The whole purpose of DSPs is to wring as much efficiency out of the ad-buying system, limiting costly human input in favor of as much automation as possible. However, since each advertiser has unique goals, there is still a fair amount of work that humans must do -- such as establishing rules that define the bid/buying criteria, and adjusting campaigns to identify the best-performing creative units and/or most responsive audiences.

In 1995, automated trading transformed the New York Stock Exchange, and that same system of real-time bidding has been transforming the online display advertising industry, as ad exchanges facilitate the automated trading of digital media. It takes power and efficiency to reach the right audience with the right inventory, at the right time and place, dynamically and in real time. Now, this technical approach is gaining popularity in mobile.

"I'm not against programmatic premium per se, but I am opposed to it when it's not executed in an intelligent way," says Rich Antoniello, CEO of Complex Media. Once again, it's the publishers who are slow to adopt premium programmatic.

When I joined Sociomantic Labs in late 2012, I was intrigued by the prospect of bringing a European ad-tech company into the North American market. Having been involved with a number of U.S.-based ad tech companies, I was attracted to the opportunity to pursue a global mission from a different starting point. In addition to navigating the daily realities of managing a globally distributed team -- local laws and regulations, identifying and recruiting talent, managing staffing, providing training, cross-border operations, localization -- it has been interesting to experience the cultural differences between the ad tech markets outside of North America.

As a follow-up to my previous article on "The Premise of Programmatic," I'd like to discuss some of the key problems of programmatic advertising and how they prevent the expansion of the quality and size of the overall market for programmatic transactions.

Premium programmatic has a major hurdle in its path: publishers are slow to join. In my conversation with Peter Minnium a few months back, Minnium noted that a shortage of premium inventory was a key obstacle to getting brands to invest in digital display. So, if the IAB is publicly telling publishers that the demand is there, why aren't more publishers offering up the inventory?

RTB should be the best thing that ever happened to our industry, but it's not living up to its potential. While RTB can be very efficient and budget-friendly, there's an unjust perception that RTB is solely the domain of retargeting and low-quality, remnant inventory. Moreover, RTB has a handful of fraud issues: ads that aren't viewable, ads that follow you endlessly even after you've made a purchase, and ads that appear on "ghost sites." Then, there's the question of quality: brands can't risk association with sensitive, offensive or otherwise unsavory content. Given these issues, many brands are simply reticent to …

Since June 2012, Facebook has made strides in opening up its environment to the digital advertising community at large with the introduction of the Facebook Exchange (FBX). Marketers can now use external sources of data for audience targeting - including site, search and even offline data, unlike before when marketers were limited to targeting Facebook users only with Facebook data.

Data, in my book, must deliver actionable insights to help publishers, advertisers and agencies make decisions that positively impact their businesses. (It has to make them money, essentially.) In the programmatic world, it should also help deliver transparency. So I was looking forward to speaking with Michael Driscoll, CEO and founder of Metamarkets, a SaaS provider of visual analytics to the online advertising industry.

Marketers' biggest challenge has always been reaching the folks who want to buy their product. That's why retailers have been thrilled by programmatic marketing - a practice through which retailers can reach customers with display ads based on the site pages they visited, the content they've consumed, and even the search terms they've entered into sites like Google. Essentially, programmatic marketing is giving marketers super powers. And new advances in ad viewability are making them even more powerful.