Programmatic advertising
Programmatic advertising is the automated buying of digital ad space through platforms that decide, impression by impression, who sees each ad and at what price.
It replaces manual negotiation (orders, emails, insertion orders) with software. The advertiser or its trading desk sets up the campaign in a DSP; publishers offer their inventory through an SSP, and the two meet on ad exchanges where each impression is allocated in milliseconds, either through an open auction (RTB) or through private deals with agreed terms.
Its advantage is not just efficiency: it lets buyers use data to decide who is behind each impression. Almost all digital display and video is now bought this way, as is a growing share of connected TV and digital out-of-home. How well a campaign performs depends largely on the quality of the audiences it is fed with.
