The winner of the bid could now have their ad in front of the right audience at the right time. This was a huge step to increase efficiency and use technology to help the process of buying and selling inventory.

Moving forward, some agencies created their own proprietary trading desks or invested in demand-side platforms (DSP) which gave them the ability to trade in the Ad Exchanges efficiently and in real time using data to influence their decision making. The same happened on the sell side: While some publishers sold directly on the ad exchange, others invested in a group of companies called sell-side platforms, which optimizes selling points for the publisher.

And this is what we’re calling “Programmatic Advertising”. Not only that it connects the buy-side (the advertiser) with the sell-side (the publisher) – in the last years, many companies arose acting as a Data Management Platform that analyzed and tracked the user behavior and collected data to offer audience segments at an additional cost in the DSPs and make those characteristics eligible for targeting. This was a major step away from content centric targeting to audience targeting in real-time. Furthermore, you can also track how your campaign is performing and make adjustments if needed to help get the results that you want.

Long Story short: Programmatic Advertising uses artificial intelligence in real-time bidding to help automate and streamline the ad buying process. It allows you to specify a target market, budgets and goals for a campaign. With that specifications, one can place ads across dozens of ad networks to reach your highly targeted audience. Programmatic Advertising allows you to serve your ad to the right user at the right time – personalized, cost efficient and trackable.

What are the most common targeting options in Programmatic?

Picture your campaign as a blank canvas and the targeting options, meaning the data points, are different colors that blend together to make a whole picture. You can target users by their interests and affinities, by their demographic (gender and age), by their keyword searches and even previous web activity. Modern DSPs offer more data points such as browser language, time of the day and even weather conditions or events. Let’s say you want to promote your soft drink brand. You would want to do that on a hot sunny day rather than on a cold rainy day.

With the rise of mobile advertising, even hyperlocal targeting is an option. Hyperlocal Advertising uses latitude and longitude behaviors to know where people are – these coordinates are collected by the installed apps on your phone. These data points can be aggregated and pushed into your DSP for targeting. But not only that it makes the users targetable for – let’s say – shops and services in your neighborhood, mobile behaviour also helps Data Management companies to qualify users. For example, a user who is regularly taking a certain route at a specific

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