Everything you need to know about programmatic series featuring extracts from our co-authored guide with ISBA - This extract is taken from Vol One ... Download the full guides here.
As the adoption of programmatic grows, advertisers have highlighted a number of issues that are still to be addressed:
Brand Safety
40% of marketers have said that ensuring their brand does not appear beside unsafe content is the primary concern when buying programmatically (Undertone 2015).
Viewability
Low levels of viewability in campaigns has led advertisers to demand they should only be charged for those impressions that appeared onscreen. Unilever CMO, Keith Weed,
was one of the first to say “Anything less than 100% viewability of digital ads is not good enough."
Ad Fraud
A combination of low standards by some of the exchanges, indiscriminate buying policies and targeting by criminal gangs has fuelled the risk of campaigns being exposed to ad fraud.
Ad Blocking
Ad-blocking is not a programmatic issue per se, but one for the display industry as a whole. Predictions have ranged from the apocalyptic to the more level headed:
“These debates flare up every five years or so and we always seem surprised,” Nestlé’s global head of digital Pete Blackshaw argued that the industry would overcome mobile ad blocking in the same way that advertisers improved their offer following the rise of pop-up blockers on desktop over 10 years ago. Marketing Week 2016.
Even when taking into consideration some of the headlines, most marketers have not seen these concerns as a barrier to programmatic adoption. These concerns, and the ad-tech industry’s response to them, will be discussed in more depth in volume 3 of this guide.
Download ISBA & Infectious Media's introduction to Programmatic.
Taking into consideration the complexity of programmatic and the challenges in educating the internal audience, it speaks volumes that in the last couple of years some of the world’s largest advertisers have publicly talked about changing their advertising strategies to take advantage of the programmatic opportunity.
We initially saw American Express stating its ambition to trade 100% of its display budget programmatically. Procter & Gamble announced they wanted to use programmatic for 70-75% of their digital advertising. Whereas TalkTalk now spends 80% of its total display budget programmatically.
Download ISBA & Infectious Media's introduction to Programmatic.