Have you ever taken part in an auction? If yes, you are definitely one of those people with a lot of patience, because auctions usually tend to run for a very long duration. What if I told you about an auction that gets over in about the same time you blink your eyes once, or maybe twice? That is what Programmatic marketing is all about. Widely tipped to be the future of advertising on the web, it allows advertisers to bid for an ad place on a web page in Real Time.

But as a marketer, did you know about programmatic marketing and the opportunities it provides? Google may have come up with a strategy to spend more than 60% of its digital advertising budgets on programmatic marketing. But until and unless everybody in the market have an idea about it, and are comfortable with the same, implementation of the idea is going to be a tough task.

So to clear the air and provide a proper insight on what exactly is programmatic marketing.

A Small Beginning

Throw in a bunch of stuff like automation, media-buying work-flow, consumer data, impressions and demographic groups in an “ad basket” which runs on real time, and you have programmatic marketing right in front you.

To be more specific, programmatic marketing is the automated bidding which works on real-time and allows various advertisers to exhibit a context based specific ad to a specific customer.

It All Starts Here

When you click on a web page, it usually takes about 2-3 seconds to load. Have you ever wondered what happens in that short span of time, other than of course your page getting loaded? It might be surprising to know that in programmatic marketing, you can find that advertisers are usually competing against each other for an ad place during that time slot!

Advertising is no more about two parties pre-negotiating the prices and conditions and agreeing upon it prior to running the ad. The new ways have given the advertisers the liberty of making use of Real Time Technology (RTT) to make their bids and win a place for their ad on the web page within a few milliseconds.

As soon as a web page is clicked, the publisher of the page sets up the ad impression for auction. An auction is held among the advertisers who compete for the ad impression. The advertiser willing to bid the highest automatically wins the right to display their ad. Upon delivering the ad to a prospective customer, the customer clicks the ad and the advertiser converts them into sale and profits. As the entire process is automated with the help of algorithms, and the price that each advertiser is willing to bid has already been programmed in, the auction takes place in a hassle free manner within the small time window.

How is It Better?

It came, it saw, it conquered! And later it got substituted as well. This is the state of most of the emerging technologies and strategies in today's world. As more and more technologies surface over the horizon, the older ones tend to be replaced gradually, only because the new arrivals are better than the existing ones. On the same lines, a report by Forrester states that by 2019, the Global Programmatic Penetration will almost be 50%. This clearly indicates that Programmatic Marketing is the new arrival in town and it will very soon replace the existing advertising and marketing ways. But what makes it better than the ones that already exist? Lets look into some of the transformative advantages that programmatic marketing puts forth in the digital advertising market.

• It provides an opportunity to bid for an inventory based on the current demand in the market instead of advance buying.
• You can always measure each individual impression, the clicks, conversions and the brand lift in real time,through which optimization of Internet ad targeting goals becomes easy.
• A variety of first party data like the behavioural patterns, demographic details, click stream data, etc. That lets you gather more information about the consumer.
• Your ad can be tailored to high precision placement by choosing specific customer instead of the normal approach of bulk based impression buying.
• The chances of finding an ideal customer is high, courtesy of huge lists of websites and attributes.

What Next?

Programmatic marketing is definitely the game changer in the business world and it is sure to be a huge factor for the success of an organization in the coming years. But it still has a long way to go. Troubled by trust issues, transparency, limited knowledge, vulnerability to frauds, and other marketing problems, programmatic marketing would take a little more time to position itself among the marketers and the advertisers.