In part one of this article series, we covered the basics – what programmatic advertising is and how it works. In part two, we’re examining the different types of programmatic advertising, and why it’s one of the most impactful components of many marketing strategies.
The Different Types of Programmatic Advertising
Over the past few years, programmatic advertising has evolved and now covers a range of different advertising formats. When this type of advertising first started around ten years ago, it only displayed ads (banner ads), but today it’s everywhere:
Video: An essential strategy for many online marketers is buying and serving digital video programmatically. Video ads have shown immense growth over the last few years and are a great way to advertise any brand.
Social: This type of programmatic advertising blends into the content on social media, websites, and other applications. This type of ad comes in the form of sponsored content. DSP now also offers advertisers the opportunity to buy programmatically across major social media platforms.
Voice: With Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and apps like Spotify, voice programmatic advertising has become popular. It is an excellent source of contextual and user-focused targeting. Through DSP, Google now offers advertisers a chance to buy audio ads.
Connected TV: One of the fastest-growing avenues of programmatic, CTV takes your video advertising to the next level. With cord-cutting becoming more and more commonplace, streaming services are exploding, and with that, available commercial space for these devices is important real estate. These higher quality video ads (think commercials) are served with layered targeting as well.
Why Choose Programmatic Advertising?
Now that we’ve unpacked what programmatic advertising is, how it works, and the various types, we can now discuss why your brand should use programmatic advertising. It isn’t for everyone, but many brands have seen exceptional growth in leads and sales. As a digital marketer, here are a few reasons you should consider using this type of advertising:
Budget-Friendly
With programmatic advertising, brands and agencies have the opportunity to target users in a big or small way. With access to an incredible amount of data, you can target specific website users with the right message, at the right time and in the correct location. The right message, right time, and right location in programmatic often mean the time, place, and device a specific web user is most likely to convert. The ability to chart a very specific course to specific – albeit anonymous individuals – is unparalleled outside of programmatic.
While it is recommended to put more overall spend in programmatic (it takes data to make data-based decisions), you can budget smartly and end up spending less money on views and impressions that don’t matter.
Real-Time Data & Insight
With programmatic advertising, everything is done in real-time, including data collection, which can give you as a digital marketer incredible insights. With these insights, you adjust your advertising campaigns across all channels and mediums accordingly. When used wisely, learnings from programmatic can boost your marketing and sales return on investment across the board.
Transparency In Media Buying
Before programmatic advertising, brands relied on agencies and other third parties to handle their ad spend and all paid media insights. Today, brands can have full transparency over how their money is spent. Advertisers can track what ads are performing to which audiences and the return of an ad all in real-time. Agencies operating with the top tier programmatic platforms can offer unprecedented reporting to clients.
One thing to keep in mind is that many third-party vendors still act as a black box with data and don’t provide all data available. Be cautious of partners if you are looking for extensive campaign data.
Multi-Channel Reach
As mentioned above, there are various types of programmatic advertising. With there being so many outputs for media, digital marketers must look at multiple channels to reach their target audience.
Artificial intelligence
Aside from robust targeting options, this is the bread and butter of programmatic. Buying programmatically is able to dissect and process billions of data points in your campaigns to find commonalities, high converters, random similarities, and more with your audience. If you don’t have a full-time data science team at your disposal, this is the next best thing as it uses this data to provide campaign optimizations daily to strengthen performance.
Overall, programmatic marketing offers digital marketers so much opportunity. It allows a more efficient way to advertise to specific sectors of its target audience and, therefore, creates greater reach, insight, and new customers.
If you’d like to learn more about how programmatic would work for you, book a free consultation with our team.