Such purchases are enabled by programmatic advertising tools, typically known as ads managers, that allow media buyers to set parameters for ad buys including price, frequency, and audience. Buyers can test targeting criteria and fine-tune the parameters to get the best results. We refer to this type of automated buying in social as programmatic direct.
When asked by Integral Ad Science (IAS) to assess various types of digital media in October 2020, 55% of US digital media professionals said that social media was most likely to experience brand risk incidents in the next 12 months—second only to programmatic advertising, cited by 56% of respondents.
These changes will have a profound effect on in-app advertising in the Apple ecosystem, as mobile programmatic advertising was previously underpinned by user-level targeting.
YouTube viewing is shifting to connected TV (CTV) screens, a behavioral change that could help make YouTube a powerful alternative for TV advertisers moving dollars to digital video.
Where future laws draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of targeting has huge implications for the future of programmatic advertising. More generally, brands are using AI in far more than programmatic advertising.