CHICAGO — Roughly 45% of display ads in the U.S. are now bought programmatically, and that’s much too big for programmatic buying to be considered a specialization anymore.
For that reason, VivaKi’s AOD trading desk has been moving programmatic specialists over to client teams at Publicis Groupe’s media agencies.
“It makes sense that we would have that programmatic buying capability within our agencies rather than having it be siloed,” says David Gould, SMG’s EVP-global digital managing director, in an interview with Beet.TV. He also notes that integrated teams will make it more viable to deliver insights to advertisers about their digital audiences that can be leveraged across all their executions.
While Gould doesn’t think that SMG needs to become a technology company, he says there’s a focus on “technology-enabled services.” That’s made possible through partnerships with tech platforms and, in one recent notable case, the purchase of one. Last fall, Publicis bought an ad-tech firm called Run to help its agencies target and track digital ads — especially on mobile — more effectively.
Gould says that Run helps make the programmatic world more transparent to clients, who worry about where their money is going and who takes a piece of it along the way.
“[It] gives us insight into how the black box works so that we can best allocate our clients’ money across the right DSPs and make sure we’re playing correctly in the marketplace,” he says.
We interviewed Gould at the SMG offices in Chicago earlier this month.
