Programmatic Marketing — What’s that?

Relevant ads weren’t always relevant.

Think back to when the advertising industry was dominated by billboards, TV ads, and the radio.

What was the advantage of having those back then? The advantage was in the reach a company got. As a business advertising with TV and radio, you paid for your ads to be blasted out to the public as far and as wide as your pockets could take you. Along the way, you would hope that someone you happened to reach just happened to be interested in purchasing your product.

Essentially, it was a game of really complicated horseshoes. Businesses would throw their horseshoes (ads) with a blindfold on and hope that it landed somewhere remotely close to the spike in the ground (their ideal buyer).

Nowadays targeting is used more so on television and radio ads, but there’s something better.

Much better.

So what exactly is programmatic marketing?

Fast forward to the 2010’s to a world much more digitalized with many different individuals owning computers and cell phones of their own, free to search for whatever their interests are.

Programmatic marketing refers to the real-time bidding or direct buying of display ads, done by machines.

But that’s not all!

These bots — that are bidding and displaying your ads for you — target your specific ads to specific types of consumers that would have a high possibility of finding your product valuable. This information is gathered from what types of sites the consumer visits, what demographic they’re in, their geographic location, and so on.

Programmatic buying ( it’s also known as) heavily reduces the amount of work that digital marketers have to do with regards to targeting the right customers, at the right time, at the right place, with the right interests (we could go on forever here). Marketing is becoming extremely efficient with things like programmatic marketing.

Econsultancy compares real-time programmatic bidding to Google AdWords in the sense that it automates ads to show on the display network to relevant consumers like AdWords does the same on the Google Search Network.²

“You mentioned ‘real-time programmatic bidding’: what’s that?”

We’re glad you asked!

There are two types of programmatic bidding:

1. Real-Time Programmatic Bidding (RTB) – This refers to the actual real-time bidding of bots on certain ad spaces that the bot deems would be a good space for relevant viewers to spot your ads.
2. Programmatic Direct – This is when the bot buys guaranteed space for your ads so that no auction is necessary.¹

Both of these types of programmatic marketing have value. Deciding on choosing one over the other depends on you.

Expect great things from the future of programmatic marketing.

The future of programmatic marketing looking bright. Marketing Land says that it already accounts for around 63% of all the display ads as of 2016.¹ It doesn’t matter whether businesses may be big or small, it looks like everyone can benefit from having relevant ads delivered from businesses to consumers. With the internet being as cluttered as it is by nature, programmatic marketing may be what business owners need to cut through the noise to reach that prized consumer.

If you have any questions about programmatic marketing, give us a shout on Twitter, or on our Facebook page! We’d be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Sources: Marketing Land¹, Econsultancy²