Commentary

Over Two Thirds of Digital Display Is Bought By Robots, Er, Programmatic Computers

by Richard Whitman , Columnist, April 7, 2016

It's really no wonder why the online ad experience truly sucks these days. It's because almost the entire process is managed by soulless computers. According to eMarketer, 67% of digital display advertising will have been bought programmatically this year. That figure will increase to 72% in 2017.

Mobile is playing a big role in that shift with 69% of mobile display bought programmatically in 2016 increasing to 78% in 2017.

Of these shifts, eMarketer Senior Analyst Lauren Fisher said, “Programmatic is extremely efficient and unparalleled in its ability to pair rich audience data with ad inventory and targeting. Buyers and sellers are also becoming more comfortable with the technology. As a result, it is being rapidly adopted across a variety of channels and ad formats.”

Wait until the robots start dabbling with content marketing.

ad spending, forecast, programmatic

2 comments about "Over Two Thirds of Digital Display Is Bought By Robots, Er, Programmatic Computers".

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Andrew Eklund from Ciceron, April 8, 2016 at 7:51 a.m.
I'm confused by your premise. Are you also saying that targeting is bad? Nothing about shitty creative? I see nothing wrong with letting the machines do something better -- assemble audiences and make the buying and selling of advertising more efficient. But none of this lets marketers and their creative staffs off the hook.
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Richard Whitman from MediaPost, April 8, 2016 at 1:34 p.m.

Granted, creativity is best left in the hands of humans but consider the endless amount of ads for kinives you see next to stories about knife murders or the annoying ads you see for something you just browsed for, or worse, just bought on Amazon. Sure, programmatic can certainly ease the human burden and increase the efficiency of digital advertising but there are just too many examples of of "Yup, that shit was placed by a computer" for me to be satisfied that removing the hman element is a good thing.