The mobile marketing industry continues to change a great rate, with evolving ad formats, media types, and customer behaviours.

The ways in which mobile advertising is purchased is also changing radically. A new study from the IAB shows that programmatic mobile ad sales are surging, a trend that is likely to continue.

---

Put simply, programmatic advertising is about the automatic buying and selling of media opportunities on digital platforms. Instead of having an individual at the end of the phone who sells inventory, the whole process is automated. This process happens in real-time, so as soon as the impression loads, the advertiser bids against others based on the context of the site.

Over the past year, nearly half (45%) of the £2.1 billion spent on digital display ads in the UK (both internet and mobile) were traded programmatically. This is up sharply from 28% the year before.

Direct sales of display ads between buyers and publishers has remained roughly stable at about 50%. However the bigger loser is ad sales through networks, which have dropped sharply from 22% in 2013 to down to only 6% in 2014.

And the numbers are even striking for mobile. Given the more fragmented state of the mobile ad market, programmatic has an even stronger effect. In 2014, nearly 2/3 of all mobile ads were traded though programmatic. This was essentially double the 37% seen in 2013.

One other interesting trend is the growth of programmatic selling of video ads.

Many people originally felt that programmatic would be primarily a tool for direct response advertising. However, video advertising – which is often more of a branding exercise – is also increasingly being sold through programmatic. In 2014, almost one fifth (18%) of video ads were traded programmatically.

These two trends – mobile ad spend and video – are likely to continue to propel the growth of programmatic.

Tim Elkington, Chief Strategy Officer at the UK’s Internet Advertising Bureau sums it up: “due to the rise in mobile and video ad spend, we estimate around 70-80% of all digital spend will be programmatic by 2018.”

(see Mobiad article Programmatic Advertising: What is it and Where is it going?)

28.07.2015    Tags: ad-network, Mobile-Video, programmatic