Inside Deutsche Telekom's programmatic tech strategy

German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom wants more control over its programmatic ad technology.
The Bonn-based mobile and broadband operator, which has 150 million mobile customers globally, wants to keep its precious first-party customer data to itself and has built its own private media trading desk through which it can run campaigns programmatically. It has spent the last two years building a technology stack and taking its data management in-house, a move its says will fundamentally change the way it works with its agencies.
“We want to take charge of our own digital advertising ecosystem, therefore must take charge of the technology that powers it,” said Gerhard Louw, Deutsche Telekom’s senior manager of International media management, who shared the plan at the Association of Online Publishers’ Autumn conference in London earlier this month.
http://digiday.com/brands/deutsche-telekom-programmatic/

 

The fusion of native and programmatic advertising is finally underway - BI Intelligence report

Many advertisers and publishers hope to meld native-ad units with programmatic buying tools, and this may finally be possible thanks to a new specification from the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
The IAB's OpenRTB 2.3 spec could underpin a programmatic-native ecosystem if it’s adopted in the ad-tech world.
In simplistic terms, the key to the new spec is the ability to serve up sponsored content that matches the look and feel of a publisher site in real time through automated processes.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/fusion-of-native-and-programmatic-underway-with-new-iab-specs-2015-6?r=US&IR=T

Adobe gears up for the programmatic ad future with on-the-fly ad creation

Adobe’s Marketing Cloud is today announcing a new dynamic ad capability that allows display ads to be generated on-the-fly for a segment of users, or for an individual user.
Adobe’s ambition, Waddell said, is to take the notoriously complex and disparate pieces of the programmatic ad environment and integrate them into a relatively simplified, relatively transparent operation.
While ad agencies still come up with the creative elements, the new dynamic ad templates — which provide the customized image, headline, and text offer based on your anonymous user profile — are key to this vision, because personalized ads bring a very fine point to a big advertising machine.
http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/15/adobe-gears-up-for-the-programmatic-ad-future-with-on-the-fly-ad-creation/

Inside the Hidden Costs of Programmatic

Programmatic ad tech involves not just the ad inventory at the end, but a trail of fees and costs along the way to pay for expensive engineers and traders, data-management platforms, research and development and more. It adds up to make programmatic buying more expensive than ordering print ad pages or TV commercials through insertion orders and other routine methods.

Even when the ad inventory is cheaper through programmatic buys, in other words, everything it takes to get there makes the total outlay larger.

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"If we put $100 million into TV, we need 1% commission to break even. Print and outdoor need 2% to 2.5%. On local, we need about 3%." Buying digital media directly from a publisher, without the intervention of ad tech, requires about a 5% commission.

"And in programmatic, we need about 10% to 12%," he said. "That's 10 times more than TV, and that's just factoring in full-time employees and overhead."
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Who's collecting the "intermediary tax"? Not every transaction involves every kind of technology vendor, but ad exchanges that house media inventory, for example, charge 7% to 20% of media revenue they touch, according to the IAB report. Platforms that facilitate automated sales for media companies typically take 10% to 20% of the revenue that passes through their hands, according to the IAB report. Networks that service programmatic buys typically mark up inventory, citing the value that they add, by 30% to 50%.
http://adage.com/article/print-edition/inside-hidden-costs-programmatic/300340/

Navigating The Modern Ad Serving Stack, Part 2: Programmatic Direct

What if you could automate the drudgery of direct buys while retaining the benefits of running directly on the publisher's ad server?

Programmatic direct is made possible by a small handful of specialized ad tech vendors — companies like iSocket, Shiny Ads, and Adslot — that focus exclusively on delivering programmatic direct solutions. Their technology relies on tight API integrations with publisher ad servers, providing advertisers and agencies with a mechanism to have their campaigns served directly on the publisher’s ad server, all in an automated, software-driven manner.

http://marketingland.com/navigating-modern-ad-serving-stack-part-2-programmatic-direct-115506

What is agile marketing and why do you need it?

It’s certainly true that social media has spurred the rise of agile marketing, and it’s the reason why marketing teams are more readily adding it to their strategies.
Social happens in real-time, particularly on channels like Twitter where comments appear in chronological order without an algorithm (for now).
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Ashley Friedlin recently discussed agile marketing on the blog, and he suggests a 70:20:10 rule for marketers.
70% of your marketing should be planned ‘marketing as usual’ activity. 20% of your marketing should be programmatic, which is to say machine-driven marketing that automatically responds to various actions of the user. 10% of your marketing should be entirely agile. Reacting to news and events as and when they happen.
https://econsultancy.com/blog/65184-what-is-agile-marketing-and-why-do-you-need-it/

The CEO of WPP’s massive advertising trading desk Xaxis explains the 3 biggest myths about his company (First up — it’s ‘not a trading desk’)

Xaxis is the programmatic media platform within the world’s largest advertising agency holding group WPP that is projected to manage $950 million in ad spend this year across 40 markets.

http://www.businessinsider.sg/xaxis-ceo-brian-lesser-interview-2015-7/#.VbCT3LUeEps

The problem with programmatic, and how to fix it.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/problem-programmatic-how-fix-bryan-gissiner 

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

Programmatic ad pricing is starting to rise as demand outstrips supply

A report from BI Intelligence finds that real-time bidding (RTB), a key piece of the programmatic ecosystem, will account for over 33% of U.S. digital ad sales, or $18.2 billion in 2018, up from just $3.1 billion in 2013.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/programmatic-rtb-ad-report-2015-3?r=US