Programmatic is one of the biggest catalysts of change to hit our industry in recent years, and has the potential to revolutionise the way ads are bought and sold, aiding faster execution and greater accuracy.
Yet from what I’ve seen, the industry is still a long way from using it to its full potential. Earlier this year, eBay advertising conducted an experiment – a week where ads on were sold exclusively through programmatic trading.
During this week more than one billion ad impressions were purchased – and I learnt just how far the industry still has to go.
New team structures
We overwhelmingly found during our programmatic experiment that people matter. Our teams had to think quickly and creatively about the placements and content of adverts.
Relying on programmatic technology alone is not an option; doing this would hinder the emotional resonance of adverts and strangle our industry.
Programmatic improves the efficiency of campaigns, but it’s nothing without a skilled industry to support it through effective placements and clever campaign designs.
As programmatic technology becomes more widespread, agencies need to implement new team structures that include individuals with the skills needed to work with programmatic advertising.
This means hiring people with the data analysis skills needed to work alongside the traditional advertising professionals. Hiring science and engineering graduates who are adept at using data can add hugely to the current agency landscape, providing the analytical skills to make sense of programmatic advertising.
Training the industry
As well as recruiting new talent to the industry, agencies also need to take a fresh look at how their teams work. During our programmatic experiment, we found that advertising sales teams need to be fully equipped to buy and sell all advert formats so clients get what they need without being funnelled into specific teams.
This means ensuring that everyone is fully adept at selling every kind of advert, so clients always get the best consultancy.
In my mind, every person needs to be equipped to buy and sell all ad formats. Organisations need to structure themselves around this holistic way of trading advertising and train staff to be ready to recommend the right ad to the right client.
As the industry evolves, the onus is also going to be on every individual marketer to get to grips with a new way of working. Understanding what programmatic means, learning the fundamentals of data analysis and knowing the capabilities of different publisher platforms are now all key for a career in marketing.
Within the next few years, I expect that programmatic will cease to be a separate channel. It’ll be part of the mainstream, driving creativity. Looking further ahead, native ads are the final frontier, but there’s a lot of work for publishers to do to build agency trust first.
In any case, programmatic is definitely here to stay. The agencies that can embrace it will ultimately lead the industry.