As a brand, you could have some pretty brilliant ads, but if it’s not in the right place targeted at the right people, then your campaign will never reach its true potential. This is the problem some brands face in getting their advertising goals achieved. However, programmatic advertising has been changing the game for the past three decades by optimizing the most important aspects of your purchase: ad spends, impressions, and reach.
Thus, programmatic advertising is rapidly increasing among digital advertisers, rising from 76% of digital advertisers allocating their efforts to programmatic advertising in 2019 to 83% by Q2 of 2020, according to MediaRadar. In this piece, let’s go through what programmatic media buying popularly known as programmatic advertising is, how it works, its types and how it helps brands achieve their goals.
What Exactly is Programmatic Media Buying?
Programmatic ad buying is the use of automated technology to help your business buy ad space. It utilizes data and algorithms to help you serve your ads to the right people at the right time and in the right place in a fraction of a second.
Programmatic advertising includes ad slots for digital out-of-home (DOOH), online, streaming, TV, video and voice ads. Its popularity in the digital space continues to rise as there are tons of advantages to both the advertiser and the seller. Programmatic display advertising takes traditional display ads one step forward. Here the algorithms make the decision of bidding and buying the ads. It reduces human error, reducing the need for salespeople and making the entire process cheaper.
How does Programmatic Media Buying Work?
The programmatic advertising process is pretty simple. Programmatic advertising works through ad exchanges which are online marketplaces, where advertising space is brokered and auctioned, and then once bought, content can be advertised.
Now, An automated algorithm uses advanced analytics to determine the correct placement of these ads on publishing sites, based on factors like industry and demographics, in order to give the ads the best bang for their buck.

This is a process that takes place in a few seconds, with buyers able to find qualified space for their ads almost instantly. Some typical platforms for programmatic advertising would be Google Ads, Verizon Media, Pubmatic etc.
Programmatic ads can be delivered to audiences in several types of channels. The most popular are display ads. Video ads like in-stream ads, out-stream ads, and in-display ads, three of which are becoming highly popular as well.
Types of Programmatic Advertising
Leveraging on programmatic media buying doesn’t have just one process. There are several methods marketers buy ads for your business. Here are three types of programmatic advertising:
1. Real-time Bidding
We’ll start by having a look at is real-time bidding. Real-time bidding, known as an open auction, is available to any advertiser/publisher that seeks to buy/sell ad space. Bids for these ads happen in real-time, and the company with the highest bid gets the ad space.
With this type of programmatic ad buying, brands can bid for ad impressions and buy ads in bulk. While brands have access to many websites and a large audience, they don’t know where their ads will appear. It means that brands run the risk of their ads appearing on sites they don’t want them to appear.
2. Private Marketplace
Private marketplace allows your programmatic ads to only appear on the websites within this marketplace if you’re invited. The private marketplace is an invite-only market, allowing publishers to control which companies can advertise on their sites. In a private marketplace, advertisers usually set aside premium ad spots to enable select advertisers to have those spots. They can set aside the ad space to attract advertisers who will pay top-dollar for premium ad space on their side. Advertisers usually prefer the use of a private marketplace because it is more transparent than Real-time bidding. The advertisers know exactly which websites their ads will be served on so measuring their ROI is super easy
3. Programmatic Direct
Third on the list is programmatic direct which is a direct sale deal between seller and buyer, eliminating the need for ad exchange parties. These companies don’t use the ad exchange but rather agree on terms for advertising on the publisher’s site. Again, the publisher invites buyers but there is no bidding involved.
Unlike other programmatic deals, direct deals offer guaranteed agreements. Furthermore, the advertiser gets a fixed number of impressions at a fixed price. Most importantly, publishers know to whom (advertisers) they are selling their ad spaces and advertisers know where their ads are being displayed.
Benefits of programmatic advertising
- Increased ad efficiencies: Every ad ultimately aims to achieve campaign goals and increase ROI. Research has found that programmatic ad buying allows brands to pinpoint the audiences that they want to reach out to, ensuring that they deliver the perfect message, in the perfect location, at the perfect time.
2. Reduced overall advertising costs. For many companies, the biggest boon of programmatic advertising is reduced cost. By automating your bidding process, as well as modifying your cost-per-thousand impressions (CPMs) in real-time, you are optimizing your ad spend.
3. Scalability: Programmatic advertising allows you to reach a larger audience across multiple websites and touchpoints in a timely and efficient manner.
4. Reducing campaign launch time: Traditional media buying takes a lot of time brokering price points and making deal and puts a strain on campaign launch time. Programmatic advertising cuts that time down drastically.
5. Collecting greater data insights: Programmatic advertising uses collected data to decide which advertisements to use, and how much it would cost. This helps brands to understand customers.
6. Ability to optimize and target the right audience in real-time.
7. Higher Return On Investment.
8. Building effective cross-device campaigns
Closing Thought
Programmatic advertising is changing how media buying operates in the digital world. It is faster, more efficient, and cheaper than traditional methods. Advertisers can optimize their campaigns in real-time, and review them on an ongoing basis. Moreover,
At Printipy we know how effective programmatic media buying is and have already been integrating programmatic media buying into campaigns. As an expert marketing agency, we help automate the decision-making process of media buying by targeting specific audiences and demographics. Printipy deals with mobile programmatic advertising, programmatic media buying and many more activities.
Whether you are a publishing house or a brand looking for media space, our programmatic buying agency will help you automate the execution of strategy. Furthermore, Printipy’s programmatic media buying is the best to help your brand unlock insights to help you realize more Return On Investment out of your media spends.