Advertising is a great way to market a business and drive in more customers, more awareness, and more fans. Depending on the budget, you can advertise your brand or your business or several social media channels, on third party blogs and websites and of course, on search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo Search.
Considering that 70% of consumers are making their purchase decisions based on information they find online and they want to read about products they use, advertising can provide you with the right channels to transmit your messages and attract more people.
An advertising campaign, however, takes time to be planned and customized. And, time is always costly, especially when you are a professional marketer who has many worries to deal with besides the ongoing advertising campaign. What if I tell you that you can save time and outsource the whole advertising process? What if I tell you that there is a way to automate an advertising campaign? Would you believe me?
Well, you’d better believe. There is such a way and today, I am going to present it to you. It’s called programmatic advertising and it is more than just a rumor, fuss or ideal.
What are programmatic ads?
Programmatic advertising came as a new and automatic way to spend your advertising budget. Traditionally, as a marketer or advertiser, you need to invest time and skills into an advertising campaign, choosing what, where and how much to spend for each ad you are publishing.
As opposed to this strategy, the programmatic system is designed to determine what kinds of ads will run and where they’ll be placed without your help. It does that automatically, with artificial intelligence (AI).
Why choose programmatic ads?
Well, the answer is easy to give. As a matter of fact, from a marketer/advertiser’s point of view, is one of the easier answers to any question regarding this industry.
It takes a lot of time to schedule banner displays, to manage how much to spend on one channel or another, to evaluate results and plan the budget spending accordingly. Programmatic ads will allow you to invest more time in design and other creative tasks and worry less about logistics and strategies. In programmatic ads, the AI component optimizes your banner displays and where they need to be run. The system is actually able to learn what type of campaigns will offer the best returns of investment.
Evolution is the key
Whatever you do, wherever you do it and regardless of the technological means you get to use while doing your job, nothing is static. Everything evolves, starting with your mindset, your skills, and strategies and up to the tools that help you get your job done. Programmatic ads are the next step in advertising and it should be treated as such. At the moment, they are the present and the future of this industry and if you want to do a great job, you need to at least consider them for the long run.
Unlike in traditional advertising, you can rely now on an intelligent algorithm that can determine where and how your ad money is best spent. Ann efficient planning and delivery allows you to be more efficient in the areas where AI cannot be used. You get more time to be creative and deliver the best copy texts, calls to action and of course, the best designs for best results.
But wait just a minute…
Are robots going to replace the advertiser entirely?
Well, of course not. There is still need for a “human touch” since the advertising banners address humans and not machines. The A.I. is able to handle insertion orders and ad tags but nevertheless. You are still needed there, for planning your strategies and optimizing your campaigns. Programmatic ads, however, will allow you to spend more time planning and customizing your campaigns, designing your banners and brainstorm for better copy texts.
The A.I. algorithm will determine where your ad money is best spent, monitor your expenses and search for areas of improvement at the same time.
In conclusion, you are still needed to handle one of the most important parts of the advertising process: the design. Here, you can save precious time as well and even a lot of money – designers do not come cheap – by choosing to do everything by yourself. Is it possible? Yes, and you don’t even need to be a professional designer to design the best ads your campaign can get.
There are a lot of tools you can use for this process, tools such as Bannersnack, which are designed especially for marketers and advertisers.
Are programmatic ads successful?
Well, according to the latest stats, more and more marketers and advertisers are embracing this new idea.
In fact, a 2017 Emarketer study suggests that the total US spend on programmatic ads has reached the incredible amount of 33 billion US dollars which accounts for 84% of all digital display ad spend.
“Private setups give buyers and sellers greater control over their automated buys. They may have initially served to bring in reticent buyers and sellers, but now private setups drive much of the change and momentum in the marketplace, as both parties seek greater control from their programmatic efforts,” said eMarketer principal analyst Lauren Fisher.
I guess, this study answers our main question that was posted above. Yes, programmatic ads are successful and marketers and advertisers alike are all embracing this new solution as their main mean to advertise online.
Is there another reason to choose programmatic ads?
Apart from the already stated reason, let’s conclude with one of the most important of all. Programmatic ads allow you to work with big data and this is a plus you cannot ignore, not in today’s context at least. It is very hard to process the huge amounts of data that big data solutions are able to provide to an advertiser or an advertising agency. It is impossible for a single person, and hard even for a team of dozens of analysts, not to mention the huge logistic and budgetary needs in order to hire enough people to process the information.
With programmatic ads, this process is handled automatically by the AI and thus, its costs in time and money are significantly decreased.
In conclusion, the answer is yes, programmatic ads may be considered as the future of online advertising.
As the data being handled by marketers is astronomically bigger than only a decade ago, the need to handle it and deliver ads to the best possible channels and demographic groups grows as well.
