Although it emerged as an autonomous field only a few years ago, programmatic is such a complex, multi-branched field that simply cannot be framed in one definition. This, of course, makes it more difficult to understand, but with a little research and our very own induction into programmatic, you might get your way around quicker than you’ve imagined.
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Experts’ Opinion
Peter Naylor, former executive vice president at NBCUniversal once stated that programmatic is “a catchall term that many people are using to categorise everything from behavioural and intent-based targeting to real-time bidding and exchange-based buying of inventory. [..] Programmatic is advertising’s newer, better mousetrap.”
This sounds, indeed, very catchy, but it doesn’t explain much. To understand programmatic you need to understand media buying, because with programmatic applied in digital marketing, you can perform multiple actions related to it: action-based ads buying, insertion orders, trafficking, data analysis, so on and so forth. So what does it do that couldn’t be done before in media buying? It all breaks down to using automated tools, based on systems and algorithms to make the calls in your media buying strategy instead of doing it yourself, manually. Allie Kline, from AOL Networks, makes it even easier to grasp: “Programmatic takes multiple data points and makes decisions [about] what screen an ad should be on, what is the most effective strategy at a given moment, and lets you do all the non-manual decisions.”
Our Opinion
So programmatic is a software that enables us to program our actions referring to our media buying strategies. It is the equivalent for back-office automation transported to the digital marketing field. Based on all the systems we’ve developed, automated programs and gathered data source we have now empowered ourselves with, programmatic seems to be the only logical step forward. Will it stick? We’re about to find out, as 2015 predictions revolve around programmatic and mobile marketing strategy.
Quotes source: http://bit.ly/1vTIgWU
