Programmatic Pole Position

Formula 1 racing to those who have only a passing interest in it would appear to be about young men who have absolutely no concept of fear being paid eye-watering sums of money to travel the most glamorous parts of the globe and look ridiculously handsome while conducting interviews with the press that have all the depth of a premiership footballers reading list and occasionally jumping into a piece of technology, which propels them around for a couple of hours at great speed until one of them – very often, the exact same one – crosses the line and is showered with champagne.

For the true fans, the real action though is the stuff that goes on behind the scenes.

The rivalries between teams and even within the teams and their drivers. Who has the most money to spend on development and attracting the best talent. Who has the ability to gather the most high-profile celebrities to their plush corporate boxes, safely separated from the Hoi Polloi by catch fencing, several meters of tarmac, pit buildings and a legion of security guards… and so on.

And yet, behind all of this is the very serious business of engineering, which is really what Formula 1 is all about. Or rather, the application of engineering within an extremely tightly defined set of parameters.

The rules of actually racing cars on the track against one another have changed little in decades. Tweaks have been introduced to try and prevent drivers from gaining on track advantages and doing things that might endanger one another, but a driver from the 1960s or 70s would easily be able to educate themselves on the differences and adapt their driving style, probably while drinking a martini and playing roulette at the same time.

However, the rulebook for the construction of the car, how it is managed during racing and what things can and cannot be exploited to enhance its performance requires an army of (literal) rocket scientists, technical designers, engineers and of course lawyers to navigate. A far cry from chaps called Arthur or Fred who wore oily overalls had oily hair and a ‘knack’ with a V8 and a set of socket spanners, when the sport originated.

The real key to F1 success is finding the tiniest bits of ambiguity in the rules and ‘discovering’, or in other words Having-The-Budget to find a way of exploiting those ambiguities to their absolute limit, which in practice means gathering and analysing a ton of data from every single component. Riveting eh!

Everything else, right up to and including the Jedi- like reaction times of the drivers is all just icing on the cake. Pretty much every driver on the grid has the skills and capability to win a race and every team can build a car which meets the necessary requirements.

It’s how far the team can push the technology available to them without breaking the rules – or without anyone noticing that they have - that makes the difference.

To the average punter though, things appear more or less unchanged. The cars look and sound amazing and move at incredible speed. The racing is furious and the drama both on and off track is scintillating. Unless data is really your bag, it is perfectly possible to enjoy F1 and ignore all the geekiness that underpins it.

And so it is with advertising.

Ads have been thrown at us from a variety of sources since forever. For most of us, the products might change over time and the ones we notice change as we ourselves age but like F1, as a consumer, you might be forgiven for thinking that advertising is what it has always been. Mostly an annoyance, but one that occasionally sparks interest and action. Hardly anyone thinks about the how or the why of what gets put in front of us.

Ever since we first plugged our home PC into the phone lines roughly 30 years ago, to establish a shaky connection to a shiny new thing called The Internet, advertising has been a – not always very welcome – feature. Nothing has really changed that much in terms of our experience of it, yet underneath, absolutely everything has.

Identifying like-minded groups of people who may be receptive to different kinds of products has become increasingly easier over time using digital technology. In part because of the proliferation of platforms that service the interests of the people who marketers wish to target but also because of the ability to gather data from their behaviour online and then serve advertising directly to them whenever and wherever they go online.

This has rapidly turned the gathering and deployment of data into an art form, allowing advertisers unprecedented tools for targeting increasingly precise groups of individuals. Not only just because they will have a need or interest for a product but at almost the exact time when it is known they have a need for it. Furthermore, canny marketers can use this knowledge and technology to make different channels used by an individual compete for the opportunity to carry that advertising message.

Programmatic methods of advertising are now commonplace in the digital world and almost everyone operating in a vertical market will have been using it as their primary advertising strategy for a while now. Except Pharma.

The reasons for this will be known to anyone who has worked in this sector. Regulation.

But now, that know-how from less tightly regulated consumer markets has been transferred into the healthcare sector and using carefully constructed data sets and the latest in targeting technology, regulation compliant programmatic advertising is taking off for pharma clients.

Just like in F1, it will be those clients who embrace this technology and understand the ways to maximise its benefits early on who will be the ones to get covered in champagne.

The front running teams who aim to deliver this new era of pharma and healthcare related advertising to HCPs are starting to make a name for themselves as was evident at last weeks’ PM Society Digital Awards and I was lucky enough to be invited to the event by The Digital Peloton who are leading the charge in the UK.

If our business was considered a little more glamorous then perhaps we could have our own reality TV/documentary series on Netflix too… Advertise to Survive anyone?