The document discusses how programmatic advertising is transforming digital marketing through automated and data-driven buying and selling of digital ads. Programmatic advertising uses real-time bidding technology and data to target ads to the right audiences. It allows for more efficient use of budgets, improved targeting and transparency. While programmatic offers many benefits, challenges remain around issues like ad fraud, lack of transparency, and evolving to support new formats and devices. Continued evolution of the programmatic ecosystem is needed to fully realize its potential.

1. THE PROGRAMMATIC
REVOLUTION
How Technology is transforming marketing
Silvia Alongi

2. 1
Index
New trends in digital marketing: the most successful approach to
adopting programmatic buying strategies. ...............................................2
1. Traditional media buying and Real-Time Bidding..............................2
2. Terminology. ........................................................................................3
3. Why Programmatic is the future of digital display advertising. .........4
4. Effective engagement with the target audience...................................5
5. Fastest-growing digital ad formats: mobile and video. ......................6
6. Programmatic Benefits. .......................................................................8
7. Programmatic Limits...........................................................................8
8. Growth is contingent on evolution.......................................................9
Bibliography. ........................................................................................10
Webography..........................................................................................10

3. 2
New trends in digital marketing: the most successful approach to
adopting programmatic buying strategies.
1. Traditional media buying and Real-Time Bidding.
Programmatic is an automated way of buying and selling ad space1
. Programmatic ad buying
typically refers to the use of software to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional
process that involves RFPs2
, human negotiations, and manual insertion orders. The difference from
traditional media buying is that it is done by machines that use data to figure out where your ad
should run, at what frequency and who should be exposed to it.
In terms of spending this means, you can limit wasted impressions you would possibly have a
traditional media buying process that would also eventually target the wrong audience.
In effect, before Programmatic ad adverting, digital ads we bought and sold by human, buyers, and
salespeople, who can be expensive and unreliable. Programmatic advertising technology promises
to make the ad-buying system more efficient, and therefore cheaper, by removing humans from
the process wherever possible.
RTB Real-Time Bidding (RTB) refers to the purchase of ads through real-time auctions, but the
programmatic software also allows advertisers to buy guaranteed ad impressions in advance from
specific publisher sites3
.
1
It is using machines to buy ads.
2
Request for proposal
3
Richardo Bilton (2015), “WTF is programmatic advertising”, digiday.com

4. 3
2. Terminology.
There are various definition variations of the term “Programmatic advertising” depending on
whether we are talking to a DSP, an SSP, publisher, advertiser, and agency or otherwise.
To understand the in and out of the programmatic ecosystem, marketers need to grasp the
terminology associated with it4
.
 Ad exchange: this is where publisher inventory is sold in auction. It is a marketplace used
to buy and sell display ads.
 RTB (Real-time bidding): is a subset of programmatic buying. It means buying ad inventory
dynamically, based on each ad impression. The winning bid is displayed instantly on the
publisher’s site.
 DSP (Demand-Side Platform): is a platform that allows advertisers/agencies to buy the
inventory in real time from various ad exchanges and data exchange accounts through RTB
interface.
 SSP (Supply-Side Platform or Sell-Side Platform): is a technology platform, which enables
the publishers to sell their ad impression inventory in real time and maximize revenue from
digital media.
 DMP (Data Management Platform): a data warehouse, which gathers the type of data and
exports it in digestible and useful information for marketers to refine and optimize their
campaigns.
4
Performance Marketing Guide (2016), performancein.com

5. 4
3. Why Programmatic is the future of digital display advertising.
Display advertising can be used as an efficient promotional tool, building brand awareness and in
some cases measuring the impact off the back of it.
One of the biggest advantages of the display is the way it can influence each stage of the marketing
funnel. It can:
- raise awareness at the beginning by contextual and behavioral targeting,
- engage and educate buyers to help them make a choice on what to acquire.
Finally, display ad retargeting can be used to convert visitors into customers.
Programmatic is able to use advertiser first party data and third party data to target the best
audience for a given campaign goal.
There are two ways marketers can infuse
data into their creative. They can use the
information about the audience5
, including
demographics, location and previous
behavior on websites gathered from first
and third party data, and they can integrate
the data about the context and
environment in such the ad appears6
.
The tool includes customer metrics that
are being collected through publisher
sites and enables you to have access to insights, demographics, behaviors and current trends. Inside
the publisher's network, you can find your much-targeted niche audience that is then been selected
to be reached by your ad that is entering a bidding process. Almost like Google AdWords.
5
The people viewing the ads.
6
Peter Crofut (2014), “Programmatic: Merging data and creative”, DoubleClick by Google, thinkwithgoogle.com

6. 5
4. Effective engagement with the target audience.
Marketing is most effective when you have achieved the three R’s—the right message, to the right
person, at the right time.
Traditionally, brands have had to make do with generic audience segments that blunt targeting and
relevance, operational inefficiencies that slow fulfillment and strain resources, and disconnected
system that make it difficult to deliver insight-driven campaigns across channels.
Programmatic buying uses technology and audience insights to automatically buy and run a
campaign in real time, reaching the right user with the right message
Programmatic media buying and robust targeting technologies have created rich data signals that
marketers can use to ensure that every impression reaches the right people at the right price.
Programmatic advertising dramatically reduces human error and the laborious process of media
buying, with perceptive programmatic techniques targeting the right consumer, at the right time,
in the back-end.
What is interesting about Programmatic buying is that it can adapt to make the buying process
much more efficient, save you time and money and eventually find your target audience faster.
Programmatic buying is changing that by delivering higher levels of targeting, relevance,

