Is Programmatic Advertising the Future of Marketing?

Of course, electronic markets operate in real time, or near to it. That suits online media just fine, because web pages, like smartphone screens, are also served up in real time in response to user queries. Today’s ad exchanges enable so-called real-time bidding (or RTB) on inventory that is bought and sold in 100 milliseconds per transaction—faster than the blink of an eye.
With increasing velocity has come expansion in scale and reach. While traditional media planners may analyze 10 to 20 ad buying opportunities a week, automated buyers of online advertising often analyze millions of ad buying opportunities a second.

The world’s digital ad markets already make available 100 billion impressions a day. Each of these impressions is qualified by as many as 100 variables, such as specific publisher sites, pages on site, dimensions of ad unit, device types, and so forth. In addition, each variable may have appended up to 100 different values, such as time of day, day of week, device location, local weather, regional sentiment, and so on.
https://hbr.org/2015/06/is-programmatic-advertising-the-future-of-marketing