Programmatic

Founded in 2006, Zillow is a real estate marketplace created by Spencer Rascoff (Cofounder of Hotwire), and former Microsoft executives + founders of Expedia—Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink. Apart from providing the estimated value of homes across the United States, the platform also offers several other features including price comparison of homes in and around a certain area; price change of a property within a given time frame (from one, to five, or even 10 years), a “Make Me Move” price information (which is an informal way to pre-market a house); aerial photographs as opposed to satellite imagery; credit check and eviction history report; and more. In September’11, Zillow had over 24 million unique visitors, representing a year-on-year growth of 103 percent. Out of these users, the company claimed that more than three-quarters were looking to buy or sell real estate in the next two years. Currently, 2 million real estate professionals are listed on Zillow, and 186 homes are viewed on mobile every second. In cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Boston, 90 percent of all the existing homes have been viewed. In 2014, Zillow bought Trulia, a long-time competitor, for $3.5 billion.The company reportedly generated a revenue of $1.3 billion in 2018 (Q1 2019: $454.1 million) and currently operates out of 10 office locations across 2 countries (Canada + United States).Let’s take a look at some of their most prominent advertising campaigns over the years: 2013-2016: “Find Your Way Home” For the first seven years, Zillow didn’t have a dedicated advertising budget, and relied primarily on the many USPs of their product to attract prospective customers. According to Rascoff—something that he also repeatedly told the company’s investors—Zillow, despite being the “largest web and mobile player in their category” had little to no brand awareness. “88 percent of Americans can’t come up with Zillow when asked to name a real-estate-related website,” he said. As a result, the company decided to double their advertising budget (a $10M to $15M increase) and started testing out some TV ads before announcing their Find Your Way Home campaign. After raising $147 million in IPO (September’12), Zillow partnered up with Deutsch (an LA-based marketing agency that’s worked with the likes of Taco Bell, Volkswagen, and Dr. Pepper) to launch a nation-wide advertising campaign that’d showcase the diversity of homebuyers in the modern times and the unique set of challenges that they face on the daily. Featuring relatable use-cases like a millennial buying his first home, a young family turning over a new leaf, and a multi-generation household searching for a new living space, the company ran 60, 30 and 15-second TV segments across popular cable networks. ...

Founded in October 2002 by Brent Oxley (then a student at Florida Atlantic University), HostGator is a Texas-based provider of shared, reseller, virtual private server, and dedicated web hosting. By 2006, HostGator had crossed 200,000 registered domains and opened their first international office in Ontario, Canada.In 2008, HostGator reached 100,000 customers and started offering unlimited space and bandwidth as part of all hosting packages. Just a year later, they doubled their customer-base and launched toll-free numbers for customers who opted for business-level hosting packages at no additional cost. At the same time, Inc. Magazine rated HostGator as one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States.HostGator was sold to Endurance International Group (EIG) for $299.8 million in 2012. Currently, the company has 1000 employees, and a global reach with localized, in-language offerings for Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Indian, Singaporean, Chilean, Colombian, African, Indonesian and Mexican customersLet’s take a closer look at their advertising strategy: Ad Spend and Ad Networks In the last 6 months, HostGator has spent $919.2K on online advertising, out of which, the majority went towards Google ($766.1K), and Direct Buy ($142.5K). ...

According to a recent survey, most people are not pleased with their ad experiences across social media (45%), retail websites (36%) and news aggregators (34%). In fact, more than 51% of them believe that the digital universe should be home to fewer ads, since most pop-ups heavily interfere with the content, interrupt shopping experiences, take up the entire screen and increase loading time.With the evolution of the advertising landscape, brands are becoming more focused on creating a user experience that matches the customers’ expectations and maximizes their ability to monetize.Here’s when native advertising comes in. ...

Programmatic buying and direct buying are different methods used to buy display-advertisement inventory. When display advertisement became a thing in the 1990s, advertisers bought ad space in bulk by striking deals with publishing websites. This expensive method is called direct buying. Things have changed. These days, advertisers can use software to purchase ad space with the help of data as opposed to traditional manual methods like human negotiation, manual insertion orders, etc. This method is called programmatic advertising and can be broadly categorized into two types: ...

In the advertising world, there is much confusion about the difference between programmatic advertising and the Google Display Network (GDN). After display advertising became a thing, it was ad networks like GDN that helped advertisers to connect with many publications. But for almost a decade, programmatic advertising has grown to become the number one way to buy display ad space. Now, programmatic advertising accounts for 82.5% of total digital as spend. ...

Programmatic advertising has become the center of attraction in the advertising world. As you can see, it is growing an additional ten billion dollars every year: It accounts for 82.5% of total digital display ad spending right now and this number will only increase. So how did it all start? When digital advertising first came up in the early 1990s, everything was manual. It worked just like traditional media. Advertisers had to reach out to each publisher and negotiate. It meant so many emails back and forth before a deal was closed. Moreover, ad impressions were bought in bulk, which meant a lot of initial spend before testing the waters. ...