As the mobile ad industry continues to grow and develop it seems that the majority of ad sales are coming in the form of programmatic. In a recent UK report, about 64% of display and video advertisement inventories were sold automatically. This comes from either direct publishers or exchanges. The report from the Internet Advertising Bureau looked at ads that were purchased throughout 2014.
This is a significant growth for programmatic, which only got about 37% in 2013. The fact that many exchanges and advertisers have been using new tools and services that make programmatic for mobile much easier is one of the main reasons for this increase.
In addition, more and more publishers have been making efforts to improve their mobile platforms due to the huge growth in usage. As more and more people move to mobile, programmatic ad buying has been an obvious choice since it is so effective while minimizing the amount of time marketers and other advertisers need to spend on it.
Tim Elkingston, the Chief Strategy Officer at the IAB said, “Programmatic’s role in digital ad buying has grown from virtually zero to nearly half of all transactions in just five years. However, the impact on mobile has been even greater due to its more fragmented ecosystem providing a ripe breeding ground for intermediaries.”
The IAB is predicting that as much as 80% of all digital media spend will be on programmatic by 2018. This is obviously a huge amount of ad buys through the many systems that are out there. As long as they continue to convert well and lead to sales, however, that number is not unreasonable.
This rapid growth over the past several years and the prediction for further growth in the near future is very important for marketers and publishers today. If publishers are not displaying programmatic ads on both desktop and mobile properties, they will quickly lose out on a significant amount of revenue. For marketers and advertisers, if they are not making ad purchases through programmatic systems, they will likely run into trouble finding the best properties on which to market their products.