This recommendation is based on the simple concept that even if an ad is 100% viewable, if it was caused to load by a bot, it is still fraud, and useless for advertisers, who thought their ad was shown to a prospective human customer.

Media buyers are more equipped than ever to handle programmatic media. The self-service user interfaces (UIs) of DSPs empower media professionals to truly bid on the right impressions at the right time. The problem is the process isn't streamlined: full access comes from using many platforms. It makes the programmatic marketplace inefficient. There are huge ad tech opportunities for centralizing programmatic buys into a single platform.

According to eMarketer, RTB now serves as the dominant transaction method of programmatic buying, accounting for more than 90% of digital ad dollars in 2014. However, there is a shift occurring with RTB that will have an impact on the future of the media buying market.

Assessing programmatic financials has never been more important. Programmatic is quickly pushing marketers into marketing technologists, and permanently turning Mad Men and Women into Math Men and Women. These "marketologists" are rightly asking questions that can only be answered by breaking down programmatic math: Where is my money going? What am I really getting? What am I not getting? So let's shed some light on these questions by asking one big question: How large and sophisticated does my programmatic advertising program have to be to justify bringing it in-house?

We hear industry pundits assert that 2015 will be the year of the connected TV, with some 138 million units of Internet-enabled television units (25% of all sets) forecast to ship to consumers, according to one estimate. If that's the case, one can't help asking: Will programmatic TV also go mainstream this year? Or put another way, will advertisers follow consumers as they consume TV content in digital channels?

If publishers are ever going to get their fair share of the growing programmatic market, they need to find a way to give multiple buyers equal access to their inventory in order to create true competition for each and every impression, maximizing the price paid. Wait a minute - isn't that what an RTB auction does? Not exactly. In a real-world auction, the universe of demand is all sitting in the same room, and all bid concurrently for the item up for sale - thus ensuring the item is sold at the highest possible price. In the programmatic world, due …

Viewability continues to be one of the biggest media buying concerns for advertisers. And while the IAB has set a 70% viewability threshold for measured impressions to guide advertisers, achieving this is unlikely for programmatic media. The big reason this threshold won't stand up in programmatic media is because most inventory that hits the ad exchanges is remnant, non-premium real estate, which may have a lower likelihood of being viewed.