While some parts of the world have wholly embraced and adopted programmatic advertising, India and the APAC region is slowly but surely catching up to speed

Up until a few years ago, programmatic media buying was perceived to be just another wide-eyed kid on the block that came with the promise to reinvent the wheel and disrupt the advertising industry for the better. Today, programmatic has come a long way – ushering in an era of automation, ridding the advertising industry of its complacency and successfully establishing itself as one of the cornerstones of the online advertising ecosystem.

Circa 2016, programmatic spending has become much more sophisticated and spends via this medium have been growing globally. Programmatic spends in the US this year are projected to reach $22.10 billion, representing a 67 per cent share of the total digital display market. Mobile and video as a medium have a major role to play in elevating the market share that programmatic has been enjoying. Mobile is expected to contribute $15.45 billion in ad revenues this year. And even though video is still expanding its reach, 2016 has proved to be a major milestone for this medium, with more than half the ad spends this year being invested in video via programmatic.

Closer to home, programmatic has been in use by larger agencies and brands for a while now, but in silos. Indian marketers typically chose to allocate a large chunk of their budgets to traditional forms of advertising such as print, television and radio – owing to insufficient knowledge of programmatic and the competencies it offers. However, of late, this has been changing for good. While the programmatic base is comparatively small In India, it is surely growing at an exponential rate.

Today, you can see some of the biggest players across industries such as retail, automobiles, FMCG and more investing sensibly in programmatic display. And a major part of this can be attributed to the marketer’s desire of wanting to connect with their audiences in a more engaging manner, forge loyalty and lastly, increase sales. Engaging with the right customer, at the right time, at all the right places – now who could possibly say no to that!

But what’s next from here? In which direction do we expect programmatic to steer the Asia Pacific region? For starters, this is where newer mediums and formats of advertising such as video and native advertising come into play. And this is already being widely used by smarter brands keeping up with the need of the hour. An observation made by Group M South Asia, earlier this year, stated that they have been seeing a lot more focused targeting of native ads with programmatic buying over the last two years, a momentum that is expected to continue through 2016 and the years to come, given the rise in automation.

For advertisers, native advertising is cost-effective, efficient in reaching out to the right set of audiences and offers better insights into consumer behaviour. Consumers prefer native ads to traditional banner ads as a number of people perceive it to be advertising that’s intended to educate as opposed to hard-sell. If marketers successfully eliminate the deception of passing off native ads as content, by clearly labelling them so, audiences will have a greater tendency to trust publisher and brands more.

Similarly, video is a great branding tool capable of conveying brand narratives and connecting with audiences on a more emotional level. Over the past couple of years, programmatic video has taken over a huge chunk of the ad tech stack. Marketers love the fact that real-time data is being put to use to get a video ad in front of the right customer, at the right time. With multiple factors driving the rise of programmatic video in countries such as the US, it’s only a matter of time we see a similar widespread adoption taking place in India and other APAC markets. For this, marketers, brands and publishers will need to establish greater comfort with programmatic technology and intent-based sales. As advertisers increase their demand for informative video for audiences, publishers must look towards programmatic to support their needs with data-driven offerings.

Globally, programmatic is entering its next stage of evolution – dynamic creatives gaining control, ad fraud being reduced and the potential to innovate has expanded by leaps and bounds within this space. Next year, when mobile revenues in the US surpassdesktop earnings, we will have arrived at the tipping point for programmatic mobile video ads. And while India may be far away from attaining these points of inflection, things are positively looking up for marketers embracing programmatic as a means of campaign execution.

With more and more companies ushering in the use of advertising technology and ad formats such as mobile, video and television gaining a stronger foothold in the programmatic space, the preconceived notion that only large investments and clout alone will drive value for your business will be relegated to being a norm of the past.

The more dexterous one is when it comes to mixing and complementing technology, data and media, the more value you will start to reap from the ecosystem.

Karan Gupta is CEO, Andbeyond.media

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