If you or your business uses online advertising, you may have heard people rave about how
programmatic ads are disrupting digital marketing.
Your ad could be brilliant, but if it’s not in the right place and targeted at the right people, your
campaign will never reach its true potential.
According to recent studies, almost 90% of consumers are open to having two-way conversations with
brands about their products or services. This emerging brand of conversational commerce gives brands
an opportunity to use well-placed (and well-crafted) programmatic ads to spark back-and-forth
engagement.
As AI in digital marketing continues to evolve and become widely adopted across all areas, working with
the right autonomous technology will help to boost output while improving the return on investment
(ROI) of targeted ad campaigns of all shapes and sizes.
Did you know? Even in 2022 alone, around 75% of leading marketers used AI technology to improve
their programmatic advertising and media buying initiatives, according to Statista.
So, if you nod when people claim programmatic advertising is a game-changer but don’t understand
why, you’re in luck.
Here, we break down what programmatic advertising is, explain targeting best practices, and examine
four brands that are doing it right.
What is programmatic advertising?
Programmatic ad buying is the use of software to buy digital advertising. While the traditional method
includes requests for proposals, tenders, quotes, and negotiation, programmatic buying uses algorithmic
software to buy and sell online display space.
A sophisticated way to place advertising, it uses traffic data and online display targeting to drive
impressions at scale, which results in a better ROI for marketers. It can also yield great results for both
SMEs and global brands. So don’t ignore it even if your organization is small.
But, it’s not the complete automation of the ad-buying process. Traditionally, you manually prepare
insertion orders or ad tags, which can be labor-intensive. With programmatic advertising, marketers
have more time for the optimization and improvement of ads to drive campaign success.
What are programmatic advertising platforms and tools?
Programmatic advertising is a powerful tool and global spend is expected to surpass $594 billion in 2024,
and beyond (Statista). The US is a big spender on programmatic ads—but the UK and countries in the
MENA region are catching up fast (OnAudience).
How and why is programmatic advertising successful?
Quite simply: yes, it is successful because it’s efficient, targeted, and scalable.
One of the key drivers of the uptake in programmatic advertising is AI and how it is changing marketing.
At this point in the game, 76% of leading marketing decision-makers believe that the influence of AI will
shape their programmatic advertising better in the coming years. A testament to the value that this
ever-evolving branch of digital marketing has to offer brands across industries.
Programmatic advertising works for marketers as it’s an efficient use of both time and resources. And,
armed with increasingly sophisticated autonomous capabilities, brands and marketers alike stand to
improve their output, as well as the impact, of their targeted programmatic advertising strategies.
With programmatic advertising, you can rely on an algorithm that will determine where your ad money
is best spent.
All you have to do is feed your programmatic solution information about your campaign, audience, and
key performance indicators, and the algorithm will do the hard work.
If you’re looking to optimize ad spend, boost your organization’s ROI, and resonate with your target
audience, programmatic advertising has the potential to help you thrive.