For digital publishers today, the benefits of programmatic are clearer than ever. Not only does it provide the chance to monetize all inventory, it also provides the insight necessary to understand what kind of yield the open market can produce. In turn, this informs pricing strategies for all ad products sold. That's why the overwhelming majority of publishers have embraced programmatic. But they're still struggling with programmatic's basics. Here are the three areas where challenges are most common.

Transparency in the programmatic world is a game of smoke and mirrors. Don't look over here where I am doing something you may not like, but please look over here away from the main goal. This happens in too many programmatic dealings, particularly in the buy-side managed service offering. What's nice about this subject is that most players have come forward at one time or another claiming more transparency is better than less. What's even nicer is having a fair way to understand transparency and judge it on a case by case basis. This why the Transparency Acid Test is …

The industry is completely focused on viewability right now. You can't go a day without reading an article about the topic. While measuring whether an ad is in view is certainly critical, as an industry we need to avoid turning viewability into the next click-through rate. We need to all understand that, like a click, an ad that is confirmed to be in the viewing window of a user's screen is just a rough proxy for success. In fact, it is just the starting point. Having your ad in view will be "table stakes" in the near future. So don't …

#1: Companies will invest more in programmatic branding. With more publishers adopting programmatic and seeing its benefits, we're seeing an important shift. Now, more marketers are leveraging programmatic to help understand the value of targeting a specific audience, as well as the impact of digital advertising on general brand attitudinal metrics.

Ad-tech companies have created a number of game-changing technology solutions that now make it possible for brands to bypass agencies, using tech companies to run their campaigns. As you can imagine, this trend is severely disrupting the way ad agencies operate, shaking up agencies' position in the online display advertising ecosystem. So what can ad agencies do to protect themselves from becoming obsolete? Here are three steps they can take:

The two hottest trends in online advertising in recent years seem almost like opposites. Programmatic advertising is about automation and scale, using technology to make advertising as efficient as possible. Native advertising, meanwhile, is about the human touch, about crafting content that blends so seamlessly into a publisher's site that it hardly feels like advertising at all. Still, native and programmatic now seem to be on something of a collision course. A small but growing number of startups are now trying to bring the efficiency and scale of programmatic to the world of native advertising.

Programmatic is one of those game-changing solutions that then creates a new set of problems to solve, mostly around deployment, data readiness, data activation, transparency, transaction cost, know-how, asset selection, etc. So in-house is a solution to a problem caused by the shift to programmatic trading. Before we talk about alternative strategies, let's define what the word "in-house" really means.