To put it in simple terms – programmatic marketing or advertising is a method of targeting specific audiences that you wish to expose your adverts to. This can cover varied segments of the population such as social standing, gender, age to certain geographic areas of a country.
The traditional ways of buying digital ad space and running the entire campaign were done by the publisher. Programmatic advertising puts the process back into the advertiser’s hands. As programmatic marketing continues to evolve into out-of-home digital, audio and TV, it becoming more important than ever for marketers to fully understand the basics if they are to devise optimized strategies.
How Programmatic Advertising Works
In programmatic advertising, artificial intelligence (AI) is used for placing ads. Real-time bidding (RTB) is used for social media advertising, online displays, video & mobile campaigns. These campaigns are now being expanded to traditional marketplaces such as TV advertising.
It enables marketers to keep tabs on how effective their investments are as well as helping them to optimize their marketing campaigns in real time. Simply put, agencies or brands employ a demand-side platform in deciding the type of impressions to acquire as well as how much to pay for those impressions. On the other hand, publishers utilize a supply-side platform in selling ad space to agencies or brands.
Programmatic advertising is helping in automating the process of media buying decision-making by targeting specific demographics and audiences. Automating means that the entire process can be carried out in real time as it is not dependent on manual trading and manual insertions.
Benefits of Programmatic Advertising
Compared to the traditional way of buying media, programmatic buying allows the buyer to design and tailor a specific message to the right target, in the best context and at the right time.
Other benefits include the following.
Guaranteed Impressions – One important aspect that comes with programmatic advertising is that it assures the advertiser of guaranteed impressions. This is because the seller and buyer agree on a price before any impressions go live.
Financial Savings – When one hears of marketing automation, what comes to the mind is an automated process designed to save time for the marketers, sparing them from having to manually handle tedious and routine tasks. However, with programmatic advertising, the automation not only saves time but money. This is achieved through the usage of Artificial Intelligence components designed to optimize your ad runs.
Works with Big Data – The good news for any marketer is that programmatic advertising solutions are compatible with Big Data towards optimizing ad spending. If, for example, you want to implement an aggressive campaign targeting a well-defined small market subset, an automated advertising system can do it for you. This is particularly important in this age of micro-targeting market segmentation.
The Future of Programmatic Advertising
Data from the IDC indicates that real time-bided spending on display advertising is going to accelerate at an annual compound growth rate of 59% through 2016. This makes it the fastest growing digital advertising segment over the next couple of years. For any marketer, anything that’s likely to grow at such a percentage is worth taking notice of.
