How Programmatic Advertising Works

Programmatic ad buying has changed the face of online advertising: Programmatic buying is on track to make up $14.88 billion of the approximately $58.6 billion digital advertising pie this year, according to eMarketer but there’s still confusion around what it actually is …

What Is Programmatic Ad Buying?

Programmatic advertising helps automate the decision-making process of media buying by targeting specific audiences and demographics.

Programmatic ads are placed using artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time bidding (RTB) for online display, social media advertising, mobile and video campaigns, and is expanding to traditional TV advertising marketplaces.

The video shows how programmatic digital marketing works and how it drives business growth for marketers.

“Programmatic” ad buying typically refers to the use of software to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs, human negotiations and manual insertion orders. It’s using machines to buy ads, basically.

But programmatic is much more than that; it’s a method to resolve the highly fragmented industry that advertising has become, to maximize the return on investment (ROI) in ad budgets.

By using a blend of machine-learning technologies and good ol’ fashioned marketer’s intuition, programmatic advertising can hit the right audience at the right time to drive higher-quality leads for brands.

Why Does Programmatic Advertising Matter?

In one word: efficiency. Before programmatic ad buying, digital ads were bought and sold by human ad buyers and salespeople, who can be expensive and unreliable. Programmatic advertising technology promises to make the ad buying system more efficient, and therefore cheaper, by removing humans from the process wherever possible.

Humans get sick, need to sleep and come to work hungover. Machines do not.

Are Robots Replacing People Buying Ads?

Well in the technical parts of the ads buying process, yes but in other areas no.

Image: MarketingLand

The advertising industry is on a march toward automation. Plenty of advertisers today are buying digital ads without speaking to a single human at a media company, and print and TV ads might not be far behind.

Automated, or programmatic, buying is growing not only because it makes ad transactions more efficient but because it can make them more effective, as long as the right data is applied. When surfing the wave of automation, Adage published 10 things you should know, learn more.

Technology is being used to replace some of the more brainless tasks that humans have historically had to handle, like sending insertion orders to publishers and dealing with ad tags, but they’re still required to optimize campaigns and to plan strategies.

Programmatic technology will probably mean there are fewer human ad buyers in the world, but it should also allow both marketers and sellers to spend more of their time planning sophisticated, customized campaigns instead of getting bogged down in bureaucracy.

Programmatic Buying: What Is It and Why Should I Care?

The video shows how technology platforms such as DSPs, DMPs, RTB, etc. make it easier to find and target the right audience for the right price. Learn the ins and outs of how media buyers use these platforms, then get a peek into the sell side, from publishers that explain how they’re choosing the inventory to make available. You’ll also learn about how mobile and video ads are being incorporated into this automated buying mix.

Programmatic buying coupled with data-driven creative can deliver more effective digital advertising campaigns. But connecting the dots between the data and the creative can be a challenge.

Knowing what to do with that data can be easy to grasp in theory, but perhaps more challenging to put into practice, especially when no single agency or partner has the full picture.

To understand what it takes to employ a truly data-driven creative strategy, DoubleClick partnered with several global brands, digital creative studio Fancy Pants Group, and the management consulting company Accenture. The aim was to conduct a collaborative, programmatic experiment through a series of data-driven ad campaigns. By tackling real brand campaigns with a variety of data insights at the ready, we learned how the campaign development process has to change to get to smarter, data-driven creative. See the experiment here.

Does programmatic marketing mark the end of creative advertising? I don’t think so, humans and robots will probably just be able to focus more on their strengths.

Is Programmatic Buying The Same As Real-Time Bidding?

Not really. ‘Real-time bidding’ (RTB) is a type of programmatic ad buying, but it isn’t the only one.

How an Ad is Served with Real Time Bidding – IAB Digital Simplified

The video shows the back-end process of how a targeted ad is served to you from your computer, through the multifaceted pipeline of the digital advertising ecosystem.

