Programmatic advertising is a term you have probably heard before but you might still be uncertain whether you know its actual meaning. Obviously, it’s something important, because so many entrepreneurs and marketing experts talk about it, but what is programmatic advertising? Simply put, it’s a method of targeting what type of audience you would like to show your ads to, an approach which encompasses segments across demographics, such as social standing, gender, age etc. However, programmatic advertising is done in real time without relying on the human touch, manual trading and insertion, but algorithms and computers.
Any marketing can be effective (if done properly), but what makes programmatic advertising different? Human ad buyers and salespeople manually buy digital advertising space for their clients and they can be unreliable and expensive. By removing humans from the buying and placement process whenever and wherever it’s possible, programmatic advertising makes ad buying more efficient, reliable and cheaper. Machines and algorithms don’t get sick, they don’t need to sleep and they are always in the mood to work. Nevertheless, even though humans don’t have to do things such as dealing with ad tags, sending insertion orders and similar menial tasks, there is still place for them in programmatic marketing. Because they aren’t overwhelmed by bureaucracy anymore, human sellers and marketers can spend more time planning, customizing and optimizing their campaigns and strategies. Essentially, programmatic advertising saves both time and money.
Programmatic advertising is on the rise and, chances are, this marketing approach will be a must in future. An increasing number of marketing agencies are eager to purchase as much media inventory as possible using programmatic channels, while some major brands have their own programmatic ad buying teams and they plan to spend the most of their marketing budgets in programmatic advertising campaigns. At this moment, most of the ads traded this way are online advertisements, but companies are exploring ways to sell even traditional media inventory using programmatic marketing methods.
