Adoption

Rajeev Goel, CEO of PubMatic speaking at Programmatic I/O, via AdExchanger:

There is a misconception that everything will be programmatic. I think 50% is about right.

Not every campaign or every marketer objective requires programmatic. There are a bunch of challenges: people, process, compensation strategies. I do think we’re at the tipping point for the next ‘S’ curve, which is private marketplaces and private exchanges.

We saw last year (2012) that 1% of the media on our platform was done via private marketplaces and in Q1, it was over 5%.

Vikram Somaya, vp of global operations and audience, Thomson Reuters via DigiDay:

I think programmatic buying in all its forms is necessary for the future of online advertising. It will underpin growth in all message formats.

Jeff Green, chief executive officer of The Trade Desk, via INMA: 

Unified auction will eventually power 95% of all advertisements and transactions. Our future depends on it.

Lucio Grimaldi, Publicitas via Portada Online:

I don’t think that programmatic buying will replace traditional media buying, as each has different functions and goals, in my opinion. Traditional [media] buying always requires a human factor, while programmatic buying is primarily based on remaining inventories.

Jimi Smoot, founder Prosperio, via LA Business Journal: 

I started my career as a media buyer and one of the things I was surprised about was how manual the process was. To buy an ad unit on the Yahoo homepage, you had to call people. You had to send Excel spreadsheets, email back and forth.

adoption curve

Media agencies and new skillsets 

Martin Kelly, chief executive and co-founder, Infectious Media:

Programmatic teams are on the platform all day, tweaking pacing, adjusting white lists, making real-time adjustments to drive performance. Media agencies with incumbent teams with an “old” skillset need time to swap the wrong people out and the right people in, this happens when any industry goes from manual trading to automated.

Brand advertising

Dominic Trigg, SVP, MD Europe, Rocket Fuel:

Concerns over the quality of inventory available for purchase has generally kept brand advertisers away from real-time bidding.

However, brand marketers aren’t content to use broad demographics and fixed audience targets but are looking to reach specific campaign goals by targeting an optimised audience at an influential point of their path to purchase. Marketers are beginning to realise that the ability to optimise in real time will help them to drive improved ROI for their branding campaigns.

Programmatic vs. native

Jason Pontin, publisher and editor-in-chief, Technology Review, via DigiDay:

The publisher in me says “programmatic buying” will have a larger impact on digital media [than native advertising], but the editor-in-chief of a technology publication says, “native ad formats.”

In truth, both will have an impact. In the short term, programmatic buying will continue to drive down the price of digital advertising (at least on B2C sites), which will force digital publishers into a degrading race for page views, but in the longer term, native ad formats will offer advertisers better engagement with publishers’ audiences, which might stabilize CPMs on websites and make mobile publishing a sustainable business. 

John Battelle, founder and executive chairman, Federated Media via DigiDay.

…it’s very important to define your terms here because in five years time, I think you will be able to buy all of these “native” units across a unified “programmatic” platform — and that platform has not yet been built.

We are, as an industry, heading in that direction, and it’s a very exciting one. When programmatic merges with native and is fueled by data and a transparent, objective framework, everyone wins.

ROI

Dominic Trigg, SVP, MD Europe, Rocket Fuel:

Real-time bidding (RTB) works particularly well for performance advertisers as the opportunity to buy individual impressions and target a consumer with a particular product of interest has allowed advertisers to lower their cost per acquisition (CPA) and increase their ROI.

roi

Data management platforms 

Megan Pagliuca, VP and GM of Digital Media, Merkle Inc. speaking at Programmatic I/O, via AdExchanger:

A consumer isn’t just interacting with one channel. They’re watching TV, they’re on Facebook, they’re searching. As we try to understand that challenge, the infrastructure around the media mix is primary. In other words, how do you get to the point where there’s one measurement number you can use across all channels to understand the consumer.

A data management platform just for display is not worth it. Only [use one] if you’re pulling a lot of different things together from search to e-mail.

Programmatic video

Brett Wilson, co-founder and CEO, TubeMogul speaking at Programmatic I/O, via AdExchanger:

When we started, a lot of the budgets came from display budgets, at the expense of other digital ad formats, but now it’s coming from TV budgets. More and more, the distinction of digital video versus TV is going away. It will be video, video, video.

Fraud

Henry Blaufox from DragonSearch , commenting on Media Post:

Fraud reduction is a work in progress. The industry won’t solve this in just a week or two.

But by analyzing the ever growing data and more precisely detecting patterns that are suspicious, the detection and then prevention level will improve, to the point where fraud isn’t lucrative for the swindlers, or a material financial hit to the advertisers, agencies, publishers and tech firms. Then it becomes a matter of catching and preventing new tricks for gaming the system as technology evolves.

eBay 

Phuong Nguyen, director of eBay Advertising UK, via 4-traders.com:

We’re working to educate the industry that programmatic is about much more than remnant inventory. Our Advertising Private Marketplace gives advertisers access to premium inventory and sophisticated targeting to eBay’s 19 million purchase-ready shoppers in the UK, and this will continue to be our focus into 2015 and beyond.

Race to the bottom 

A director interviewed in the IAB and Winterberry Group’s report – Going Global: Programmatic Audience Development Around the World:

In too many markets, programmatic is all about ‘How cheaply can I buy a bunch of inventory?…[That’s] not advancing the conversation on what the approach can really offer in terms of finding an audience first and foremost. Right now, the preoccupation is in getting the best price, and that’s standing in the way of progress for so many.

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Targeting 

Amber Benson VP, Marketing for Simpli.fi, via Convince and Convert:

First-generation programmatic marketing is built on a funnel mentality: Buy a pre-packaged audience segment, target them with advertising, and then use all the post-impression data available to narrow that segment down to quality conversions. The only problem is, once you get to that conversion, you have no idea what happened pre-impression that put them in the audience segment in the first place.

You meet your customers at the end of their journey, but you really have no idea how they got there.

Precision programmatic marketing uses unstructured data to build custom audiences and optimize them on the fly. Using unstructured data allows marketers to target, optimize, and report using element-level data–important details like search history, site visits, recency, context and location, that provide clues to the customer’s progression toward purchase.

Eric Bosco, CEO of ChoiceStream, via Forbes:

The allure of digital advertising has long been its inherent one-to-one nature. However, until recently we have only realized one-to-one metrics – who clicked on an ad and who converted…

There will be several winners who profit from this seismic shift in digital advertising. The first set includes developers of the two distinct components of programmatic buying: Real-Time Bidding and Continual Optimization. The second set of winners will be publishers whose premium content and premium audiences will be bid up as more programmatic buyers enter the market. The third set of winners will be the marketers who acquire internal expertise and develop the partnerships necessary to operate in the evolving ad ecosystem.

Cookies

Scott Knoll, CEO, Integral Ad Science speaking at Programmatic I/O, via AdExchanger: 

There are three levers or pillars to the ad business: the message itself, the right audience, the right place. Industry has focused on audience. But if you don’t have the first two right, you’re wasting your money.

We’ve gone the wrong way by focusing on cookies. In an exchange, the whole idea is you have buyers and sellers looking for the right price and placement. But by focusing on cookies, we’ve limited it to a small percentage of the inventory. Whether it’s audience or environment, we need to create a marketplace for efficiently buying and selling inventory that goes beyond the cookie.