• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, April 6, 2017

Now with Programmatic Guaranteed available to all users of DoubleClick Bid Manager and DoubleClick for Publishers globally, Google has added two new key features that support buyer audience lists and sponsorships.

Through the ability to automate bidding on search campaigns, automation in general has become an interesting topic for me. The announcement, made Wednesday, certainly furthers Google's Programmatic Guaranteed project and advances its strategy to give publishers the flexibility to negotiate different types of ad deals delivered through programmatic channels, such as direct deals historically transacted on paper insertion orders and tags.

Co-written by Kurt Spoerer, group product manager at DoubleClick, and Roshan Khan, product manager at DoubleClick, a blog post explains how Programmatic Guaranteed with sponsorships allows publishers to sell high-value inventory on a flat-fee sponsorship basis — a common practice among publishers transacting via traditional reservations."

The new capability theoretically allows advertisers and publishers to maintain the control of a sponsorship transaction, while gaining efficiency benefits programmatic offers. It is intended to take features from search advertising and integrate them into display ad buying, but I believe it can do more -- and I have oftenwritten on the subject of creating a completely connected advertising supply chain with best practices and checks and balances. This supply chain must connect to a brand's enterprise systems.

Surely it is a daunting task.

During an interesting conversation about programmatic and brand safety with Jeremy Hlavacek, VP of global automated monetization at The Weather Company, said "we really want a combination of humans and automation," he said using the term "augmented capabilities."

Hlavacek oversees the IBM company's partnerships and programmatic ad business. He, too, would like to see the advertising industry more quickly develop best practices for automation and programmatic ad service. He described the topic of our conversation as "quality control" issue in advertising and the industry needs more checks and balances.