Learn

What Is Programmatic Advertising?

At a basic level, a good way to describe programmatic marketing is as a way of targeting the type of audience you want to show your advertising to. This could mean reaching out to certain segments across a number of demographics, including social standing, gender, age, and even geographic location. Similarly to paid search, with programmatic advertising, you can adjust the way your advertisements appear according to frequency and time of day, as well as deciding where you'd like your ads to appear. The point of programmatic advertising is that you're only paying for ads that you know will be highly effective - delivered to the right audience at the right time.

In programmatic media buying, you purchase advertising space using software (like Info Station's advertising platform) that automates the optimization, placement, and purchase of media inventory through a bidding system.

Explore

Why Programmatic
Advertising Matters?

Some experts in the industry agree that programmatic advertising is growing more successful by the day, and has the ability to expand into an industry worth tens of billions of dollars by the time we reach 2020. However, in spite of these impressive numbers, a wide number of marketers remain to be confused about what programmatic advertising actually is, and how they can use it in their own strategies.

Media Planing and buying icon
Why is programmatic so important?

The simple answer is that it allows for better efficiency in marketing strategies. Before programmatic advertising and ad buying methods existed, digital ads had to be sold and bought by human salespeople and ad buyers, which lead to a great deal of expensive and unreliable marketing. What's more, in an effort to try and approach the right buyers, marketers had to go for a quantity over quality approach that resulted in thousands of expensive, unsuccessful ad placements.

Media Planing and buying icon
Programmatic advertising is a solution

Programmatic advertising can make the ad buying system more efficient, faster, and a lot cheaper for businesses, by removing some of the human element from the process. This doesn't necessarily mean, however, that human buying techniques will cease to exist. Though technology is being used to replace some of the medial tasks that human beings have been responsible for handling in the past, like dealing with ad tags or delivering insertion orders to publishers, humans are still required to optimize strategies and campaigns.

Media Planing and buying icon
Reporting & Analysis

Performance Metrics, Placement, Engagement, and Analysis. Site, creative, and audience-level reports make it easy to track impressions, clicks, and conversions, as well as evaluate performance against ROI goals and other key metrics.

Media Planing and buying icon

While it's true that programmatic ad buying could mean that there are fewer ad buyers in the system, it could also give sellers and marketers a valuable opportunity to spend more of their time on developing customized, and sophisticated campaigns.

Media Planing and buying icon
“ Is Programmatic, Advertising the Future? ”

Automating the system allows for the matter to be done in real-time without relying on manual trading and insertions. In other words, it saves your business time, while still allowing you to tailor a specific creative or message to the right person, in the right context, at the right time. The method should therefore deliver a far more personalized and precise form of media, resulting in an effectively targeted campaign, and a less "spray and pray" traditional approach to digital advertising.

Many agencies suggest that they're eager to buy up as much media as possible through available programmatic channels, and other major brands have begun to build up in-house teams that help them to manage a more comprehensive programmatic advertising plan. At this time, it's generally digital ads that are sold and bought through programmatic measures, but some media agencies and companies have begun to look into ways that traditional media could be sold through the same concepts.