah, there’s a ton of different options on the market, but some are self-server you log in and your hands are on the keyboard and setting up the targeting and the budgets and the flight dates. And then there’s also options on the market where someone will manage it for you. And so they are still using a DSP. You’re just simply using some of their workforce to help you out if you don’t have the bandwidth. Okay. Let’s define programmatic. What you got? Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a couple. I’m sure there’s a lot of pre-thought of definitions out there for myself. I think a programmatic is any program that you can use to buy and execute media. And that could be in the TV space, the digital space, the radio space. There’s a ton of different programmatic platforms that are out there, but anything that’s really making your life easier when executing a media campaign can be considered programmatic. Well, I know Jenny knows that I used to be a TV rep. We used to get our buys with a fax machine. I don’t know if I call it a fax machine. Programmatic. Okay. All right. So, you know, it’s 2024. What exactly can we buy with the DSP? Like, what is the reality nowadays? Yeah. So DSPs, they started with just kind of display advertising and some people might have like a predisposition of that. It’s only display, but we can buy a display now. We have native, which is kind of the cousin of display, pre-rolled video, connected TVs available. So anything, any kind of streaming television that’s out there. And then we can also do digital audio and bits and pieces as well. So the breadth and depth of the inventory has grown a ton over the last 10, 15 years. And for our audience, we’re talking about local attractions, zoos, aquariums, gardens, museums. I mean, Jenny, were you typically executing buys on a market level? Maybe even tighter, maybe a little broader? You know, what can we really buy, Jake, with the DSP like on a local level? Yeah. On a local level, you just have to be a little more careful than on a national level just because of the scale that’s available to you. So you can still buy all of that inventory that I’ve listed on a local level. It’s just a matter of the depth of targeting that you can use nowadays. So I can’t find families who drive a red van and have two dogs and three bicycles at a local level. But if you’re looking for more of like a household income or people who enjoy leisurely activities or museums, something a little bit more of a broad category, that’s what you can buy at a local level effectively currently. I think there, we’ve had some previous discussions around like local media, traditional media versus digital media. And I think in many cases you have a lot of opportunity to reach still a relatively large audience with digital. But there’s still like, I think if you can kind of talk to us a little bit, like, are you going to be able to run streaming audio on a local level through a DSP and reach as many people as you can with terrestrial radio on a local level or streaming TV digitally on a local level versus broadcast TV because a lot of the data that’s coming out is showing like more people are going to streaming audio, more people are going to streaming TV. But can you really tap into them from an advertising perspective on a local level and still get that same reach? Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And there’s as always, there’s a little bit of it depends on the back end of that. But really if we’re using the same kind of approach as terrestrial radio and linear television, where we’re just buying like a geographical area, typically we can get a little bit more specific. So instead of buying all of Tampa or all of Jacksonville, you can buy the two, three, four zip codes that maybe meet a little bit closer to your attraction or that have a more relevant audience to your attraction. So you can get more specific. But I would say again that the targeting’s got to be a little bit more broad as well. So just again, just double, triple, quadruple, checking the scale is always going to be important. So we can buy three, four zip codes and probably deliver really well, but we can’t again find families with six kids and drive three mini vans and have two dogs because there’s only three of those right maybe close to your attraction and then we’re really fighting for inventory delivery. So it’s a treat it like a treat at the same way then right? You’re buying traditional broadly. You’d be buying digital broadly on that local level. Yeah, you’ve got it dead on just keep it really broad and we can get more specific geographically and keep it the same as far as targeting goes. Well, okay, let’s just keep set the stage here though. What can we buy? What can we access with the DSP? Yeah, also a great question. The biggest like hot topic hot button right now is in the connected TV space because there’s probably hundreds of apps at this point that are streaming content. So a lot of those like hot names or household brand names that are paid subscriptions like a HBO max or a Netflix or even some of Kulu’s not available through a DSP or have programmatic inventory available. But if you think of anything that’s really like super ad supported. So free advertising streaming television is a huge one or anything that has even just limited ads as well can be bought through PMP. But the big things to kind of avoid are those like really I would call super premium names within the streaming space that have paid subscriptions currently. So if you’re paying $9.99 or $4.99 for that streaming app, we’re likely unable to get any inventory on it whereas if you’re just able to click on it and get free content that’s typically what you’re going to be able to buy within that streaming television