• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, February 23, 2016

Here in beautiful, sunny Arizona, the air is thick with brand marketers, agencies and vendors all looking to learn from one another about how to do programmatic successfully, about the pitfalls and complexities -- of which there are many. Everyone’s keen to learn. Many are also here to cut deals.

And that’s OK, because this is the perfect venue in which to do it. This is my first Programmatic Insider Summit, and I must say that people are genuinely open to one another and appear to be getting the most out of the experience. You’ve got brand marketers, direct-response advertisers, agency folks, ad-tech vendors and legal experts all trying to make sense of the landscape.

Most panelists on my session on the factors holding programmatic back represented DR-based advertisers. None of them seem to be ready to go build a DMP just yet. 

Some of those panelists, like Mike Colella, founder and CEO of Credit Simple, a personal finance comparison site among other things, is doing just fine spending a couple million dollars on Google Display. Goji, a marketer of property and casualty insurance, doesn’t mind engaging in programmatic if it’s going to make the phone ring: it’s on a CPA model and needs to make sure agents are in place to talk consumers through a complex transaction.

All of which begs the question: Do direct-response advertisers get less out of programmatic than big-brand advertisers? Vonage, which is focusing heavily on B2B efforts as well as keeping its B2C going,  is pretty smart about its programmatic strategy. Read more about how Vonage does it here. I look forward to Day #2, when we’ll have an exciting panel first thing on ad blocking.