Programmatic Advertising — An opinion

“Digital is the future”, one of the most clichéd, used, abused and outdated statements ever if you’re in the digital marketing industry, but still for some reason you are probably going to hear this in your lectures for a couple more years. Humans in general have a high inertia and a tendency to not let go what they know to learn something new. Which is why there are very few early adopters and fewer innovators.
Talking of the future, the world is turning towards complete automation and so is digital marketing in its own ways. One big leap towards the same was Programmatic Advertising. Programmatic has been around the block since quite some time now and its usage has been on the rise by agencies as well as brands. The popular type of programmatic advertising is Real Time Bidding which you all might be familiar with. It involves the auctioning of the inventory with the help of an ad-exchange and an SSP. The SSP puts on the table all the available ad inventory for the advertiser from which the brand can pick and choose through a DSP, basis the audience to be targeted. The audience is determined by their online behaviour, hence naming it, rather obviously, Behaviour based targeting. Imagine ad-ex to be an auction hall where the inventory provided by the SSP is being auctioned and will be sold to the highest bidder. Publishers feed the available inventory to the SSP. The highest bidder sends her consultant (the DSP) to the auction hall who has full control over what to bid on and what not to.
The other form of Programmatic happens directly between the Advertiser and the Publisher. There is no Ad-exchange involved. This is known as Programmatic Direct. This is the type that is now becoming increasingly popular since it gives the advertisers better control and leaves lesser room for ad frauds. All of this happens in the time that it takes for your webpage to load.
What programmatic has done is that it has eliminated the need for humans to take part in the buying and selling of the media inventory, thereby making the entire process exceptionally fast and less erroneous. However, it has its own set of issues.
Due to its nature, it is difficult to find out where all the ads are running and how many humans are viewing it. Although there are a lot of Ad Fraud restricting measures already in place, there is still a grey area which remains unmeasurable.
Another issue is the lack of experts and awareness in this field, especially in India. Now a day’s large brands are extensively using programmatic for their digital campaigns but apart from that there is hardly any awareness on a broader scale. Hence, even if an agency specializing in programmatic advises its brands to advertise through programmatic, the scepticism of the brand manager poses a great challenge.
These challenges are temporary and will sooner or later be rectified. What concerns me more is the massive turbulence the media industry is set to face due to this innovation. If experts are to be believed, Programmatic is soon going to be the only way of digital advertising. I am purposely avoiding quoting any numbers because every expert has his/her own take on it ranging from as soon as 3 years to as later as 10 years.
Another shocking but not surprising development is the usage of Programmatic in traditional media. Imagine the ad slots in a newspaper selling through a software. It might seem far-fetched but is not unattainable. Steps have already been taken in this direction and programmatic for T.V. is set to be a reality soon.
Taking a bird’s eye view, if all of this goes the way it is going, we might soon see a huge shift in the functioning of media houses and agencies. There will be far less man power required to take part in media planning. The job of a planner would just be restricted to pressing the right buttons. With brands developing and hiring in-house programmatic resources, there might not even be a need for a media agency altogether. For someone like me, who’s working in a media agency, it paints an exceptionally gloomy picture. At the end of the day, humans have always adapted efficiency over empathy. Hence a few decades from now, this gloomy picture is bound to come alive unless of course, it is interrupted by yet another unforeseen human advancement!

