Training my new colleague Josh included an intense hour-long powwow where I tried to explain the inner workings of the industry at a relatively high level. Afterward his eyes were as wide as dinner plates and his jaw trembled slightly – I could tell I’d completely overloaded his mind.
I hope that’s not the same experience for the brave souls who try the online training element of MediaMath’s New Marketing Institute (NMI) on digital education platform Grovo, especially considering that the crash course covers the basics of display advertising in less than an hour – 18:32 flat. Then again, with such a fast-changing space, can you even afford to spend around 20 minutes learning (or refreshing on) the basics?
As a supplement to the NMI’s in-person training sessions held at the Direct Marketing Association’s headquarters in New York,The introductory crash course consists of 15 animated videos, each with a short quiz immediately following. Varying in length between less than a minute and a little over two, this set hits everything from “The Key Players” to “Impressions” to “Economics of Display” and even “Consumer Advertising and Privacy.”
Coming from the minds of MediaMath, it’s not surprising that programmatic buying is a focus from the start – in “The Key Players,” the narrator explains, “Historically, [buying and selling] was done manually…” (yes – manual ad buying and selling is totally a thing of the past!) before defining demand-side platforms, sell-side platforms and exchanges.
The video shows the machine-driven trading process as exactly that – conveyor belts from the buy and sell side flowing into a giant, crunching engine, which spurts out stacks of dollars for the pubs while agencies get… Eyeballs. Yes, I had to rewind a few times to make sure that’s what I saw.
Which goes to show the whimsical element of the course – the “historical” piece mentioned above is sepia-colored and made to appear on old film stock. The friendly user environment of Grovo makes some really difficult material easier to digest while delivering some smirks. In addition to smart illustration, each video page contains glossary terms linked to the section relevant video segment.
Certified members of the New Marketing Institute receive access to not just the online advertising material, but also the rest of Grovo’s premium educational catalog – more than 3,000 lessons on a variety of topics, including social media, cloud computing and many other facets of digital marketing. By itself, NMI seems like a pretty handy tool for a newbie’s initiation… Or maybe as a quick refresher for an old pro.