7. 6
efficiency and impact. Your advertising appears only where it will have a significant impact on
campaign objectives.
Let's say we have an insight that men who travel for a business like to buy whiskey from airports
upon their departure, but if they have kids they most probably buy chocolates. This way we could
create two different ads depending on their family status but also target only business men who
are currently at an airport. Programmatic will help us match the right ad to the right people in real-
time7
.
Programmatic Ad buying can also be used for testing the potency of your Ads. Because it is cost-
effective, fast and real-time it can help you run tests with multiple creatives of your ads.
5. Fastest-growing digital ad formats: mobile and video.
The changing consumer habit is playing a huge role in the adoption of programmatic as marketers
devise strategies to take advantage of trends like the rise in smartphone penetration, and
increasingly sophisticated technology, which facilitates communication in real time.
More programmatic buys are now happening across channels and ad formats. More agencies and
marketers are considering programmatic earlier in their media buying cycle.
7
Demetris Stefani (2016), “The evolution of your ad campaign is programmatic”, digitaldoughnut.com

8. 7
Relevancy is key and programmatic can hit the right audience at the right time, driving better
conversion rates for brands across a diverse set of inventory sources; from traditional display and
mobile to video, social and native.
Mobile has become one of the driving forces behind display’s recent growth due to advertisers
being attracted to the sheer ubiquity of smartphones, and the way they have enabled their users to
receive messages wherever they are.
Mobile devices have become embedded in consumers’ lives as they can access the internet on the
move: shopping, at work or on public transport. Therefore, being able to reach consumers at the
optimum moment, in real time, is a huge opportunity for advertisers, and one that programmatic
buying has facilitated.
Mobile accounted for the vast majority (78%) of digital ad spend growth, increasing 60.3%
year-on-year to £2.63bn – or 30.5% of all digital advertising.
Video ad spend, overall, grew 50.7% to £711 million whilst video spend on mobile alone increased
by 98% to £353 million due to the increasing numbers of people watching video, TV and film on
smartphones.
Content and native advertising spend – which includes “advertorials” and ads in social media news
feeds – increased by 49.9% to £776 million.

9. 8
Ad spend on social media sites grew 45% to £1.25bn – now accounting for 41% of banner/video
display ad spend. Over 71% of social media spend goes on mobile8
.
6. Programmatic Benefits.
Here are just three of the main benefits worth noting:
 Maximizing of budget and efficiency: Programmatic allows advertisers to target
consumers across mobile and desktop devices seamlessly, communicating with relevant
ads at the opportune moment.
 Meaningful advertising: Programmatic can help to create more impactful forms of
advertising, relevant to specific consumers, rather just a highly generalized audience
segment.
 Transparency and insights: Using an automated buying system captures extensive results,
including how well audiences have engaged with the ad, the best time of day and day of
the week to target users as well as facilitating A/B creative testing.
7. Programmatic Limits.
Programmatic ad buying may represent the future of ad trading in some senses, but it is not without
its hurdles.
Lots of challenges still exist to enable
programmatic to work. Concerns that
were addressed throughout the event
included transparency, fraud, and trust;
limited understanding and knowledge;
confusion over terminology; moving
from direct response to branding dollars,
moving from mostly standard banners to
native, video, rising stars, and audio ad
8
IAB UK (2016), “Dgital adspend grows at fastest rate for seven years”, www.iabuk.net

10. 9
formats; internal organizational challenges for brands and publishers; and delivering different
creative through programmatic9
.
Ad fraud is a growing problem within the ad industry in general, and it is a cause for concern.
Programmatic buying, along with due diligence, could help weed out fraud and deliver impactful
ads to real viewers.
8. Growth is contingent on evolution.
The core of the display market, performance-based impressions, will shift toward programmatic
exchange-based trading at a rate of 11, 4% annually between 2014 and 2019.
The industry will need to evolve for realizing the potential of programmatic:
 Be more transparent: 73% of marketers/agencies would purchase more if there were
greater transparency in the buying process and 70% of publishers would sell more if they
could see who is buying from them.
 Prove that ads work: 80% of marketers would buy more if there were greater emphasis on
quality of viewable impressions
 Be where people are: 72% of Publishers would sell more programmatically with stronger
cross-platform support
9
Carl Kalapesi (2014), “Top 10 Things you need to know about Programmatic but were to afraid to ask”, iab.com

11. 10
Bibliography.
Carl Kalapesi (2014), “Top 10 Things you need to know about Programmatic but were too afraid
to ask”, iab.com
Demetris Stefani (2016), “The evolution of your ad campaign is programmatic”,
digitaldoughnut.com
Doubleclick by Google (2014), “Programmatic: The Evolution of Media Buying”, DoubleClick
by Google, thinkwithgoogle.com
IAB UK (2016), “Dgital adspend grows at fastest rate for seven years”, www.iabuk.net
Performancein’s (2016), “The Performance Marketing Guide”, performancein.com
Performance Marketing Guide (2016), performancein.com
Peter Crofut (2014), “Programmatic: Merging data and creative”, DoubleClick by Google,
thinkwithgoogle.com
Richardo Bilton (2015), “WTF is programmatic advertising”, digiday.com
Webography.
Business2community.com
digiday.com
digitaldoughnut.com
iab.com
iabuk.net
en.wikipedia.org
performancein.com
stateofdigital.com
thinkwithgoogle.com
think.storage.googleapis.com
tradedoubler.com
zanox.com