A quick update: If you're reading this from the future, here's the recorded sessions of The Long Game!

Last week I told you about Amanda's session at The Long Game. This week is about what came right after it, when Kaitlyn and Stephanie from The Trade Desk took the floor.

They opened by asking the room to think about the last time we read about the Dockers, watched a favourite show, or put a podcast on. Take a moment to do the same; we’ll come back to it.

Search and social is where most of us feel comfortable. It's familiar, and it's easy to measure. But your customers only spend 24% of their time inside those platforms. The other 76% goes on everything else: the news, a playlist, a show, a podcast.

Here’s where we go back to the first thought. The things we'd all just been picturing, reading the news, watching TV, listening to a podcast, are exactly where your customers spend that other 76%.

Showing up in those moments does more for growth than trying to be everywhere at once. This is where programmatic earns its keep. Instead of a publisher deciding what ad your customer sees and when, your own data does the deciding, in real time, wherever your customer happens to be.

It plays out in the numbers too. Buy media the old way, and the same person might see your ad 20 times spread across five different platforms. Run it through programmatic instead, and that number can drop to around 8, freeing up the rest of the budget to go and find someone new.

What excites me about this is how much of it comes down to using data you probably already have, just pointed in the right direction.

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This is taken from the weekly email written by one of our directors, Roberto Boi. Every Thursday he shares observations, ideas and perspectives from the work we’re doing day to day at Dilate. If you’d like to get it delivered straight to your inbox, you can sign up here.