COLOGNE — Once upon a time, “programmatic” was when publishers gave away their unsold inventory in real-time bidding auctions for cheap rates.
But that was then. Now programmatic is growing up. And you can thank private marketplaces, the technology tools which allow publishers to put controls over who they let in to buy and sell, and how.
That means the programmatic trading of tomorrow looks a lot like the traditional manual selling techniques of yesterday, but with a lot more efficiency, says one ad-tech exec trying to help publishers benefit.
“We’re seeing the line between programmatic and direct having gone away,” PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel says in this video interview with Beet.TV. “More and more of programmatic is direct sales in the programmatic environment.”
What does Goel mean? something he was talking about at the DMEXCO digital advertising gathering in Germany this week – allowing publishers to have the best of both worlds, when it comes to programmatic benefits with manual control.
“Many publishers we work with use our platform for private marketplace transactions,” he adds. “Their own sales team is going out and selling to agencies and trading desks, selling their typical value proposition around audience, around transparency … and using our platform as the programmatic platform to facilitate those transactions.”
Programmatic rose to 73% of US digital display spend last year and is forecast to hit 78% this year, 84% by 2019, according to eMarketer.
“There is $50bn of brand spend coming in to programmatic,” Goel says. “The vast majority of that will be captured by private marketplace-type transactions – could be private marketplace, private marketplace guaranteed, biddable IOs. The publisher’s sales team is selling directly to the advertisers.
This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
