The processes involved in banner and display ad purchases can be inefficient as well as time-consuming. Performing certain tasks associated with digital marketing, such as dealing with ad tags, takes time and can keep you from other more important responsibilities.
Programmatic advertising is, in the most basic sense, a way for you to automate those simple but tedious tasks. Diverting them to an automated system frees up your time so you can direct your energy elsewhere. This technology is gaining traction quickly among digital marketers because it is extremely effective, efficient and improves daily work flow.
What Is Programmatic Advertising?
Several steps in the online ad purchase process are fairly straightforward but time consuming. In addition, processes such as bidding can easily be handled by technology given a few basic parameters. Traditionally, an ad purchase includes requests for proposals at the start of the bidding process, followed by human-to-human negotiations — a laborious process — and manual insertion orders, which are the standard contracts governing the placement and display of ads.
Instead of handling these processes yourself, you can use an automated system to set the rules for how these processes should go. That automated process then executes the ad bidding and purchase process while ensuring that ad deals remain within the established parameters. These "programmatic solutions" speed up the sales process and improve it in many ways.
The Benefits: Why It's Here to Stay
The benefits to your daily work experience are obvious. Simple automated solutions eliminate some of your most time-consuming tasks, thereby reducing the stress placed on marketing departments and freeing up manpower to work on other projects. Plus, these tools perform the work just as well as, if not better than, humans handling the negotiations and ad fulfillment processes, according to Digiday, which notes that the use of programmatic ads is on the rise.
Because the process moves much faster than the old way, some companies are eager to increase their online media purchases. The constraints of display ad purchases in the past weren't just financial — it takes manpower to execute them, and that could limit activity. These automated solutions can free up time and ultimately improve productivity while also saving your company money.
Additionally, there's this benefit to the automated technology: Programmatic solutions work around the clock. That kind of flexibility and workload ceiling are huge advantages on their own, but the efficiency is what's pushed these solutions into the mainstream.
By increasing productivity, improving efficiency and perhaps improving upon prior processes and even the ROI of display ad campaigns, programmatic solutions are a growing trend that are here to stay.
