Commentary

$3B In Programmatic Video Spend in 2015, Says EMarketer

It’s a programmatic world, after all. And proving it (or re-confirming that, more like it), is eMarketer’s 2015 Programmatic Advertising report. According to its data, programmatic video will account for nearly $3 billion, or 39%, of the total spend on video advertising this year.  

Altogether programmatic ad buying of display ads will surpass traditional direct sales this year, accounting for about 3 out of every 5 digital dollars spent.

By 2017, eMarketer says, that dollar amount for programmatic video spending will total $7.4 billion, of 65% of the total video spend, and by then programmatic will be taking its piece from a larger pie.

That’s because eMarketer supposes a neat blurring of what is TV and what is Video:Other. The idea of TV Everywhere is morphing into Video Everywhere (but with much of it from TV).

“One way in which this mantra will play out is through increased adoption of ads delivered via over-the-top platforms such as Roku and Apple TV, as well as through continued growth in programmatic video advertising on mobile devices,” the executive summary of the larger study surmises.

The only thing holding programmatic video spending down are the publishers that still resist it in favor of their own premium content.

To arrive at its numbers, Marketer used its own proprietary data combined with “hundreds of pieces of third-party data and analysis,” and over 70 interviews with experts and executives over the last two quarters.

Though it says things may change as programmatic gains even more traction, “so far programmatic spending on social media advertising has overwhelmingly gone to two sellers, Facebook and (to a lesser degree) Twitter. Similarly, YouTube rules when it comes to programmatic digital video ad spending.” Those facts of life won’t change too soon, eMarketer says, but could over time.

And, like every advertising trend out there, a lot of the action is on mobile. The report says spending on programmatically purchased mobile ads will overtake that of desktop this year by more than $3.23 billion. This report says 60% of mobile ad spend this year has been a programmatic buy.

Programmatic native advertising is shaping up to be the big driver for mobile advertisers, and in the next four years, eMarketer says native advertising will be pushing lots of mobile’s overall programmatic gains.

One significant difference between programmatic digital advertising and evolving programmatic TV advertising, eMarketer says is that TV’s use of it is to better identify and exploit target audiences more granularly, like, literally, never before. Digital programmatic advertising has mainly been used for workflow efficiency.


pj@mediapost.com
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