Programmatic Advertising : How Smart Brands Are Buying Ads Faster, Smarter, and Better

With programmatic advertising, brands and publishers have been able to change how they purchase and sell digital media. This means that rather than negotiate and book inventory manually and place ads in certain fixed positions, today's ads are delivered through automated systems that can serve your ad to the right audience at the proper time. If you're looking for growth, accountability, or optimizing your advertising efforts on a continuous basis in competitive digital marketplaces, then programmatic advertising will be an important consideration for your company.

Programmatic ad buying is all about data, algorithms and machine learning as a method of automating ad buying from advertisers. This helps reduce waste and allows the advertising agency to quickly react based upon consumer behavior across channels.

The Evolution of Programmatic Advertising in Digital Marketing

Programmatic advertising emerged as a major break from traditional manual media buying and insertion orders. Early digital advertising (on free samples of shy to like) involved considerable use of human coordination, resulting in both costly errors and delays in executing campaigns. The use of programmatic technology introduced the use of real time bidding to expedite and automate workflows to dramatically improve the level of speed and accuracy in executing advertising campaigns.

Advertisers are utilizing complex technology to create personalized advertising messages at scale by utilizing user-related data to anticipate behavior using programmatic technology. The growth of programmatic has necessitated the creation of programmatic infrastructure that supports today's digital advertisers.

How a Programmatic Campaign Works

The programmatic campaign is accomplished via the interrelated activities of advertisers, publishers, and automated systems. When a user engages with content on a site or an app, an ad impression is instantly evaluated against a set of criteria such as audience data, contextual data, bidding parameters, etc. An appropriate ad is served to the user by an automated system within a few milliseconds after the evaluation process has completed, with no manual effort on the part of anyone involved in the process.

Because of this process, brands can manage their budgets, target users, and measure results all in real time. When ad impressions are being served, they are continuously being optimized so that they each contribute toward specific, measurable business results.

Programmatic Direct Campaigns and Premium Inventory

While real-time bidding is widely known, programmatic direct campaign models offer advertisers access to premium inventory with greater control and transparency. These campaigns include pre-established agreements along with automated fulfillment, providing the reliability of a direct deal as well as the efficiency of programmatic execution.

Programmatic direct is especially important for branding-type campaigns that require assurance of placement, fixed pricing and a trusted publisher environment.

The Role of a Programmatic Platform

A programmatic platform is essentially a piece of technology that creates the connection between ad buyers (advertisers) and ad sellers (publishers) through the buying and selling of advertising space via programmatic means. Programmatic platforms optimize, login and report on performance via one location by aggregating many different data sources to provide an advertiser and publisher with actionable insights with which improved decision-making is possible.

More advanced programmatic platforms offer cross-channel support for managing display, video, mobile and connected TV campaigns via one user interface.

Programmatic Technology and Data-Driven Targeting

Data is critical to every area of programmatic advertising. There are many types of data used in programmatic technology, and these come from several different sources. The combination of the large amount of data collected and the different ways in which it is used helps programmatic advertising identify the best audiences to target for a particular advertising campaign. As a result, fewer impressions are wasted and more engagement occurs.

Programmatic systems adapt to ongoing changes and developments in privacy laws, primarily using contextual targeting and privacy-compliant data, while not reducing engagement or effectiveness.

Measuring Performance in Programmatic Advertising

Transparency is one of the most important benefits of programmatic advertising buying. Advertisers are able to assess impressions, clicks, conversions and return on ad spend across a variety of bids and targets, and in real time. By using key performance indicators in a programmatic campaign, we can continually improve our targeting, bid adjustments and creative optimization.

Having this level of insight enables marketers to make data-driven decisions that allow them to efficiently scale what has been successful for them.

Why Programmatic Advertising Matters for Modern Brands

In a fragmented media environment, programmatic advertising provides the agility and precision to connect to target audiences. Automated buying reduces our operating costs, while increasing the scope and relevance of our ads. Using an automated approach to execute advertising that is digital in nature will increase the speed of delivering advertisements to consumers via more effective targeting methods and the ability to measure results, ultimately increasing the ability for a company to effectively use digital channels for its brand.

Programmatically using a strong programmatic platform and cutting-edge programmatic technology allows advertisers to achieve superior performance and efficiency levels compared to their competitors.

Final Thoughts on Programmatic Advertising

No longer are programmatic solutions optional for brands attempting to compete in the digital marketplace. The fact that programmatic can automate media buying while taking advantage of data to optimize each campaign in real time helps clearly establish the programmatic segment as an integral part of a brand's modern-day marketing strategy.

Whether it is through a dynamic programmatic campaign or a managed programmatic direct campaign, businesses embracing programmatic solutions can prepare themselves for long term sustainable success and continuous growth within the increasingly data-driven digital marketing environment.