What’s next for programmatic? Six big trends to watch

Marketers around the world are increasingly tapping into the power of programmatic for their digital marketing and advertising efforts, including: display, video, social media and search.

This process of media buying, marketing and advertising uses algorithmic software to automate the buying, placement and optimization of media buying, bidding and marketing.

According to the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), programmatic advertising spending reached $10.1B in 2014 and is set to double by the end of this year.

In fact, programmatic or automated advertising accounted for nearly 50% of the US digital display market it 2014. Marketers are quickly realizing the benefits of programmatic and are clearly jumping in with both feet.

Target’s Group Manager-Digital, Patrick Reiter, recently was quoted discussing some of the benefits of using Programmatic.

It can help us better coordinate messaging to our customers, better manage inventory [and] bring forward information in a way that we hadn’t been able to before – so think about nuances buried within product feeds and things like that. All this comes into play from, really, technology hitting the retail space – and one of the themes is programmatic.

So what’s next for programmatic? Here are six trends to watch.

1. Programmatic expands to tv and radio

As more tv shows, podcasts and content is streamed through services such as Hulu and others, advertisers will have yet another avenue to reach targeted audiences.

Look for other services to follow Hulu’s lead in 2015 by offering smarter advertising with programmatic buying opportunities in the near future.

2. The rise of Programmatic Direct Mail®

Advances in identity management, combined with reverse append services and digital printing, now allows marketers to automate personalized postcards and catalogs in near real-time.

Given the huge budgets allocated to this traditional channel, programmatic direct mail is poised to offer marketers one of the biggest opportunities yet to drive revenue and results.

New providers such as Pebblepost and Lob are looking to help traditional marketers coordinate marketing efforts with their digital counterparts using the power of data, technology and programmatic.

Near real-time digital printing and mobile signals are two major forces helping marketers bridge the gap between digital and physical customer journeys and meeting consumer needs in the moment via multiple marketing channels.

3. Programmatic mobile and video dominate

In 2014, mobile accounted for 44.1% of all US programmatic display ad spending ($4.44bn).

In addition, 60%  of brands’ online video ad spending is programmatic. As time spent on mobile devices and bandwidth and wifi availability increases, so will video viewing. As a result, programmatic ad budgets and spending will shift to mobile and video programmatic efforts at a dramatically rate.

4. Dynamic content technology and ad choices evolve

One to one, personalized messaging for programmatic advertising is hard. When I ran programmatic display efforts at Responsys/Oracle orchestrating a personalized email with a corresponding display ad with multiple variables (product, price, content) was, to say the least, difficult.

After evaluating dozens of vendors, we finally found an ad partner to support the level of personalization needed for our most sophisticated efforts at scale. As more and more data is collected — including the campaign performance, fine tuning ad campaigns and content variables in an automated and efficient manner will become paramount.

Advances in technology solutions will allow further personalization and optimization in real-time. Additionally, as mobile and video continues to increase their share of the market, look for new ad units to appear beyond the traditional banners as marketers look to drive better results.

5. Orchestrated programmatic marketing

68% of marketers believe DMPs are key to future of programmatic marketing according to a recent Econsultancy/Oracle report.

At the heart of of these solutions must be a robust identity management solution. While first and  third party data enhances a profile to create micro segments for targeting, tying a profile to this data along with the media specific ID will continue to expand.

Brands will increasingly have access to a growing set of identifies including a cookie, email, phone number, physical postal address and app ID (i.e. IDFA).

As a result, DMPs with robust identity management solutions will enable marketers to orchestrate their media and marketing communications across multiple channels and break down the divide between physical and digital channels in ways never before imagined or possible.

6. Attribution & analytics

The rise of orchestrated programmatic advertising/media and marketing will fuel greater investments in analytics and attribution efforts as marketers look to better understand the customer journey and the specific impact of each channel’s influence on the individual.

It’s clear to see programmatic is here to stay as marketers look to not only refine their messaging and marketing efforts to increase ROI, but drive better experiences for the consumer.

‘Til Next Time.