space currently. And this term walled gardens like can I buy Meta? Can I buy YouTube? Yeah also a great question. Yeah any any of the social media apps I would say so Twitter, Instagram, Facebook all those are going to be native to the platform. So if I want to buy Facebook inventory or Instagram inventory I’m going to have to go directly to them and same thing goes with Amazon as well. So if you think of like kind of the big four tech companies out there those are all going to be my Ryan mentioned walled gardens and you’re going to have to go to them directly to get any sort of inventory. We fall kind of in between the lines of Google and and and socials the way that I explain it. So Google they are the biggest tech company you know out there and you’re going to have to go to them directly for anything that they own and then for socials same thing that’s kind of their own monster and own platform that you’re going to buy on but anything that falls in between. So if you’re reading an article on ESPN or looking up a holiday recipe that’s where we’re going to be able to get the inventory for you. Excellent. All right so let’s get into the meat here. How can we use a DSP to help develop our digital media plan or overall plan? I know we talked about some ideas on how to do this far away. Yeah so the biggest thing is just there’s a ton of planning tools built into DSPs not just simplify all of them out there have some sort of planning tool like your disposal and they allow you to either plug in the audience you’re looking for or the geographical area you’re looking to target and they’ll either provide household levels or device let or the amount of devices that are available to target or some sort of number that you can use to plan off of and then depending on that number we can do a daily budget weekly budget monthly budget but there’s a ton of tools out there built into the DSPs currently that at least give you and point you in the right direction of how much we should be allocating to different audiences different inventory sources different flights things like that and there’s even tools that help you with CPMs as well so for you know deep in December around the holidays it’s going to tell you a bit a little bit higher versus maybe the low of June or July in the summer we can be a little bit more effective with our CPMs and costs of media as well so just there’s a whole number out there but you know household numbers device numbers reaching frequency all different things that we can plug into our DSP and be able to get some sort of result that is you know informing us where we should put our budgets Jenny I’m thinking you know I’m going into Facebook or meta and I’m I’m setting up a promoted post campaign or I’m in my Google ads account and I’m tweaking my search campaign each of those platforms have some sort of campaign planner Jake is telling us this is similar to what simplify or any other DSP could do yeah I think this is important because when we think about the planning process the planning and buying process that can live with different people so you have different people who are building that strategy the initial channel mix and then it gets handed to a buying team and whether that’s a broadcast buying team or whether that’s a digital buying team we’re going out and trying to execute something but if those teams aren’t talking during the planning phase and they aren’t using these audience numbers or these household numbers like Jake just referred to within the platforms you could be building out a plan or a channel mix based off of like research and survey data from a year ago to determine that hey everyone’s watching streaming TV so I’m going to put all my money in a streaming TV versus broadcast and then you give that money to your vendor or try to plug it into that DSP and then you realize you can’t actually spend that money so if you’re not utilizing the audience sizes or the impression counts to be able to build that plan out in the beginning you can have probably have difficulty actually executing that plan at the end and I think sometimes I get covered up with just the ability to optimize and move money around because a lot of times maybe you didn’t utilize it utilize those numbers to build that plan in the first place so I think it’s crucial I think as you’re building out a media plan you should be asking like how these budgets were determined right so it’s going to be a combination hopefully of research that showed the audience was there but then actual data within a platform to show that audience size so that you can kind of look across the board and see what the audience sizes are total impression account or total impression count is in all these channels to see why you’re spending more on one channel versus the other and of course objectives matter too right they each serve a different purpose but understanding just the size and what you can spend I think is always a really helpful kind of planning tool when you’re going through the channels to know you know should I only be spending two thousand dollars or should I be spending ten thousand fifty thousand in this channel you’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast conversations on how non-profit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their mission through marketing your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of attend media attend media is a media planning and buying agency specializing in zoos aquariums gardens and museums for more information please visit attend.media now back to Ryan and Jenny okay so we’ve pulled this data we’ve we’ve dive into the DSP we’ve layered on some targeting options we’ve got an idea whether it be on a household or an impression level what we can actually do in the world