RTB refers to the purchase of ads through real-time auctions, but programmatic software also allows advertisers to buy guaranteed ad impressions in advance from specific publisher sites. This method of buying is often referred to as ‘Programmatic direct.’

Understanding Programmatic (Direct) Digital Advertising

Learn about how Programmatic is impacting digital advertising, what Real-Time-Bidding (RTB) is, and how publishers and marketers are capitalizing on this explosive new form of buying and selling media.

Is Programmatic “The Future Of Ad Buying”?

It might be, but technology nowadays evolves so fat that there might be other forms of ad buying before programmatic gets widely used. It’s impossible to tell what portion of advertising is now traded programatically, but it’s definitely on the rise.

Some agencies now say they’re eager to buy as much media as possible through programmatic channels, and some major brands have even built out in-house teams to handle their programmatic ad buying as they spend more of their marketing budgets that way.

Over the past few years, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have gobbled up programmatic ad-tech companies in a play to sell ads across the web, not just through their own platforms. Unlike the vast majority of independent ad-tech firms, these social-media networks have reams of login data, allowing them to connect user identities across devices. These social companies’ offerings are poised to overtake the competition — with the possible exception of Google.

At the moment, it’s mainly online ads that are traded programatically, but increasingly media companies and agencies are exploring ways to sell “traditional” media this way, including TV spots and out-of-home ads.

Display Advertising Basics P2 (RTB, DSP, Programmatic, Private Exchanges, PMP)

This video shows an overview of real-time bidding (RTB), ad exchanges, demand-side platforms (DSPs) and the ongoing shift from traditional ways of buying display advertising to programmatic buying through a demand side platform (DSP). Includes buying through open ad exchanges, private exchanges, private marketplaces, and programmatic guaranteed direct buys.

Display Advertising Basics (DSPs, RTB, Ad Exchanges, DMPs)

Here is a 20 minute video covering the basics of display advertising and how display advertising is bought and sold, includes an overview of key vendors and concepts like Demand-side Platforms (DSPs), Real-time Bidding (RTB), Ad Exchanges, Data Management Platforms (DMPs), and Ad Servers.

It’s not just banner ads: Some brands have said they plan to move all their display-ad spending through programmatic channels. And that’s led technology players to build functionality that allows brands to buy more than standard banner ads. Ad network Undertone, for instance, made its premium ad units available programmatically earlier this year.

And if you not quite sure yet what the difference really is between Real-Time-Bidding and Programmatic (Direct) Advertising below are two more videos that explain the different aspects of it quite well.

RTB vs Progammatic Advertising, What’s the Difference?

Head of Display, James Bourner has a look at two seemingly interchangeable terms in display – RTB (real-time bidding) and Programmatic Advertising – and what the difference is between them.

Direct vs. Programmatic: An Analyst’s Perspective

Michael Greene, Senior Analyst, Forrester, uncovers commons myths about programmatic buying and participates in a lively discussion with Andy Atherton, AppNexus’s SVP of Strategic Accounts.

3 Ways to Make the Most of Programmatic and Data-Driven Creative

Image: Google

Programmatic buying coupled with data-driven creative can deliver more effective digital advertising campaigns. But connecting the dots between the data and the creative can be a challenge. Here is Google’s break down on how to do it successfully.

Brand marketers know more than anyone that effective creative is equal parts data and emotion. When it comes to display creative, programmatic buying brings a lot more data into that equation. Knowing what to d

As 2016 marketing strategies kick into high gear, there’s one word on everyone’s mind: programmatic. Global programmatic ad spend is expected to reach $21.6B in 2016, and account for 67% of all digital display ad sales (Source: Google).

Programmatic advertising allows brands to reach their audiences with messages tailored to their interests and mindsets in the crucial moments when decisions are made. As such, it’s not just changing how we buy and sell media—it’s also transforming the way we strategize, design, and develop creative.

Curated from:

How Programmatic Advertising Works

What Is Programmatic Ad Buying?