Programmatic... What happened to Automatic?

The advertising and marketing industry is obsessed with all things programmatic, but has the industry overlooked the benefits of automating non-programmatic media buying?

It's very easy to get an article published in the industry trade press if that article contains keywords like "programmable algorithm", "linear regression" or "header bidding" etc... etc... etc... These terms are sexy to Chief Digital Officers from the media agencies and Chief Marketing Officers from the brands or advertisers. However, programmatic media would represent approximately between 15% and 30% of the total digital media transacted daily. So why aren't we talking about the rest?

Programmatic Media Rates

The actual figure of how much media is traded programmatically is very hard to define for many reasons. The percentage of programmatically traded media differs from market to market; for instance more sophisticated markets like the US / UK sells more programmatic media than less sophisticated markets like some smaller APAC countries. The percentage differs by medium; for instance desktop is traded more programmatic than mobile because it's harder to trade mobile app inventory programmatically. It differs by format; for instance there is more display (banner ads) inventory traded programmatically because there are more of them in comparison to video inventory. Lastly; some media agencies include all media that is purchased via their trading desk as programmatic, even if this media is a non-programmatic campaign. In summary: It's hard to accurately define, however, I've been looking at these programmatic numbers from my local market over the last few years and my personal estimate is that 15% to 30% of the total number of digital ad-impressions are traded programmatically.

Campaign Management Systems

Even if we assume the best case scenario and estimate that 30% of ad-impressions are traded programmatically then we should ask ourselves, "what's happening with that other 70% of ad-impressions?" The stark truth is that these ad-impressions are still traded manually. These ad-impressions are purchased via a media buying platform like Symphony, iDesk or MediaOcean. These platforms have existed for years and they represent the majority of digital ad-impressions so why don't we hear more about them in the industry trade press?

Campaign management systems allow media buyers and sellers to log into the same platform to transact online. These platforms have two primary objectives. (a) minimize errors based on manually handling of digital campaigns, and (b) maximize efficiency by streamlining the process. However, even with these systems there still is allot of manual handling of digital campaigns. On average there are still six pairs of hands that manually touch each campaign!

Campaign Management Steps

• Step 1 - Creative Agency. This team manually exports the HTML creative assets from programs like Adobe Photoshop / Adobe Illustrator etc... These files are normally zipped and manually emailed to the media agency.
• Step 2 - Media Agency. This team receives the manual creative. They then match the creative to the media schedule and then emails them to the operations team.
• Step 3 - Agency Operations Team. This team receives the media and creative via email. They then manually upload these into the third party ad-server. They then export ad-tags and emails them to the publisher.
• Step 4 - 3rd Party Measurement. This is an optional step whereby the agency operations team "wrap" the creative with other technology like Viewability, Ad-Fraud or Brand Safety, Audience Measurement, Retargeting and Conversation Attribution.
• Step 5 - Publisher Media Team. This team receives the ad-tags from the agency team and checks the details against their internal media booking system.
• Step 6 - Publisher Operations Team. This team receive the ad-tags and uploads them into the publisher ad-server.

In the end, the campaign goes live and all teams check their systems to ensure that they are counting ad-impressions, clicks etc... correctly. There are still so many manual steps! Why aren't we focusing on reducing the errors and automating these manual processes?

Automated Guaranteed

One new and exciting development that will help automate some of these processes is called "Automated Guaranteed". The core of this new technology allows the agency media team (step 2 above) to connect directly into the publisher ad-server (step 5 above). This new technology condenses 3 manual steps into 1! The goal is to save time, save money and improve campaign performance.

Next steps: There will be more articles to come on automated guaranteed including features like;

• (a) Advertiser Benefit - How campaign targeting and performance can improve by overlaying publisher audience data (DMP) over the inventory.
• (b) Agency Benefit - How media agencies that rely on Trading Deals will benefit as they will be higher up the inventory water fall.
• (c) Publisher Benefit - How Automated Guaranteed will help publishers monetize their inventory without growing their sales staff.