Pulse #1: Direct Sales and Programmatic Buying
This is Pulse’s debut edition!
First things first - In what ways are advertisements sold?
It doesn’t hurt to know the difference between direct sales and programmatic advertising. Keep reading to find out.
In the digital world, direct sales take place when an advertiser (for example, a brand or an advertising agency that acts on its behalf) contacts the medium where it wants to carry out their campaign and together they define the project’s specifics. The advertiser and the publisher decide what will be the campaign's reach, cost, duration and more. The available options vary depending on the ad format.
In the mobile gaming industry, buying advertising spots directly allows brands and agencies to use different formats that may not be available to buy through programmatic sales. Direct sales also make it easier to create ad strategies embedded in the game.
The programmatic buying of advertising is the automatized acquisition of online ad spots through the use of particular software. In general, it’s defined in contraposition with direct sales, in which all exchanges, settlements and uploads are carried out manually.
The term is sometimes used to refer to real-time bidding as if they were synonyms. However, not all programmatic sales take place in real-time bidding. Sometimes, programmatic sales are actually just ad spots sold automatically.
