At this year’s LeadsCon, one topic keeps bubbling to the surface: programmatic advertising. So much data is available from both third parties and first parties, as well as proprietary data that brands are quietly sitting on and a million different solutions to make that data work for users. There’s a sense that marketing is becoming a simple formula, where data is plugged into an algorithm, and the machines do all the work. If you aren’t doing marketing that way, you’re doing it wrong.

This is an oversimplification of a complex development in marketing. The reality is that creative execution and human judgment are still important in determining what data is useful — and how to harness it. But there are no best practices to tell us how to do this, which brings us to the main problem in the programmatic revolution.

The Programmatic Dilemma

The question is simple: How do I make programmatic advertising interesting and enticing to users? The algorithms by themselves cannot create compelling content, yet compelling content on its own won’t attract users unless it’s put in front of them and noticed.

More and more marketers are realizing the need to combine the creative side of traditional advertising with the data of the programmatic approach to advertising. Yet few marketers have any clue as to how to combine these two sides to the marketing coin.

This is creating a need for marketers to partner with a company that can help them create good content and deploy it where it will be most effective.

ion Interactive Solutions

At this year’s LeadsCon, ion Interactive President Scott Brinker will discuss this issue in a keynote presentation. ion has developed a content software platform that helps marketers boost campaign performance by adopting creative strategies to different contexts and data sets. Brinker will discuss the burgeoning industry of content-development SaaS for marketers and how it impacts the lead generation world.

His timing couldn’t be better. The need for compelling content that gets high-quality clicks and engagement has never been stronger. We all know click-thru rates are down and going down further — just when more brands are getting into digital as traditional channels continue to collapse. What we need is a smart platform that empowers marketers to adjust and improve their ad campaigns using whatever data they have available. Companies like ion are promising to provide just that.

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