Simplest Intro to Programmatic Advertising

When my daughter asked me "what do you in office?", I told her that I put ads in her games and YouTube videos, she wasn't very thrilled though.

But yes, Programmatic Advertising is more than that, this is my attempt to simplify and talk about it in plain English.

In this effort I will omit many details and nuances and draw some parallel with Stock Trading, to make it suitable for the people that are not from the programmatic advertising domain.

Imagine that you have built a website and you want to monetise it through advertising, for that first step would be to create ad slots on your website.

In old times you would either go around talking to advertisers to find ads for your slots or work with large Ad Networks if your website had enough traction. In any case, it is a lot of leg work for you (The publisher).

In modern times, you would use supply side providers (SSPs) to register your ad slots with them, like companies list themselves on Stock Exchanges.

When someone visits your website, depending upon the privacy settings and authentication, various information about them such as location, identity, demographic details etc., will be collected. and will be sent to an Ad Exchange, where your ad slot will be made available for bidding. Did you notice that it is similar to the Stocks being traded on the Stock Exchange?

On the other side, Demand Side Providers (DSPs) have access to the inventory/ad slots that are traded on the Ad Exchange, like Stock Brokers have access to the Scrips being traded on the Stock Exchange.

Both Programmatic Media buying and Stock trading have traders that use DSPs and Stock Brokers to bid for the Ad Slots in case of Programmatic Advertising and for Scrips in case of Stock Trading.

Programmatic Advertising and Stock Trading, both rely heavily on Data, Analysis and underlying technology for building most effective bidding strategies.