On Monday, February 24th, 2020, the Department of Communication Studies hosted a campus-wide lecture entitled “Technology & Programmatic Advertising 101” in the library auditorium, presented by Alice Huiwen Yang, programmatic solutions consultant from Amazon. The event was part of Professor Xiaowen Xu’s Communication and Digital Advertising class. Attendees were mostly students majored in Communication Studies and Marketing.
Alice’s presentation enlightened the audience about potential career opportunities within the Programmatic Advertising field. In her current position at Amazon, Alice strategizes with advertisers to optimize their campaign results. Before joining Amazon, Alice worked at an IPG agency as a programmatic campaign manager as well as working for Getty Images’ digital marketing team.
As the highlight of her presentation, Alice described how the invention of the DSP, which stands for “demand-side platform,” changed the field of digital media buy by automating human processes. In the 1950s and 60s, distributing an advertisement campaign was a more tedious task. Advertising agents needed to place numerous sales calls to ad publishers like newspapers, magazines, and TV stations in order to ask if they could accommodate their campaigns. Today, the DSP changed this human-to-human interaction to computer-to-computer.
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Alice revealed that these changes were necessary to increase the efficiency and targeting capabilities of advertising campaign distribution. Increased targeting abilities allow advertisers to use consumer behavior data and distribute advertisements to the correct demographic audience for their product. DSPs also increased the ability of advertisers to reach a larger scale of consumers, Alice described. Now, the new technology allows for an advertising campaign to easily reach millions of people, without needing to hire more advertising agents to complete this job.
After her presentation, students in attendance engaged Alice in many questions, such as how she became involved in the ad tech field, skills needed in programmatic advertising related jobs, experiences working in technology and start-up companies, and advices on internship and networking. Alice’s presentation was fun and informative in teaching TCNJ students about the technological side of digital advertising.
Written By: Deanna Amarosa