Programmatic buying and selling represents nothing less than a revolution in the digital media landscape. Programmatic is not simply a tactic that appends to digital media strategies hatched in
previous eras -- it is a beating heart pumping vibrant new blood throughout the entire body of digital media.
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.