Some thoughts on Programmatic Advertising

Erm.. Everyone is fancy with the keywords such as "big data", "machine learning", "programmatic advertising" or "rtb" nowadays. In the earlier years, same thing happened whereby people used to mention "cloud services or hosting", "cloud computing", "ad network" and "social media marketing". (But in fact not many cloud computing company could succeed till now, only those who have segment their target market clearly can survive)

Let's look at south east asia market, according to The Economist, they have compiled some forecast for Global RTB grow from year 2010 to year 2017, there is no doubt that Asia Pacific market was the fastest growing pie among all the countries, and IDC also forecast that there would be more than 40% digital ad inventory would be sold and purchase through RTB by year 2017.

For sure we could never let this growing pie fly away like that, but does the programmatic advertising same as earlier years? No, either the ad tech or the game rules has been changed dramatically. I will further elaborate into three points, Here you go:

1) Game changed: In the RTB market, that's a lot of RTB platforms/technology, we have to do some research before we get them on board. In old days, an automated ad trading platform just good enough to make some direct response in order and make available for few target funnels, it defeat  the tracking of full funnels digital media, since the marketers now need to have access to multi ad channels rather than serving omni-channel platform. (Even now most of the big brands marketers would buy the inventory via in-house team, they will have to evaluate the performance for the most cost effective funnel)

2) Mobile View-ability: That's always a concern for marketer who choose to advertise in mobile platform, "has my ad been seen and by who?"  Most RTB technology nowadays has adopted behavioral segmentation, mobile timing lifespan, ad placement data and cookies delivery factors, but due to data signal and tracking pixels are harder to track accurately compare to desktop, RTB service provider need to have a holistic approach to build a fully integrated platform to verify or ensure every part of the system is working.

3) Fight Ad Fraud: Even now the ad tech has been improved a lotin RTB ecosystem, but fraud problem still exist. "URL masking" black hat technique and fake tracking data were the most fraudulent practices, some of the dishonest agencies would just use the blended CPA report or fake clicks/impression report to show their clients. That's always advisable to go with reputable ad tech company, agency, publisher or ad network group, especially trading for your premium inventories. (to ensure the granularity of the ad data, please consider to pull some of your budget to RTB) 

Thank you for reading!

picture credit to: www.adcolony.com