Programmatic advertising is growing fast, but it still has major faults. It now accounts for over 2/3rds of US digital media buys, but the reality is bots are racking up fraudulent ad views. They account for between 3 and 37% of all fraudulent ad views (the stats in this area are so murky it's impossible to know where between those two extremes the true figure lies), and reportedly are costing marketing over seven billion dollars this year.
Fraud is thus a big concern for those buying programmatic slots, as is ad blocking, which has increased markedly now that mobile ad blockers are becoming more prevalent. Interestingly though, they are not the problem which most concerns senior ad buyers.
Multidevice measurement apparently presents the biggest challenge, which makes sense given the impossible task of accurately measuring ROI without being able to properly attribute traffic sources and ad impressions.
Marketers should consider how these problems can be ameliorated and ask their programmatic providers how they plan on solving them. One problem not on this list is better data integration between the programmatic ads and the company. Poor integration leads to things like me getting constant remarketing ads on every site I visit for a product I already purchased weeks before. Surely marketers can do better than this?
By Robert Allen
Rob Allen is Marketing Manager for Numiko, a digital agency that design and build websites for purpose driven organisations, such as the Science Museum Group, Cancer Research UK, University of London and the Electoral Commission. Rob was blog editor at Smart Insights from 2015-2017. You can follow Rob on LinkedIn.
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