How to hire great RTB talent for your business
Many companies today are becoming aware of the importance of hiring Programmatic Advertising and Real Time Bidding (RTB) profiles, since it is known that Google and Facebook Digital advertising networks are far from having a 100% user reach.
Whether it's through media agencies in search of talent to provide RTB services to their clients, or companies looking to internalise their Programmatic Advertising campaigns, the need for qualified AdTech personnel has grown exponentially in recent years in Spain.
According to Tradelab data, Spanish companies invested 26% of their overal Digital Marketing budgets in Programmatic Advertising in 2019, which clearly indicates that the Spanish AdTech industry is steering in a new direction.
In this post, we offer some guidelines to help you hire the best RTB experts for your business.
What is Programmatic?
To have a clear understanding of what programmatic advertising is (of which the RTB is only one of the many applications), let's see below the traditional advertising model that was previously the only way for a brand to advertise on the internet:
In a traditional online advertising model, a brand X closes a deal with a website Y (for example an online newspaper), so that their ads appear in certain areas of that page. It is a 100% manual process, where human parties (rather than machines) interact until reaching an agreement.
Let's now look at the Programmatic Advertising model:
The infographic above shows how, instead of closing a manual agreement between an advertising company and a publisher, the programmatic model allows the same transaction to be carried out in a fully automated way, without the need for people to intervene. All this with the advantage that advertisers do not need to manually close deals with each of the websites where they would like to publish their ads.
We can thus define Programmatic Advertising as follow:
Programmatic advertising is a system that automates the processes and transactions involved with purchasing and dynamically placing ads on websites or apps
The difference with Google Ads
When we launch Display campaigns on Google, something similar to the programmatic purchase model occurs, with the difference that the scope of our ads is limited to those publishers who have subscribed to Google Adsense advertising programs.
By contrast, RTB offers advertisers a multitude of publisher websites that for some reason have not subscribed to Google Adsense, which allows them to reach beyond Google's advertising network.
In other words, Real Time Bidding allows advertisers to access all of Google's GDN network as part of their Programmatic inventory, in addition to millions of other websites that are not available through the Google network.
Third-party agents such as Nielsen’s eXelate also provide RTB advertisers with exhaustive data. As an example of the power of RTB data, you could decide to only target “iPhone users who ordered pizza through Deliveroo last week and also have the Uber Eats iPhone app installed.” This level of targeting is simply impossible to reach by using the Google Display Network alone.
Another advatage of programmatic over Google, is that a DSP platform would allow you to re-use the data you collected through a contact form in order to adapt your campaign, while Google doesn't allow such level of customized targeting.
Finding RTB talent
Profiles with generic knowledge of RTB are relatively easy to find, since many professionals in the Digital world have been in contact at some time with this type of technology, and understand the concept of programmatic buying.
The real difficulty is finding profiles with an advanced level of RTB. A good way to proceed is by eliminating a first batch of candidates through questions such as:
- Explain the difference bewteen RTB and Programmatic
- What is a DSP platform? Can you list any?
- How programmatic advertising differs from Google Display ads
In our experience, candidates whose CV indicates that they have been working in RTB agencies often respond satisfactorily to these three questions.
With the profiles that remain after this first screening, we can move on to the next phase consisting of a test that will help us assess our candidates' technical knowledge.
Knowledge tests
In the case of RTB, it is essential to carry out tests with a strong numerical and probabilistic orientation, since programmatic advertising is very anchored in the world of mathematics.
Let's see below a possible question we would ask in an RTB test:
An advertiser has bought 5 million impressions. If the end-user ad blocking software blocked 1 million impressions and it is later discovered that another million impressions were viewed by robots (non-human traffic), and if the advertiser paid a € 3.00 CPM for the 5 million impressions, what is the actual effective CPM paid by the advertiser?
[Do you know the answer? Send it to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., we will tell you right away if you are right ;) ]
A test should also include open questions about real life situations that may occur in the management of an RTB client portfolio. For example, in the case of an advertiser focused on achieving visibility for their brand through RTB campaigns, we could ask a candidate how to measure the impact of an online programmatic campaign over offline sales.
Knowing that programmatic advertising is becoming increasingly important in the Digital landscape, it is essential to make sure that we are hiring the best professionals in the RTB sector for our company.
At PayPerTalent, we are known for our candidate selection methodology that is based on knowledge tests to find the best talent in any Digital Marketing discipline. This assures us on the one hand that the candidates are really interested in the selection process, since the tests require significant amounts of time to complete. And on the other hand this guarantees us that our clients only interview with candidates who have demonstrated their knowledge beyond their CV.
Are you looking to hire RTB talent for your business in Spain?
Just send us a message through our contact form to find out how we can help you recruit great Digital Talent...