As a discipline, performance marketing is both the ultimate in efficiency and on a worrying path. But the tactic, in which buyers pay only for measurable results, now stands ready to be rejuvenated, says a leading ad-tech exec.

“The modernization of performance marketing has still got a long way to go,” according to Marco Bertozzi, the new performance marketing head of ad agency SMG.

“Because we haven’t necessarily had all the relevant tools and data, performance has gone down this road of straightforward, lowest cost-per-click (pricing), based on last-click models.

“We should be taking in to account the availability of attribution modelling… as part of performance. Otherwise, our KPIs are getting lower and lower an we’re going to run out of road.”

Bertozzi, too, is changing. As a long-serving executive at SMG parent Publicis’ VivaKi digital unit, he oversaw the rise of programmatic technology, including through VivaKi’s Audience On Demand unit.

Arguably, Bertozzi’s new role, which comes as Publicis organizes in to four agency divisions, suggests yet another maturation of programmatic ad-tech. He is tasked with unifying SMG’s performance activities in one practice.

“People are very focused on ‘programmatic’ as the label,” Bertozzi adds. “But, actually… the journey toward a single view of customer… understanding cross-channel, cross-device… all of these metrics that we’re talking about daily in programmatic are actually the fundamentals to performance (marketing).”

 

This video part of a series about the state of programmatic advertising sponsored by OpenX. Please find other videos from the series here.