Commentary
Programmatic's Mainstream Future: Building Cohesion, Reducing Friction
- by Alanna Gombert , Op-Ed Contributor, February 29, 2016
Programmatic has already conquered the desktop, and is expanding to include mobile, TV, audio, and out-of-home. Branded video dollars are rapidly moving to programmatic video and TV, and the theme of that migration is storytelling, and ad units: branded ad units, delivered seamlessly to consumers wherever they may be.
It’s not about the benefits and pitfalls of whether programmatic is the future. We’re really past that debate. Programmatic is mainstream, and it’s now a matter of further increasing trust in the supply chain, of building cohesion and reducing friction in the automated digital media pipeline, and of evolving our teams and their skill sets to reflect this new reality.
The agency’s role in programmatic’s future is critical. For agencies to stay competitive, they need to reduce the friction of internal walls built around technology and client silos. There isn’t one right way to structure organizationally, but if programmatic is walled off from the rest of the internal teams, the promise of automation is less likely to be fully realized.
The need to cross-train teams on programmatic throughout the digital media value chain is no longer a luxury -- it’s essential. Programmatic does not inherently represent a “man versus machine” staffing dichotomy. But it does raise the floor of the skill sets necessary to remain an effective participant in the digital media economy.
In the past, media buyers and sellers with low baseline technical skill sets could effectively hide within their old media channels, with “tech sales” the domain of an elite, trained workforce. Programmatic renders those channel silos increasingly obsolete.
This doesn’t mean that everyone in the supply chain will need to write code. What it does mean is that cross-training teams in baseline technical skills will become the norm. For example, everyone should understand how data management platforms, real-time bidding, and ad exchanges actually work.
Mac Delaney of Merkle, Randy Kilgore of Kilgore Media Group, and Jim Norton of AOL will be talking about this skills gap at length at the IAB Programmatic Marketplace conference on March 7.
Looking at emerging trends in TV, audio, out-of-home, and beyond, we are witnessing more and more ad-spend dollars flow through programmatic. That programmatic is firmly anchored in today’s reality is evidenced by increasing share of upfront TV spend. Still, there remain underlying challenges to even wider adoption.
Tension between standardization and innovation in emerging markets such as programmatic TV -- with attribution models still largely rooted in the desktop -- will require resolution with more modern, robust attribution methods.
We will need to coalesce around all of this rapidly, if we want to promote programmatic's fast-paced growth.
This is an exciting time for programmatic, as it moves beyond the awkwardness of adolescence and develops into a cohesive, mature fixture in the digital media landscape.
Actually, Alaana, we are a long way from passing the debate about the adoption of programmatic buying for TV. The issue is far from settled and there are grave doubts in many quarters about "programmatic", as defined by its ardent enthusiasts, ever being adopted by main stream TV ad sellers or time buyers----some experimental activity and single seller, marginal GRP inventory auctions notwithstanding. More likely, "programmatic" will have to adapt to the realities of each medium, in most cases being merely a new name for computer assisted media buying/selling, where humans continue to make the key negotiating and executional decisions.
Sorry for misspelling your name Alanna.