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Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive officer of Uber, arrives at the Sun Valley Resort for the annual Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, July 10, 2018 in Sun Valley, Idaho.
- Uber has taken programmatic
advertising in-house while also investing in technology, data and partners. - The company is also running most media-buying functions, including strategy and optimization, in-house.
- Uber's objectives have also evolved from acquiring customers to reengaging with existing ones.
What do you do when your user base is reaching a saturation point and your competition is proliferating by the day?
If you're Uber, you take the steering wheel and get creative with your ad targeting.
The complicated ad tech landscape is not for everyone, but Uber has transitioned from an agency-led media buying model to taking greater control of its campaigns over the past few years.
"Three years ago, we were still working primarily with agencies, taking our budgets and giving them to external partners to run mainly acquisition campaigns on our behalf," Bennett Rosenblatt, Uber's programmatic display lead said at an Advertising Week panel on Tuesday with programmatic firm MediaMath.
"That has changed dramatically."
Uber has taken charge of its media-buying
The brand is now running most functions, including strategy and optimization in-house. Uber has an internal trading team, and has also started to invest in a dedicated ad tech team to build sophisticated algorithms for media-buying.
"In many ways, it's been a transition from caring just about acquisition and giving everything to external partners to run everything on our behalf to now running acquisition, re-engagement, and re-marketing, and doing it with our hands on keyboard in the house," said Rosenblatt.
It has also expanded its global footprint. While Uber's programmatic team was initially based out of its headquarters in San Francisco, the company has now set up dedicated teams in "mega-regions" such as Amsterdam, Mexico City, and Singapore.
But it still leans onto its partners when required
That's not to say that Uber doesn't rely on its partners at all. When it was setting up international teams dedicated to programmatic, for instance, it leaned on MediaMath to inform the brand on what was working and what wasn't.
Similarly, as the company focuses on sharpening its brand identity and promise after a cascade of corporate disasters in 2017, it has also started to rely on the agency AKQA for its branding campaigns.
"We haven't been great in branding and creating an amazing brand and that image externally, historically we've been a performance-first organization," said Rosenblatt.
It has started to go beyond just trying to land new customers
With its riders in the US hitting a saturation point, Uber's marketing objectives have evolved from being primarily acquisition-oriented to focusing on re-engagement, said Rosenblatt.
As a result, the company has started tracking more closely whether its ad campaigns actually caused the consumer to convert.
"Our total addressable market has now shrunk to the point that we can't run campaigns super efficiently," he said. "And to be honest, running static banners, hitting users with 20 or 30 ads a week, is just not incremental for us."
"What really matters is when someone gets their butt in a seat and takes that first trip," he said.
Uber has also adopted a customer-first approach, and started personalizing ads
The company has also become increasingly customer-first in its approach, trying to serve ads at the right time, at the right place to the right user with a personalized message that's going to resonate with them.
One way that it's done that, for example, is by building dynamic feeds with its ad server Celtra that allows it to surface interactive ads to customers. A low frequency rider in the middle of levels in the game Candy Crush, may for instance, get a look-book for the top five restaurants among Uber riders in their area that he or she can swipe through.
"Imagine if we can serve that to someone that loves going to restaurants, or someone that we know loves traveling," said Rosenblatt. "That's a really great experience. Good marketing for me isn't running a static banner on someone's phone."
The brand is wading into mobile - but with caution
Almost the entirety of Uber's advertising for its riders happens in-app, becuase it is tough for the brand to track individual customers across the web using their mobile data
The brand is trying to find a way around the problem by using a connected-ID solution by MediaMath. That means it can more efficiently parse through mobile inventory, doubling the supply available to it.
"Mobile's a really tough game right now, and we're trying to shift mobile to being fully programmatic," he said.