Martech Interview with Steph Miller, Commercial Director, UK at Adnami

At a time when targeted advertising seems to be under threat, with cookies, ATT and more high on the agenda, brands need to make every digital advertising opportunity count more than ever before. As a result, the benefits of each different format is under the spotlight. Here, we meet Steph Miller, the UK Commercial Director at Adnami, who explains the hype around high impact, and shares the secrets of her company’s success.

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As a digital publisher, why should I want to work with a high impact advertising specialist? 

Publishers who manage their own high impact ads tend to be limited by their experience of the formats. Many are  only able to  sell takeovers or on a direct IO basis , which are  powerful advertising vehicles, but only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to high impact.. 

By working with Adnami you can more easily introduce other elements of high impact whilst retaining all of the creative control and client negotiations. Whatsmore, Adnami only charges a small tech fee and therefore you are able to start increasing your yield and managing growth per impression.

What problem does Adnami exist to solve? 

Each publisher requires slightly different specifications for their high impact ad spots, so for brands, and their agencies, running a campaign across multiple sites, or in multiple territories, there’s a lot of manual work involved to adapt the creative for every site on the plan. Adnami provides the tech bridge between Agencies and Publishers that allows ads to render perfectly every time across our certified publishers, meaning only one set of creatives is required for each campaign.

This not only provides efficiency for advertisers, with hours of time saved, it also guarantees consistency across the campaign and, by standardising the creatives, enables ads to be traded at scale programmatically in one deal.

For publishers, the bonus is they keep all the control. The alternative is having networks sell their inventory for them and then take a revenue share. 

Adnami strips out the complexity and creates a seamless, simplified process for all parties. 

How does this differ from other players in this space?

In many cases you will see everything happen in reverse: the vendor will approach the agency to get the deal, and will then go to the publisher and offer up a number of campaigns to run on their sites. They then take a rev share on those deals. This will equate to anything between 40 and 60% of the revenue on a monthly basis. With Adnami, it’s a fixed CPM, and the publisher gets to choose the margins, so they are much more in control of their bottom line. 

Where would you say you sit in the ecosystem? Are you publisher first, or brand first? 

Neither – we’re tech first. We exist to bridge that tech gap between agencies and publishers. Our aim is to keep our sales team as lean as possible and instead enable those conversations with agencies around how we can help them streamline their workflows and save time in managing deals, and empower the Publisher sales teams to get out there and sell the more attention grabbing campaigns with juicier budgets.

What’s the biggest misconception about high impact advertising?

I think many people still feel a disconnect with High Impact advertising. They want to place high impact at the top of the marketing funnel as a branding exercise and digital advertising is typically used further down the funnel to drive cheap clicks. However, it really can, and should, sit throughout the funnel. Obviously it’s lovely to have big branding campaigns in huge formats – it’s a brilliant way to get your brand out there, it’s effective and drives a lot of engagement – but that’s not always the sole objective of an ad campaign.

Marketers are constantly thinking about what specific outcome they want from an individual campaign. For example, if you’re a phone provider trying to convince people to sign a contract with your company, you need them to see the offering over and over again. They are unlikely to click on the first ad they see and change their contract immediately.

With ecommerce it’s different as the price points and commitment are less. You see a pair of shoes you like and it’s not a stretch to say that’s enough to drive a sale. 

So, it all depends on what your brand is and what your user journey through to sale looks like, but my key piece of advice is, don’t necessarily think of high impact as only sitting at the top of the funnel and being a branding opportunity. It really can go all the way through because we do offer formats that command attention and engagement.