We’ve all recently heard about programmatic advertising, trend that is starting to become popular with certain brands and even has Google dedicating 60 percent of its budgets toward finding and buying companies in this growing space. Programmatic advertising is “automatic” or programmable advertising buying that can reduce the time between negotiations and possibly dealing with absent media buyers (whether on vacation, sick, or something else).
But, is it truly the future of advertising? Here’s what you need to know about programmatic.
What exactly is programmatic advertising?
While “automatic advertising” is the very short explanation, there is more to it than just automated buying. Software is used to purchase multiple kinds of digital advertising in order to streamline the overall digital advertising buying process without the hassle of manually keying in orders or going through multiple negotiations.
Because of this highly efficient method of buying ads, the humans behind the advertising can focus more on strategy and implementation while the menial, smaller tasks are reserved for the computer or software that is being used in programmatic.
However, you shouldn’t confuse automatic bidding and programmatic advertising as interchangeable terms. Automatic bidding, like what you can do in Google Adwords, is only a type of programmatic that has been around for quite some time and now the industry is starting to explode with new types of automatic ad buying besides Pay-Per-Click.
How does programmatic advertising affect B2B?
Because robots are essentially taking care of the menial tasks and buying, marketers, sellers, and others within the marketing cycle of a campaign have more time to focus on the “big picture” and ensure that highly customized and unique campaigns are being created.
With B2B, this means greater competition, as well. Programmatic advertising leads to better targeting with highly engaging campaigns customized specifically for certain brands. For example, a company ready to launch a new product like a smartwatch or other wearable could do manual research and discover a website all about wearables. They pay for their ads to target that website’s subscribers and realize suddenly that the ROI doesn’t match the goals they had originally set and failed to realize that the website in question is mostly targeted at consumers of wearables, not the actual manufacturers or businesses in the industry. With programmatic advertising, that guess work can be taken out of the equation.
As a business, you need to be on the lookout for streamlining any processes and being able to tailor ads to a specific target audience is a big part of the marketing process. Your competitors are going to look into any method or tool in order to be the top pick for that same target audience they also happen to be going after. According to a DigiDay report of Fortune 500 companies they surveyed, 30 percent of them are already looking into programmatic advertising and how it can work for them.
What businesses are using programmatic advertising already?
At the moment, programmatic advertising is big within the mobile marketing space, and in particular, with FitBit wearables. In fact, there is an entire company revolved around programmatic wearables ads called FitAd and they already have competition from Tapsense (the go-to for the not-yet-released Apple watch). There is also ShinyAds, which has its own programmatic platform for businesses.
As for actual businesses and brands using programmatic, some of them include Apple and The Daily Mail—both of whomhave been putting more of their ad budgets into programmatic. As it starts to gain more traction, expect even more businesses to start experimenting with programmatic in 2015.
Want more info on programmatic? Read about the trends to watch for in 2015
