• by Skip Brand , March 21, 2014

For once, online advertising has the opportunity to beat television ads. The content that’s running in the ad unit natively will allow the window to premium programmatic to blow right open.

Programmatic is based on the three Cs: consumer, creative and content. The first C was all about the consumer. The idea of buying sites and audiences manifests itself really well around the consumer, and we hear a lot about audience buying in programmatic. The next C is creative, which has been an evolution in programmatic. Now that you can use data and optimize programmatically to find the right audience you want, you can actually now find the right creative and formats for the ad (video in every ad unit).

The big video explosion is not just because video can be sold, but also because video can be bought programmatically. Look at the growth in this space. AOL bought Adapt.tv. BrightRoll, Videology, TubeMogel and on the heels of Tremor Video and Yume IPOing. The easiest way to optimize creative is to make it sight, sound and motion, but now we can even make it programmatic.

The next phase – and the most exciting phase of the three C’s – is content.  When we first talked about the consumer and audience, it was based on the onus that site buying was dead. If you were a site that wasn’t Yahoo or AOL, you fell out of favor. Those sites still have really amazing content, but now that content is really important,  content is king! Heck, Forbes believes financial content is worth $500M. Business Insider worth $100M, which is a lot more than Newsweek sold at $5M.

With native, you have to be careful about how you deliver the ad. Consumers really don’t want ad units in their news feed, and advertorials, while well-established, don’t scale – and the consumer hates them. Top publications don’t want to run advertorials unless they are from superior brands and things get questionable beyond the top 500 brands, when a publisher needs to be authentic. Consumers just won’t accept this content.

Still, content is the best form of native. We’ve found that the best content is from short-tail sites or traditional publisher content on long-tail sites on the independent Web. In our case, we look for content that is written for affluent audiences. With this focus on the three C’s, programmatic is beginning to be more powerful than television. Data + content + media beats TV. The only way to beat TV is to adopt premium native programmatic.