Is Programmatic the Future of Advertising?

Olena Bakalo
3 min readMar 24, 2021

The idea that consumers hate advertising is a myth.

The ads they dislike are the ones that don’t offer anything useful — like trying to sell surfboards to the landlocked. It shouldn’t be this way.

Digital advertising has come a long way: there are now more advertising platforms than ever. This can be overwhelming for businesses.

Luckily, programmatic marketing is here to change the game and give advertisers a much better way of connecting with consumers. Programmatic makes it easy to specify a target market, budgets, and goals for a campaign while reaching a highly-targeted audience.

If you’re interested in learning about programmatic advertising, then this article is for you!

What is Programmatic Marketing?

Simply put, programmatic marketing utilizes software to buy and optimize digital campaigns automatically, rather than buying them directly from publishers. Automation increases efficiency and allows for a much more effective strategy.

Programmatic automates buying by using Artificial Intelligence and employing RTB is one way to do it. RTB, or real-time bidding, is a process, where agencies or advertisers bid on display ad inventory through an auction model in an online ad exchange.

The process happens in an instant: competing bids are calculated by a host of analytics and algorithms. They automatically determine the most cost-effective bid.

With RTB in Programmatic advertising, you no longer need to spend copious amounts of time on ad placement, buying, and analysis after the acquisition. Reliable algorithms and computers do it all on your behalf, unlike when working with the Google Display Network.

Besides, with Programmatic, you have access to any format and channel, including mobile, tablet, desktop, audio, and connected TV.

How Programmatic Marketing Helps Businesses

Better targeting

The targeting possibilities of programmatic advertising offer impressive ways of helping you aim for exactly the audience you need.

The fact that the targeting is optimized for all devices in real-time makes it even more impressive.

You can target any number of different demographics: age, gender, location, occupation, etc., as well as choose during what time of day you want your ads to be seen.

Better Returns

Programmatic ads allow businesses to create a more effective campaign with a smaller budget.

With programmatic’s specific targeting capabilities, ads are only seen by people that are interested in them. This translates into fewer wasted clicks and impressions.

Additionally, the use of real-time bidding eliminates the risk of overpayment, since the ad space negotiated for is not based on a predetermined price as in traditional media advertising.

Advanced Tracking

This type of digital marketing engages in click and impression tracking.

Advertisers and publishers that use programmatic advertising have real-time access to data about ad placements and activity.

With the help of Programmatic, advertisers can even find out what websites and apps the target audience frequents.

The advertiser can see not only the total number of conversions but the value and the category of each conversion gained from ad impressions and clicks.

Efficient Campaign Management

Within Programmatic, all ad campaigns fit into a single system. This makes management infinitely easier.

Having all campaigns in one page makes planning and budgeting easier for everyone involved.

There’s no need for Excel spreadsheets anymore — everything you need to see will be on one platform right in front of you.

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Nearly 88% of display ads in the US are forecasted to be bought programmatically in 2021.

So to answer the first question posed, I believe that programmatic marketing isn’t the future of advertising — it’s the present!

It is time to adapt your marketing strategy and not get left behind. Programmatic advertising will help you reach the right audiences while saving time and improving results.

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Olena Bakalo

Digitize. Immediately! Co-founder, CEO @iplace.agency Portugal