How Software Is Eating Video Ads And, Soon, TVMy new report, “How Software Is Eating Video Ads And, Soon, TV” just went live. In it, I document how automation has gained traction in digital media buying and why it’s only a matter of time before we see it jump to assets such as online video. Read the report now and join me for a Webinar on Tuesday, February 25, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern standard time.

Sure, the scarcity of inventory and the premium associated with professional video content drive caution and reluctance among sellers. But in a few years, short- and long-form video content, both user-generated and broadcast-native, will be bought programmatically in an inevitable takeover of automated trading that has already started today – and will work all the way up to TV buying. Two forces make programmatic buying unavoidable:

  • Traditional buying cannot cope with audience fragmentation across devices. The explosion of new platforms and ways of viewing videos will continue dispersing audiences, making it increasingly difficult to reach the desired number of viewers through linear TV alone. And many of these new platforms are digital, enabling a break from broad age/gender ratings buys and a move to addressing ads to individuals. Traditional manual buying approaches simply can’t cope with this volume of video sources and the shift to addressable advertising.
  • Programmatic video won’t be a one-size-fits-all. Programmatic in video will take a different shape than programmatic in display where it is equated with auctions and real-time bidding because programmatic is really about the automation of audience-based buying, not the financial transaction. As a result, we see different forms of programmatic buying developing, driven by the dynamics of supply and demand in different tiers of inventory.

Marketers will need to adopt a more hands-on approach to succeed in this new paradigm of data- and audience-driven video trading. My report explains what to expect from the transition to programmatic video buying and how marketers can prepare today to unlock the full potential of their online video – and, eventually, TV – campaigns.

Are you buying video programmatically today? How do you see it evolving in the next few years?