What are the benefits and challenges of using programmatic advertising?

At the end of the day, when you buy programmatic advertising, you're buying all the junk that the publisher can't sell directly. You pay peanuts, you get monkees.

Programmatic advertising automates the buying and selling of online ad space using AI and real-time bidding. Advertisers set parameters (like audience demographics, budget, and goals), and software algorithms place ads in optimal digital spaces across websites and apps in milliseconds, maximizing ad performance and efficiency.

Programmatic advertising finds an ideal use case in the streaming and OTT space. As the ad spend in the OTT market is projected to grow further in the near future, advertising video-on-demand (AVOD) services are growing at a faster rate than subscription-based services. Server-side ad insertion (SSAI) is the most prominent delivery method, as it serves ads that are targeted and relevant to the viewer, with multiple benefits attached. Among these are seamless backend management and delivery to multiple platforms, ad-blocking prevention (the ads are stitched into the content), and programmatic ad requests, including targeting and content data.

A few more benefits of programmatic advertising: - the ability to holistically frequency cap across your media buys, so you don’t over-saturate the same household/person with your message across different inventory. CTV example: setting a frequency cap of 2/day across ALL CTV inventory (Hulu, HBO Max, Peacock, etc…) vs publisher-direct frequency capping where you must set each cap separately (2/day for each Hulu, HBO Max, and Peacock = 6/day total cap) - minimizing duplication across traditional TV + CTV to make sure you’re not exposing the same person to your ad across both - by using technology like ACR (automated content recognition) - 1st party data implementation - where you can target existing customers + build look-a-like models

I bought programmatic for my client and if you use a bad vendor, the ad appears some whackadoodle sites--guns, porn, Breibart, etc. Make sure you get the list of the sites in the network you're buying or you'll end up where you don't want to be!

Another issue with programatic is rooted in creative malleability. Think of programatic advertising like real estate - a lot of buyers with limited inventory. Your best bet for a balance of placements and price will be smaller and odd sizes. That means your messaging needs to be malleable enough to distill into punchy short lines as well as scale up to fill bigger spaces. This typically boils down into how well you've mastered the brevity of your brand positioning. If you can't concisely express that brand value, I'd hone that in before venturing into programatic.