I have fallen out of love with programmatic – philosophically. My affection has been waning and I’ve realised the only way to revive it is to hark back to the basics. It’s time to eradicate the hyperbole and erroneous ways we talk about programmatic in the industry.
In contrast to simplifying the complexity that exists within the digital industry, sticking a programmatic label on something usually causes confusion. Let me explain: I love the industry we work in. I am fortunate enough to be touching most of the disciplines within digital, from the more mature and familiar disciplines like paid search and SEO, through to conversion rate optimisation, social, and of course programmatic, or what we all call programmatic.
Look up the word ‘programmatic’ in the dictionary and you’ll find a description that sounds similar to “the nature of, or according to, a programme, schedule, or method”. So doing something programmatically essentially just means doing it according to a particular schedule or method. In most cases this equates to doing it in an automated fashion, ensuring consistency in how things are done. It is about process more than it is about anything else but this is often lost in translation.
To help simplify things, display is a format that can be bought programmatically – or in an automated fashion – using data and granular audience insights for retargeting and prospecting. The compelling narrative around this that everyone’s getting excited about is the clever use of data and insights to drive effective targeting and efficient ROI. It’s not solely programmatic as is often understood, but simply data and insights driven marketing. The word ‘programmatic’ is used ubiquitously to mean “doing things with data, using granular insights and buying media it in an automated fashion”. Hence programmatic has started to lose its meaning.
Now, I should be clear; programmatic as a process has been the most significant change agent in the digital advertising industry since paid search, possibly ever. It is partly why I do what I do. Indeed it has taken us from ‘mad men’ to ‘math men’, to use yet another overused expression. But programmatic is lazy. It focuses on the technology as opposed to the reasons for using that technology, bamboozling people within the industry as we harp on about DSP, DMPs, SSPs, DCOs.
It’s time to forget the technology; that is just the enabler. It’s the strategy behind it all that really matters. Using programmatic as a catch-all term for everything that is automated, insights or data driven, or that simply uses 1st, 2nd or 3rd party data is not the future. It doesn’t do our industry or practitioners justice simply bundling “data stuff” into the term programmatic. With thousands of new technologies entering the industry each year we need to ensure that strategy still remains the driving force behind any marketing campaign. Data and insight driven marketing is the future: programmatic process with all of its tools simply enables this. I’ve sat in countless meetings with marketers frustrated that only now the penny has dropped. Too many times I have heard people claim they feel dazed by programmatic until someone is able to explain it to them in layman’s terms. Increasingly my peers within the industry are using the terms ‘digital’ and ‘programmatic(ly)’ interchangeably adding even more confusion. It suggests that digital activity is the same as programmatic activity. Call me pedantic, but that’s got to stop.
The advent of programmatic a few years back was, let’s face it, the revival of display. Display as we know it was dying and it needed a big programmatic pick-me-up to halt its decline. People were genuinely worried about the future of the format that, in so many ways, was the birth child of the industry. Then along came programmatic and I fell in love with a subject that is so much more than just display now. So yes, my love has faded but I know how I’ll revive it: I’ll stop using the word programmatic unless I really have to!
By Martin Vinter, Head of Bought Media at iProspect UK.
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