Automation is the name of the game. For the marketing industry, automated technology has been illuminated through the recent rise of programmatic buying and RTB technology. As a result, everyone in the ecosystem -- from marketers to ad agencies, publishers and ad tech companies -- has experienced massive shifts in their products, whom they hire, and how they buy media, value an impression, and reach an audience. While RTB technologies and programmatic buying continue to fuel the momentum behind marketing automation, common themes are being called into question.

Programmatic now delivers more than 33% of financial ads, according to the Journal of Financial Adverting and Marketing. In addition, more than half of financial brands will spend ad budgets through RTB and programmatic for both branding and direct marketing campaigns. Expect three trends in financial advertising as this segment begins to spend well over half of its ad dollars via RTB and programmatic: 1.) Video, video and more video 2.) Private exchanges with huge discounts for volume 3.) Viewability and cost-per-view (CPV) like Undertone and others are pushing to scale premium.

While programmatic has quickly become an important term in many marketers' digital arsenals, widespread adoption still faces challenges. For one, the concept still perplexes some, with a recent poll showing only 23% of marketers understand programmatic buying and use it to execute campaigns. One of the largest hurdles inhibiting wider adoption is digital media's movement toward a vertical-focused marketplace. For programmatic technology to become ubiquitous within marketing strategies, it must deal with this movement.

Jack Kerouac said, "The road is life!" Now programmatic is the life of digital media enthusiasts, and the travel industry is embracing it. Kerouac often asked, "What's in store for me in the direction I do not take?" In travel, the answer is that publishers, agencies and clients who do not embrace programmatic are getting left behind.

The business world is prone to radical changes, and change brings a mix of feelings, many of them negative. Yet transition occurs whether industries embrace the change wholesale or initially resist. Look at the music industry, which went from selling CDs to MP3s to focusing on streaming services in a little more than a decade. In digital advertising, marketers had barely begun to grasp the thousands of computations necessary to deliver an ad to a consumer's browser when real-time bidding came along. Now, all of these computations are done in real time, with even more complex decisions added to the …

I was raised to avoid using labels. Describing people, countries, and companies with broad descriptions that can border on stereotypes, positively or negatively, can be very dangerous and inappropriate. Still, In today's world of programmatic buying and selling, and more specifically in the expanding world of private exchanges, labels are critical.

Much has been made of the use of premium inventory vs. performance inventory on RTB platforms. Some detractors claim that RTB traffic is worthless and that DSPs are polluting their premium traffic with remnant inventory that costs the same but doesn't convert. This may have been true of RTB platforms in their early days. But now, especially in the case of mobile, RTB has proven itself as both a branding tool and a way to engage consumers in the context of relevant content in real-time.

Gregg Colvin, U.S. COO at Universal McCann (UM) is very experienced with both programmatic (@agency) and premium (@Fox Networks). As a trained lawyer and COO, he has a pragmatic grasp on all aspects of the RTB marketplace. I recently interviewed Colvin, who has watched the programmatic revolution from the inside. Believe it or not, he sees the glass as more than half full and herein even addresses a few of the issues to make RTB even better.

Have you heard about the independent media trader (IMT)? This catalyst of change is an emerging discipline focused on executing ad inventory buying and selling on behalf of marketers, agencies, and publishers, and -- at times -- on behalf of its own and/or others' risk capital.

The ad tech industry is always simmering with activity, and has been particularly active with M&As lately. This is (usually) great news for investors, executives, and similar companies and technologies that benefit from a valuation boost. But in ad tech, and especially programmatic, the untold story is what happens to clients.