Everyone who’s anyone in the digital advertising landscape has learned, by now, that Programmatic has become a new favorite for the attention of Publishers and Advertisers alike. And yet, despite being recognized as the current future-shaping trend of the online world, it still raises many questions to many marketers.
In plain English, Programmatic Advertising is a term that encompasses all the technology and techniques used to sell digital media automatically – in other words, it stands for any automated way in which buyers and sellers can transact digital ads (display, video, mobile, search).
The Interactive Advertising Bureau has defined four main ways to transact programmatically today: Automated Guaranteed (an automated version of a traditional direct transaction); Unreserved Fixed Rate (otherwise known as preferred deals), Invitation-Only Auction and Open Auction – the latter being based on a stock-exchange model, where technologies like SSPs and DSPs are the brokers of the Sellers and Buyers involved in the ad-bidding process.
Programmatic Advertising allows the display of highly-customized ads to the user, based on demographic and behavioral data about that specific user; this is why programmatic equals efficiency, in terms of both creating a media campaign (advertisers) and delivering the outcome (publishers).
However forward, it is safe to say that the massive growth of this data-enabled form of advertising is an indication of the performance it drives for both Publishers and Advertisers, as well as a sign that it is a vehicle which will continue to evolve and make room for creativity and innovation in advertising.