progammatic1For some time already, programmatic is seen as a savior of online marketing, which is why we decided to highlight the opportunities and limitations of programmatic display in an article. In particular because many marketing executives still do not seem to understand clearly what programmatic advertising can and what it can’t do. This is understandable, given the technical complexity, misleading terminology, and sometimes unrealistic expectations.

Programmatic Advertising means the fully automatic purchase and sale of advertising space in real-time. Software makes the decision for us and decides, depending on the transaction model, where ads are purchased. Any data can be included in this decision-making process via a so-called Data Management Platform (DMP). For example, ad slots can be booked depending on the weather, user interests or geographical characteristics. The entire process, from the Demand Side Platform (DSP) to the Sell Side Platform (SSP) is automated within technology platforms.

The Programmatic Advertising Process:
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Programmatic enables user-centric targeting

Compared to display marketing, programmatic advertising enables us to examine the characteristics of a visitor at the moment a person enters real-time auctions for the advertising space, opening up the possibility of really user-centered targeting for display marketing. The placement of advertising can be dependent on users' demographics, but also on their interests, their browsing habits or geographical indications, to name a few, which extends the perspective of the former branding discipline.

Whether reading the daily newspaper, streaming series or researching products, digital media are firmly anchored in people's everyday lives. The search and surf behavior of the users causes a gigantic data mountain and programmatic marketing allows us now to use this powerful knowledge of our users in display marketing.

For advertisers, this not only reduces waste coverage, it also opens up new facets in display marketing: The achievable goals are no longer solely in image gain, but in the targeted acquisition of new customers to the emergence of specific user actions, downloading a white paper on the newsletter registration until the sale of a product - because we are likely to reach users who already have some involvement with our brand or our topic.

Display marketing is evolving towards a mix of branding and performance channels and the big players – like Google, Facebook and most recently Amazon - have positioned themselves here. Especially Google and Amazon have not only an advantage due to the mass, but because of the validity of their data: Amazon has the knowledge about real buying behavior; at Google, users also send clear messages about their search query, which topics, brands or products they are interested in.

If you want to reach a clearly defined target group, there is no way around data-driven, programmatic display marketing approaches. It's not rocket science and can deliver great results if used properly with the right goals set.