Now is the Time for Advertisers to Reach Consumers through Digital Channels

Consumers love online content. Not only are they spending more time at their computers, but targeting methods are becoming more advanced each day. The industry employs some of the world's brightest minds and competition between advertisers is cut-throat. Companies are desperate to understand their consumers' needs and many are looking for new advertising channels. Programmatic advertising is an exciting development. According to econsultancy.com, 62% of marketers use programmatic for brand objectives. In 2018, it is estimated that programmatic advertising will account for over $18.2 billion in U.S. digital advertisement revenues, a dramatic increase from $3.1 billion in 2013.

Why is Programmatic Advertising so Exciting?

Programmatic essentially means automatic. Programmatic buying refers to advertisement space that is bought on a web page by an automatic service. This can be achieved either through bidding for the space or by purchasing it directly. What this provides is efficiency. Before programmatic buying, digital advertisements were bought and sold by real people. Humans, by their nature, cost money to hire and can be unreliable. By removing the human capacity for error, laziness and wages from the equation, programmatic advertising technology increases the efficiency of ad buying exponentially. This makes the process smoother, more reliable and more cost effective. It's a win-win situation, unless you're a soon-to-be-unemployed human ad buyer yourself.

Is Programmatic Buying Different to Real-Time Bidding?

Real-time bidding (RTB) is a form of programmatic ad buying, but there are many other types as well. RTB is the buying and selling of online ad impressions through real-time actions that take place in the time it takes to load a webpage. Previously, advertisers used websites as proxies for the advertisements. For example, if they wanted to target movie fans, they would purchase advertisements on a movie-related website. In contrast, RTB enables them to target their ads to specific users instead of across a whole site. This method is called "programmatic direct."

Is Programmatic Advertising the Future?

Most likely. Although there are no concrete figures revealing how much of advertising is traded programmatically, its use is clearly spreading fast and wide. With shifting priorities, many companies are changing the focus of their marketing budgets and are now keen to buy as much media as they can through programmatic channels. Meanwhile, major brands have become so interested that they are hiring in-house teams to oversee their programmatic ad buying. Currently, it's mostly online advertisements that are traded programmatically, but media companies are increasingly investigating exciting and potentially lucrative ways to sell traditional media this way, including TV commercials.