Real-time advertising (RTA) has exploded in the last few years and now accounts for 14% of display spend in the UK. Although the adoption of RTA has been nothing short of phenomenal, there are still some concerns around the quality of digital advertising space available programmatically.
Programmatic premium is an industry wide initiative to automate the buying and selling of all premium digital advertising, save a few specialised formats. Publisher buy-in has been achieved through “walled garden” agreements, like private marketplaces (PMPs), which provide sell-side control. These initiatives have seen increasingly premium spots being made available programmatically, from take overs, to pre-roll.
Automation brings obvious efficiencies, but it also opens up new opportunities for both marketers, and content owners. As a programmatic specialist our partnerships with brands are often able to inform both the supply and demand side on how to take advantage of these opportunities.
But what do advertisers gain from the programmatic buying of premium media? With no manual processes, no excel sheets and no adserver headaches, the ease of setup and automation has brought much lower costs of advertising fulfilment from the supply side. Automation also means buyers are able to achieve access to premium placements rapidly, and without the need to commit to large amounts of spend.
These changes have given birth to the “flexible media plan”. Opposed to a static plan, which can be fixed for months, a programmatic brand plan consists of less significant portions of budget, spent at shorter intervals, and with a higher number of publishers. Using techniques learned from direct response (DR), the most effective placements for a campaign can be quickly determined. Budgets can easily be shifted mid-campaign to concentrate on these best performing placements because of the lower minimum spends needed.
Something else very valuable to advertisers is the data being made available by publishers who have high volumes of users, categorised content and new techniques to segment users. By accessing this data via the bid stream and combining it with advertiser data, we can find a precise audience and show them the right creative message all the time, and with no wastage.
This coupled with measurements of audience and engagement (exposure time, Online GRP, video completion etc) produces an extremely effective and customisable digital brand opportunity.
For brand advertisers access to premium inventory is fundamental and preferential treatment on the exchange via private marketplaces has allowed some advertisers ‘first look’ at any impressions that have not been guaranteed via direct sales teams.
However, technology has been recently launched that will allow advertisers to get access to a publisher’s entire inventory via the exchange. Google’s release late February of their “Enhanced Dynamic Allocation” will enable competition between direct and exchange buyers, with the impression going to the highest bidder.
This is an important step for programmatic premium. By having access to 100% of available impressions across multiple publishers will offer the scale needed for even the largest of brand campaigns to be executed via data driven targeting.
It is important to remember that although this brand spend is traded programmatically, planning, negotiation and setup is still done person to person. Just like the old days, it is often the case that a conversation is needed with publishers to talk CPMs, impression, formats and availability. The only difference is the conversation is no longer just forecasting spend for the next quarter, it has become much more forward looking than that.
This gets to the heart of what programmatic premium is all about, leaving the administrative red tape of media plans behind to create long term transparent partnerships; using data from both publishers and advertisers to produce creative, efficient and effective campaigns.
Dan Larden, Supply & Trading Manager, Infectious Media
