The new open and network-based models of programmatic marketing are outperforming the old closed systems. The most striking thing about this is that many of the successful technology companies are letting the network do the work. What starts out as partnerships in specific areas of expertise (verticals) moves into programmatic measurement or optimization collaboration. Many claim higher performance when moving to mass collaboration and even crowdsourcing.

The advantage of working in a start-up or small agency is that while everyone has his or her specific roles, everyone is also available to help one another get the job done. So while creatives and buyers have superficially unrelated jobs, they collaborate to ensure that the right campaigns are shown in the right markets. As companies grow, this sort of constant collaboration naturally becomes more difficult. But the real problems with inter-departmental collaboration occur when mid-size agencies begin to more closely resemble much larger competitors like Publicis and Omnicom, or the megacorp they would have become if their merger …

TripleLift CEO Eric Berry envisions native advertising as the means to unlock the premium programmatic opportunity for brand marketers. Leave it to a lawyer by training, an MIT-trained product guy in practice, and an early employee at AppNexus to solve the challenges of native advertising.

If you're a marketer reading this article, there's a decent chance you already know that programmatic buying is a uniquely effective tool. The problem? Just because you get it doesn't mean the higher-ups do. So, how do you convince the C-suite that the company is missing out on programmatic? Well, you can start by remembering the fundamental lesson of programmatic advertising: You've got to target the right message to the right people. With that in mind, here are some helpful tips for convincing the leaders of your company to go pro(grammatic):

Marketers want to engage audiences. Yet most media spend still targets content, using this as a surrogate for the audiences that frequently consume this content. Until recently, it was technically and commercially unreasonable for both buyers and sellers to negotiate for subsets of broadcast media content (e.g., television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, etc.) based on buyer-defined audience segments. With the advances in programmatic media planning and execution, we have seen these barriers erode amid the rise of audience-based tailored advertising.

There's no doubting the impact that open exchanges and programmatic buying have had on the advertising landscape. But while unlimited scale for cheap is compelling, it does have its downside. For GroupM agencies, that downside appears to have finally won out. In a strategic and well-defended move, GroupM has agreed to stop buying into open exchanges, illustrating that agencies and advertisers should be building direct publisher relationships or working with trusted partners that leverage O&O/direct publisher inventory. I couldn't agree more -- for these primary reasons:

GroupM's public departure from the Open RTB market was a big discussion topic at the OMMA RTB Conference. In a more general discussion but with (tacit) reference to GroupM, I said that any large advertiser that does not participate in Open RTB is making a big mistake. GroupM cited two major factors motivating its (alleged) imminent departure from the Open RTB world: 1) fraud, and 2) controlling price via scale. Fraud has been discussed plenty by others, so I'm here to talk about scale.

It wasn't too long ago that technology companies were using the initial software-as-a-service (SaaS) programs to (hopefully) provide analysis through computed statistics. The data was manually inputted and mined through by professionals who then produced infographics to show their marketing executives and CMOs. It was a long, labor-intensive process. Luckily, programmers have not stopped creating and upgrading their algorithms and are bringing us a bright new era in premium programmatic.

Over the past decade, we have seen the disruption of many commercial models, often credited to the Internet, but more accurately due to the freer flow of information. For instance, the hated process of buying a car has been transformed by TrueCar, a crowd-sourced automobile pricing platform, enabling customers to understand what others pay for the same automobile. What was the common thread in each of these industries before being disrupted? Business models dependent on opacity are inherently unstable, as at least one party in the transaction, typically the customer, is left unsatisfied. In digital media, the lack of transparency …

Despite the momentum from many major players in the marketing space, recent research by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Forrester Consulting found that more than half of the marketers surveyed didn't understand programmatic well enough to buy and execute campaigns with it. Further, just one-quarter of U.S. client-side marketers understand and are using programmatic technology.