Programmatic advertising automatically places advertisements in electronic media to achieve optimal results. It could transform recruitment marketing by effectively targeting audiences across numerous networks both contextually and behaviourally.

“Programmatic advertising, marketing or media are technologies that automate buying, placement and optimisation of media inventory, replacing human-based methods. In this process, supply and demand partners use automated systems to place advertisements in electronically targeted media inventory.”

From Wikipedia

If you calculate the number of permutations that bidders have to analyse whether to buy specific impressions and compute the bids for each of them, it equals a staggering million billion possibilities. That’s a lot of zeroes.

Let’s take a look back in time. It was 21 years ago when the first banner ad appeared on HotWired.com, the previous URL of wired.com. This effectively marked the new beginning for not just advertising but also for all marketing. Let’s be honest though, the banner ad was not a million miles from our traditional practices at the time. So what’s changed? Technology. The speed of advancement in ad serving technology in recent years has been meteoric and is still going strong. Soon it is believed that every display unit will be an advertising opportunity, so not exclusive to your mobile, tablet or PC but your oven timer at home or your car dashboard.  These will be interactive displays that will be able to track consumer response too.

There has been an obvious massive increase in online media publishers, and with it the number of display advertising opportunities now in the millions. From a media planner’s point of view, traditionally they would be liaising with 15 -30 media publishers and analysing 20 – 30 ad buys a week. Automated buyers of online advertising analyse millions in a second.

For display advertising, programmatic is the future, and it won’t stop there. Analysts believe that programmatic purchasing will be soon part of our everyday lives, whether buying a car or a pair of shoes.

From a recruitment marketing point of view it now means we can effectively target audiences across numerous networks both contextually and behaviourally, not relying on just a limited number of media publishing platforms. At Penna we have been using programmatic for a while now and the response data is compelling, showing much better results than traditional display advertising approaches. Whatever your thoughts on display advertising are, programmatic makes it possible to target audiences at the right time and for less money.

Jim Bloor