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5 Ways to Beat Your Competition Using Programmatic Advertising

May 14, 2016
By: Marissa Camilli

Automation is the name of the game now – you need to get your ads out in an organized and consistent fashion. Programmatic advertising is the new buzzword making it more efficient and effective ad transactions for businesses across the world. Here are five things to know about programmatic advertising.

It’s time to scale

If you are not in on the programmatic advertising trend, that needs to change. The pie is scaling to the tune of $14.88 billion, or approximately 25% of the total $58.6 billion mobile marketing pie in 2015. This accounts for a $5 billion jump over 2014, and the trend shows no signs of reversing itself. Mobile advertising accounts for around 30% of this trend currently, and that number is also increasing.

Move Ubiquitously Across Media Platforms

You can employ the automation of programmatic advertising through traditional and social media, giving every business the ability to move through TV and Facebook mobile – not just the big boys. This full funnel buying can be done without talking to a single person on traditional channels, a noticeable upgrade over previous business generations. Imagine being able to connect directly to your audience through a well-placed ad on your mobile app – all during a commercial for the Price is Right!

Analytics Provide Real Time Improvements that Can Be Automated

Programmatic buying fixes itself. Ad buyers can now evaluate the geography, the time of day, the audience segment and the platform that work best in real time. These changes can be programmed in and left to work until the next round of analytics to improve the campaign. However, this next round of analytics could occur the very next day. Usually, ad buyers have to agree to a certain number of ads, locking the campaign into a certain level of efficiency that cannot be changed on the fly, even if it does not perform well. This is especially important on the mobile platform, because the new analytics can immediately be incorporated into GPS-centered promotions.

Brands Bring Ad Buying In House

Forget having to pay the premium for a third party outsourced ad agency. Programmatic ad buying allows your business to bring advertising fully in house, similar to the way the Hootsuite and Microsoft Office automation did for administration and operations. As a matter of fact, internal programmatic buying is the segment of the market that is growing the fastest. 2013 showed 11% of the ads bought through ad-tech company Index Exchange were bought through in house teams. The next year, that percentage grew to 15.

Mobile Social Networks Get Around Cookies

Although behavioral targeting is somewhat limited because of the problems that mobile platforms face with cookies, the increasing influence of major social media platforms over mobile is helping companies overcome this issue. With the exception of Google, the rest of the major social media sites are getting into the programmatic ad buying space, usurping intellectual property in the space, and they already have the data to take full advantage of user IDs across devices.

Marissa Camilli
By Marissa Camilli
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