How robot auctions are shaking up digital advertising

And IHS forecasts that by 2020, 90% of global online banner advertising will be bought and sold programmatically, equating to a spend of $92.6bn (£60bn).
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He points out that for marketing purposes our personal identities are anonymised using a cryptographic hashing process that assigns each of us a long number code - a unique digital ID.
These codes are then shared by advertisers and publishers to identify us as the person who did this, liked that, bought this, and visited that website.
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The satirical magazine Private Eye has a section called Malgorithms devoted to examples of unsuitable ads placed next to news stories because the ad-serving program has not understood the context correctly.
"Targeting ads on keywords alone is a blunt instrument," says Mr Kelly. "You can end up with an ad for luggage company Samsonite running next to a story about a body being found in a suitcase, for example. Brands are understandably wary about this."
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