John Hancock, the insurance and investment company, has gleaned numerous benefits from tapping into the power of programmatic advertising.
Barbara Goose, chief marketing officer at John Hancock, discussed this subject on a recent webinar held by Brand Innovators.
She reported that programmatic has been a valuable asset for the investment and insurance firm in numerous ways.
“We feel like it’s a great weapon,” she said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: John Hancock adapts to new COVID-19 mindsets and marketing realities – and ‘ramps up’ for 2021.)
The benefits of programmatic, Goose added, include being “a great way to reach your audience and be super relevant with your message.”
For John Hancock, a player in a category that often fails to generate interest among younger, digitally-savvy consumers, this approach has other advantages, too.
“We very much needed to grow a new audience – and [that audience was] very much digital,” Goose told the Brand Innovators online session.
Goose further ventured that programmatic not only allows marketers to achieve meaningful scale, but also to deepen their consumer understanding.
“We’re doing a good job because we're putting it into the mix. We’re anxious to get more scale and our [programmatic] model gave us a definition of kind of what digital scale looks like,” she said.
Indeed, Goose reported, there is considerable room for programmatic growth. “We could honestly double what we’re spending and it would still help our return,” she said.
Goose joined John Hancock after 15 years at Boston-based agency Digitas, where she spent her last 18 months as president.
Brand safety is still a concern, she continued, but is not as great a worry as in the past, when agencies and clients lacked tools to stop ads appearing next to undesirable content.
“Early on, when I was at Digitas, [people would ask], ‘What happens if your ad ends up on some horrible site?’” Goose said.
With screeners and experienced programmers now in place to manage programmatic, “That’s less of a risk,” she asserted.
“We believe in the relevancy for the customer, so the upside [of programmatic] is super strong. It’s a great tactic for us.”
Sourced from WARC