in our market Jake how do we get this data from you or the DSP to the planner like can you talk about like best practices on getting everybody talking yeah I mean I think that’s the keyword right just get everybody talking whether that’s having a Zoom call or open Slack channel or email thread with everybody who’s on it and that’s somebody who’s hands on keyboard in the DSP that’s going to be buying it whether that’s the person it within the agency or somebody from you know our team that’s managing for you having somebody who has a holistic view of all the budgets so across programmatic linear radio newspaper all the channels that you’re buying having somebody that’s savvy to that and then I would say you know somebody who’s just also like the middle man to that and making sure that everything’s getting traffic accordingly so just get everybody in one way or another talking and on a call and that could be if I weekly check in or weekly one again an email thread that’s just ongoing but I think just communication across multiple people is key and within the agency too if they have you know a planning team and an execution team making sure both of those people are on the call as well and then also making sure everybody is using the same kind of source of truth so if we are pulling in impression level or a household number or whatever it might be that that data is the middle point for everybody and that we’re not pulling different data from different data sources and the media planning team is using one and the the media execution team is using a different data source and then the you know overall planer is using us third one and then all of a sudden our numbers are conflicting and then we have to almost start over from from square one and figure out which number we’re going to use so two points there have one source of truth as far as the data and research goes and then two find an open source of communication whether that’s a zoom call email through N Slack channel to make sure everybody communicates effectively across all the teams I can hear Jenny going oh my gosh well you know this needs to happen in the planning process right Jenny want to speak to that well I think this is kind of what we were talking about before right that’s that’s got to be happening up front in the planning but then also ongoing as the campaigns that you’re launching things change all of a sudden the things you thought you were going to track or could track might change the objectives could hopefully they don’t shift but they could so just making sure everyone on all sides is all up to date on what’s happening and then what’s the campaigns actually launched that we’re all still focused on the same thing like Jake was talking about so I think one of the other kind of tricky pieces is there’s a lot of data available and you go in with one kind of main metric to focus on but then you see all these other shiny objects and want to try to pull a lever multiple different ways so just staying focused on what that in result is and not making too many decisions too quickly to to make changes in the plan but letting it work the way it was intended to work and to support the objectives that it was created for I think our important as well too but I do I think that’s you know kind of another question if we talk about the data and all the things that you can look at Jake what what type of data can you provide in reports in addition to things like click through your rates completed view rates conversion rates what what are some other things that your team looks at that you can also share with clients too and reporting yeah I’ll speak a little bit more specifically to simplify here because that’s the company that worked for in the DSP that I know best and I look at reports daily most likely so I’ll speak a little bit more to that but for us we also pull domain list and that could be connected TV domain list or even just a normal web browser domain list to see how each individual website and each individual TV domain is performing and we’ll optimize a report against that for us we’re we’re big advocates of geofencing so we can see how each individual geofences performing as well so we’ll take a look of that and then we’re also just looking at budget fulfillment so how much of the budget for yesterday or the day before did we spend making sure that we’re pacing really well or if a you know line item is underpacing or underperforming work and we you know possibly move that budget so just looking at the main KPIs across you know as many ways that we can splice and dice it but two the big ones specifically and attractions would be the geofences that we’re using and then the domains is pretty much universal across all campaigns so those are two big ones and then the other one we have a keyword search tool specifically built into our DSP and so similar to Google AdWords we can see how keywords perform and that’s another way in which we can take you know 50 75 different data points and optimize across them as well so there’s a lot of different ways I would say those are probably the top three different things that we’re using and then the main one being that budget fluidity so how are the actual just overall tactics performing so there’s three tactics you know performing are we getting the cost per action or are we getting the click to rate that we want and if we’re not hey can we move 50 100 200 dollars to hopefully move that needle in the right direction so lot of different ways but I would say those are the couple the main ones that we’ve got Jake going back to the planning stuff um you know let’s say we have an aquarium that has an in-house team and maybe they don’t have work with an agency maybe they’re not as um experienced in in working directly with DSPs like