The Programmatic Landscape

We came over Luma’s infographic ”Display LUMAscape”,  and thought it illustrates very well how there are a lot of different players involved in today's programmatic process of trading display advertising between marketers and publishers.

Picture source: Terence Kawaja, http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/display-ad-tech-lumascape/

We think this is a good starting point to analyse some of the issues that have been introduced when the relation between marketers, media agencies and publishers have developed from “direct buying” into pragmatic buying through various ad exchanges.

As more and more of the display marketing are traded through various markets and exchanges platforms, is it more difficult than ever for marketers to have control of where their banners are shown. The Breithart Appnexus controversy clearly illustrates this problem and is probably just another example of display advertising showed on websites where advertisers don’t want it to be showed.

The gap between the buyer/marketer and the publisher has grown a lot wider. This gap has been filled up with players that deliver technology and tools that let publishers offer their inventory to anyone on the web, and marketers to track consumers around the web across sites, apps and other digital channels. But many of these technology enablers demands a cut of the ad spend before it ends up in the publisher’s pockets. Possible implications for traditional publishers like newspapers can be smaller revenues, fewer journalists and quality of the content. How this will affect advertisers in the long term are yet to be seen.

Screenshot: http://edition.cnn.com/

And what about the people who are exposed to these ads? Do they really know where and what kind of digital traces they leave when they browse the web, social media and apps on their mobile phones? And do they really like to be retargeted around the web? And what do accepting cookies in order to continue browsing actually mean?

Programmatic is here to stay and its more important than ever that both marketers, middle man’s, publisher and consumers understands the issues that comes with this.

Amanda Holst and Ingvild Larsen