April 9th, 2020 was a memorable day in my journey as a digital marketer. It is a proud feeling when you are invited to deliver a guest lecture in the same class you once studied. Programmatic trading being an emerging field in digital advertising, I was invited by the course director of M.Sc Digital Marketing at DCU Business School to share my knowledge on the topic.
There was a wave of excitement in me as well as a bit of nervousness of doing well. Amid the Corona Virus outbreak in Dublin, everything was locked down in the city. All the Schools, Colleges and offices were shut down and people were working from home. Due to this the lecture was scheduled virtually.
While I was studying this course, I had a fair bit of idea of how programmatic advertising works but was still curious to learn more about the field. Unfortunately, there weren’t any lectures hosted around the operational part of the field where I could get an understanding of how a typical day of programmatic trader looks like and what are the everyday tasks in the working routine. I wanted these insights as I has planned to get a job in the field. This thought helped me in shaping my presentation in lecture. I decided that with the overall picture of how the field is growing and its future scope, I will mostly focus on helping out the students on understanding the operations in this field.
Working on the buy side of the programmatic ecosystem the presentation was slightly inclined towards buying media but also made sure that the student get a basic idea of how the all the sides work. At the end of the presentation, I added a scenario where I showed them how we get briefs from our clients related to the upcoming campaigns they want to execute. And based on that brief an explanation of how we plan and design the campaign to help and achieve the objectives from that particular campaign. At the End, I created a sample campaign on the Google’s DSP called as Display & Video 360 (DV360) to show how campaigns get created and how to manager them on a daily basis. In short, the lecture was delivered in a way that me as a student always wanted. It was a very curious and intelligent group of students in the class, which after the presentation asked some interesting questions about client handling, career in the field and also around topics such as drawbacks of the field and ethical barriers.
As I mentioned earlier, I thoroughly enjoyed this time at Dublin City University and would like to go back there another time to share more interesting and insightful things around digital marketing as a field and get to connect with more students looking forward to learning advertising and marketing technologies and connect with them.