what are some things that you need to get from the client the advertiser in this case in order to put together whether it be just recommendations or answer some the questions that they should be asking in terms of what’s really possible you know what’s the availability of inventory out there yeah I mean the number one uh thing is what is the objective is it just we’re trying to drive website traffic because there’s an event coming up is it that we’re trying to do ticket sales because we’ve got a one-time event where we’re bringing some sharks in or whatever it might be so the number one thing is the objective and then the number two thing would be what’s your key audience that you’re looking to target is it families is your number one audience is it you know couples that you’re trying to get is it date night you know what’s the audience that you find most to attend these events and that that can be two or three different audiences that’s totally fine but we need to know what the audience is you can’t just come to us and say we want to sell more tickets and it’s like well what’s the time frame you know what’s the objective is there a specific price point so if the tickets are $50 a piece is that that’s important to us as well because we need to make sure that return on ad spend is effective for the campaign um there’s just uh you know as much information as the client can provide is always better you know better or more is better but yeah those are just a couple of the baseline things also flight dates really important so are we spending this budget in a month are we spending it in a week are we spending it for the rest of the year that’s important as well and so all those things are are really important when trying to plan a campaign luckily uh you know most DSPs will do planning for free um so if you reach out to them they’re happy to put together a baseline proposal for them but again having those couple things in mind is is important and i also say just like have an idea of how much you want to spend on programmatic saying you have no budget really doesn’t help us at all because we’ll put together a million dollar plan and then all of a sudden you only have a thousand dollars and that’s a big change in the uh the proposal that we put together so it doesn’t have to be we have exactly $25,000 but hey we’re looking to spend five to ten thousand dollars or we’re looking to spend ten to twenty thousand dollars and that at least gets us in the ballpark of uh where we can put budgets and um you know how many different tactics we might need to employ for a single campaign good stuff okay so what should i mean think about the clients out there that you’re working with what are some things that they’re doing now that they probably shouldn’t be doing or what are some things that you wish they would be doing um you know specifically within their campaigns what are kind of some of the do’s and don’t say you’re saying yeah um produced i would say ask more questions i feel like there’s a lot of times that we might be providing reports and they don’t know what things are and they’re kind of afraid to ask or uh seem dumb to the vendor or are seem uneducated we’re totally fine with questions there’s you know a thousand different acronyms and if you don’t know what what one is just ask us or why are we optimizing towards something i would say just ask more questions or if the report is too in depth ask us to you know just simplify it down and and make it easy for you to understand so that you can portray it not only to your team but probably your boss or somebody else on the team that needs to understand it even at a simpler level than we do um and then the second do i would say just be open to fluidity across the campaign so just because we go in with a plan from day one or the start of the flight um doesn’t mean that we need to stick to it for the full 30 days 60 days 90 days of the campaign um you need to be open to moving budgets from one campaign to another or one line item to another or one tactic to another um you need to be open to new ideas if they were not performer ready to so we might have three tactics that we really like and i’m not saying happens all the time but there’s certainly campaigns where they kind of fall dead off the start so we need to come up with another idea and that’s okay to add a fourth campaign or even turn you know a specific targeting tactic off if it’s just not performing well so just being fluid and on the move um and then the last one i would say is just kind of trust your vendors so make sure that you’re vetting them fully and that you trust to work with them because they’re going to need to make some decisions for you along the way that you might not you know not that you don’t need to approve every second and you don’t need to micromanage um a lot of DSPs have a lot of smart people and they know what they’re doing so just making sure that you like the vendor and DSP that you pick so when it comes time to decide whether to get rid of a domain or a geofence that you trust them to make that small decision that probably can impact the campaign i’m pretty well and you don’t have to micromanage that campaign in the background um so those are three dues don’t so i would say don’t come to the table without an idea without of a budget that you want to spend because if you say we don’t you i don’t have an idea i’m going to put together you know a fifty thousand hundred thousand dollar budget proposal um and then you know we have to back it all the way down and then we do double the work that way so even if it’s a thousand dollars let us know it’s a thousand dollars and we can come up with something that’s effective that makes sense for that budget um and then the other one is don’t just activate a