Commentary
Media-Buying Continues To Migrate In-House Thanks To Programmatic, 'Control' Is No. 1 Reason
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, January 15, 2018
Media-buying will continue to migrate “in-house,” thanks to programmatic ad technology, and the No. 1 reason is “control,” according to the results of a survey of advertisers and ad agency executives being released this week by digital media-buying technology firm Centro.
The study, which surveyed 153 ad execs late last summer, found that 81% of marketers plan to bring at least some of their programmatic advertising in-house over the next 12 months, while 59% said they will no longer outsource their programmatic media-buying to a third party by next year.
“More control” was the most common rationale, followed by “increased revenue stream,” “greater transparency” and “better ROI.”
The survey also reveals that programmatic media-buying is driving a wide range of marketplace models. But overall, the growth is going to so-called “private marketplaces” (cited by 39% of respondents) and open RTB (30%).
Despite the growth of biddable media models, nearly two-thirds (63%) of the respondents said they are leveraging programmatic ad technology mainly to automate conventional “direct” insertion order-based media buys and ad requests from their digital media suppliers.
Joe Mandese is the Editor in Chief of MediaPost. You can reach Joe at joe@mediapost.com.
I'd be interested to know of the 81% that plan to bring programmatic in-house, how many of those are just taking over for an agency that places an IO with a RocketFuel or another DSP that does fully managed? My guess is 99% of them and maybe more - and if I were a marketer and that's all my agency were doing was placing an IO - then I would bring it in-house as well. But I think it's time for the media to start differentiating between managed programmatic DSP's and self-serve. There aren't many clients that would want to, and there probably aren't any that have the man power to run the self-serve DSP, trafficking, analysis, etc. So I'd love for the media and the research companies to quit labeling everything as "programmatic" and dive into a little bit more detail as to what it means is actually happening.