• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 19, 2015

In a move that will pull advertising and marketing into the manufacturing supply chain, Vector Media Group has built a programmatic system that links these processes to a retailer's or brand's enterprise resource planning (ERP) and inventory control supply chain to automate the cycle.

The link allows Vector to adjust search campaigns that automatically adapt to the hundreds of thousands of products coming in and out of inventory. Without an automated system, marketers take the chance of bidding on keywords for out-of-stock quantities or products the brand no longer sells. It's a huge problem for retailers like Home Depot, Target, and Wal-Mart, which have hundreds of thousands of products. 

Lee Goldberg, CEO at Vector Media Group, says brands can waste millions of dollars based on their budget bidding on keywords for out-of-stock products. "We see so many clients where they're advertising on products they can't sell," he says,

Brands generate data files from an ERP platform supported by companies like Monsoon Commerce or SAP, which builds the product inventory file from product, brand, color, size, and quantity on hand data. It dynamically builds campaigns, advertisements, ad groups, and keywords for search ads from the feed.

As the quantity on hand moves from one to zero the campaign pauses. The system gets updates every 24 hours with the data from the FTP file reflecting the change, and then Vector process the file, pushing the data live to Google and Bing. When the unit comes back into stock, the search campaign resumes. The same occurs for price changes serving up in the search advertisement.