Brand safety and measurement concerns fail to stem rise of programmatic spend
New figures from SMI show that industry concerns about brand safety and measurement have had little impact on the rise in programmatic spending, with investment in some sectors up between 500% and more than 2000% year-on-year.
Jane Schulze: “The rate of growth has not slowed”
Figures for the use of programmatic for the first quarter of 2017 compared to Q1 2016 showed a dramatic and continuing rise in programmatic spending through Australian media agencies.
While some sectors grew from a tiny base resulting in astonishing rises – with spending on cameras, recording devices and other digital products up 9,324% – other sectors which which were beginning to grow from mature bases continued to rise by over 100%.
While this an interesting take, I would question why programmatic has been called out as a separate channel in reporting? By doing so it’s easy lump all programmatic trading in the group of brand safety issues and immeasurability, regardless of channel or supply. Would it not be a more useful view to cut all media channels by the volume traded via a direct IO vs put through technology / traded in that channel’s version of programmatic? For me, talking about the growth in display (or video for that matter) now switching to “programmatic” is a misnomer as it is still display or video being bought, just the method of transaction which has changed. Appreciate this goes against much of the rhetoric at the moment, and isn’t as easy as a re-cut of the data, but to me would be a more forward thinking approach.