IAB Europe Report: Attitudes towards Programmatic Advertising – June 2016

Nearly all stakeholders including strategists, planners, buyers and operational teams across the digital ecosystem are embracing programmatic advertising and building on its potential for value creation. With only 13% of advertisers, 8% of publishers and 7% of media agencies claiming that they are not using programmatic technology, the study shows that almost everybody in the industry is now deploying some form of programmatic advertising.

Respondents named a reduction of media wastage and greater cost and trading efficiencies as the most important impacts of programmatic. The research also highlights growing recognition among the industry that as programmatic matures, it contributes to key advertising objectives such as scaling mobile campaigns and reaching consumers more effectively with branding messages.

Greater integration with wider ad measurement models and increasing sophistication beyond the click are other two other key factors driving programmatic adoption.

With benefits clearly recognised and cited in the research, and emergence of proven models, programmatic adoption is likely to continue to grow. Indeed, all stakeholders remain optimistic about the outlook of programmatic with over 90% of them citing an increase in investment over the next 12 months.

But the benefits are accompanied by challenges, and significant barriers to adoption remain. The biggest bottleneck is finding the people with the right skills and experience to navigate this brave new world successfully.

For the first time the research looked at the operational models used to execute programmatic and there is a clear evolution of programmatic strategy across markets. Advertisers start out on their programmatic journey with an independent specialist, then move to an agency or DSP and then in mature markets adopt an agency or hybrid model, i.e. a combination of more than one strategy. Similarly, publisher strategies are evolving; they start out with a hybrid model, then lean more heavily on their SSP and finally bring the expertise in-house. For agencies, the in-house agency trading desk remains dominant.

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