campaign without research like we’ve been talking about so um just because ctb’s hot does not mean that we can spend seventy five thousand dollars um in view for georja unconnected tv we need to make sure that we can uh deliver effectively um and then um make sure that it also performs effectively for the campaign so i would say just do a little bit of research or again um a lot of dsp’s do planning for free so make sure that they’re doing their due diligence to make sure that the campaign will deliver in full or will be effective for the the budget and the location that you’re trying to target so that’s two other ones that i would do for don’ts do for don’ts but yeah you see give you give a a minute for the rep uh to rip a little bit and he fires away here’s what i got you down for uh you’re saying ask questions uh specifically when it comes to reporting be open to uh your campaign managers advice uh on moving tactics i can see jennie going hmm let think about that one um number three you’ve got trust your vendors and i get that i mean these guys are in the platform day in and day out um number four coming to the table with a budget uh if you are going to rely on your dsp to actually do the plan for you having some sort sense of a budget gets them headed in the right direction and then i love the fifth one doing the research um don’t just send that budget down the line that came out of nowhere um you can dream it but the reality might look a lot different yeah and even if you do research right then the dsp can at least double check or whoever’s planning can double check that number so um just making sure everybody’s aligned with with the planning process and the research that makes sense for the campaign jennie from the uh from the planning side from the agency side anything to add to that list think it’s just be careful with slicing your budgets too thin um we kind of talked about this with social in the past but social has the problem of no minimums therefore it gets a lot of leftover dollars or really tiny test budgets um so sometimes that that all we see that transfer also in programmatic but just being careful that you’re not trying to run several tactics or you know audiences with a really small budget slicing and dicing it too thin um and i think just being careful with the targeting i think for non non-profit attractions cultural attractions sometimes you are trying to reach you know you’re you’re targeting is more the the market itself right of course you’ve got maybe parents or a particular um you know age group that you’re trying to reach but uh it’s a relatively broad audience so try not to layer too much targeting to you know define who that audience is and i think that’s going to give me more fluidity in terms of being able to optimize surds the best performance but yeah i think the the budgets and targeting are materials that we watch out for yeah with the slicing of dicing of of tooth in i know a lot of the like attractions that you guys are marketing to and working with um they want their budgets to be effective right we’re not just throwing a thousand dollars out there to throw a thousand dollars out there we want return on ads and we want visitors so um if you have a small budget like it’s not going to be the sexiest of plans out there with all these cool targeting tactics we need to keep it um you know lean and and effective to maybe some tactics that we know historically perform really well for cost for action or offline attribution or ever it might be so yeah if you have a small budget one or two tactics that we historically know work well um is going to be your best move as opposed to seven tactics and it’s really cool geofencing and addressable and all these like you know crazy tactics that sound good in theory but when it comes to small budgets are arenas effective we say keep it disciplined so i love that that’s great why so Jake wrapping this up um you know tell us why should zoos museums aquariums gardens be looking at simplified to be there go to dsp and uh and be sure to include a way for people to get in touch with you yeah absolutely um so simplify again it is a dsp we offer managed service and self service so depending on how your team is structured there’s definitely work models for you um and then we have a lot of uh tactics that work at that hyper local or dma level whether it’s geofencing competing attractions or other attractions that the the company might own um and we can also attribute both online and offline conversions so if you want ticket sales online where i go and i go through a whole cart process and get to a thank you page we can track those for you or if someone just simply sees a connected tv ad in their television and walks up to the front gate we can track that as well so really great attribution pieces um and again we can plan at that you know hyper local or dma level to let you know okay we can spend this amount or here’s what is going to be effective based on the households um that we found for your target audience so great planning tools easy work model um and even better attribution for for simplified excellent to get in contact with us the easiest way would be through our website it’s simply .fi s-i-m-p-l-i .fi or just google simplified dsp and that comes up as well uh biggest thing that ends in f i not f y um so that’s the easiest way to get in contact with us and there’s a ton of information on that website contact us button all that good stuff is on there as well Jake thanks for your time yeah thanks for having me this was so much fun i appreciate it thank you for listening to the marketing attractions podcast if you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to be a guest on the show please visit our website at marketing attractions podcast.com