RTB is causing a major paradigm shift in how online ads are bought and sold, says Michael Smith, vice president of revenue platforms and operations at Hearst Magazines Digital Media. He compares RTB's importance to when search marketing first came out. Long-term, all media will be purchased through RTB, Smith predicts. "It's too compelling a technology for marketers and advertisers not to harness," he explains.

I've been responsible for helping companies expand internationally before - for products as diverse as movies (film distribution for Disney) to ad servers (Sabela Media, my first startup) - and it never ceases to amaze me how complicated it is for companies to grow beyond their roots. First and most obvious, there are major cultural and linguistic differences between the U.S. and other markets. Globalization and the continued rise of American cultural imperialism aside, other markets have different ways of doing things. In digital advertising, this can be as superficial as how requests for proposals (RFPs) and insertion orders (IOs) …

As marketers, our battlefield is the marketplace. Taking this idea to heart, lately I have been studying military philosophy and strategy to find ideas not offered in the latest Godin or Gladwell variant. Recently I came across an extremely interesting idea that could help marketers looking to take full advantage of the real-time edge technology gives to us to reach audiences: the OODA loop, which comes from the late Colonel John Boyd of the U.S. Air Force.

I am a huge fan of Flite and its CEO, Will Price, due to the company's ability to add what is really needed for premium programmatic to take "Flite," which is content and context. In the past, publishers created economic value by aggregating audiences around a certain demographic or context. Price says that RTB is changing all of this. "RTB is allowing marketers to shift from audiences that are aggregated by context, i.e. publisher domain, to synthetically stitching together an audience across thousands of publishers," explains Price.

The amount of data and intelligence available for programmatic media buying grows exponentially every day. RTB platforms can distill the data and design algorithms to endlessly exploit their potential. This gives agencies and their media buyers a daunting -- but not impossible -- challenge. They must effectively evaluate the ability of one platform or algorithm against another in an age where technology is growing more complex.

Real-time bidding offers indie publishers an efficient way to maximize their revenue stream. "We grew up with the reality of technology stripping out inefficiencies and disrupting established systems. We are not going to fight it. We are going to embrace it and take advantage of it," says Alex Magnin, CRO of Thought Catalog. "Efficiency is a great thing. One only needs to look at the differences between the net CPMs of old school ad networks and the CPMs of the RTB market to understand the value of programmatic and RTB, especially to an indie publisher like us."

Wind back the clock and envision yourself as a digital marketer in 2005. Chances are, you don't recognize it one bit, especially if you're using today's market as a comparison. Believe it or not, RTB came on the scene as the popularized, go-to acronym for marketers only five short years ago. Since then, the digital ad industry has undergone a wholesale evolution in which traditional creative strategy has had to confront the new age of big data and analytics: "Mad Men" versus "Math Men," as they say.

As real-time bidding and programmatic media buying become more commonplace in the online advertising industry, the question of creative will need to take center stage. Jeff Hirsch, CMO of CPXi, says that as brands adopt programmatic buying, they face a new challenge: the ability to deliver creative in real time. Enter the need for what Hirsch calls "programmatic creative" -- "using technology to automatically create and iterate ads on the fly, in any size, that can be served in real time." "This means more creative flexibility and more efficient campaigns."

2013 was kind to programmatic marketing. RTB display alone accounted for 20% of all digital ad spend. By 2017, it will reach 30%, or $9 billion. Does this mean we're finally reaching the age when all advertising dollars will flow through RTB pipes? Not quite. True, there promising trends that will move the needle forward, but others will hold us back at bit. Here are five trends we predict will affect programmatic 2014.

Richard Frankel, RocketFuel's president and co-founder, and I agree on many things. One of them is that programmatic will continue to grow in the new year, not that you'd need to be an oracle to foresee that. Not only will more brand marketers begin using programmatic -- they'll be using it more intelligently as well.