Over time, both the number of advertisers and publishers grew exponentially. Advertisers wanted to reach the target audience to influence users so as to purchase, build brand awareness and affinity or promote an event. Publishers used to provide a web property which was made up of intriguing and useful content to attract a greater number of audiences. The advertisers used to achieve their marketing goals by using right content to the right people and thus use to connect with their target audiences. It was up to media buyers to create media plans that targeted the right people and communicate with publishers that had access to those audience. For example, Nike is an advertiser and wants to show Ads on other websites, say, any food or clothing or sports website. At the same time, there is a publisher and he/ she wants to sell Ad slots at their website and gain profits. The publisher reaches the marketing team of Nike and gives them brief of Ad slots which can be used to target Nike’s audience. Nike agrees and buy those slots for particular period of time. This is a traditional method of advertising and thus is a tedious process, as it becomes impossible for publishers to sell most of their inventory manually and for advertisers to handle the direct media buying process.

 Due to the traditional method of advertising, the advertisers would have to be in direct contact with thousands of publishers at a time in order to maximize their reach and because of the same reason, manually tracking all of the Ads proved to be nearly impossible. The Advertisers used to track the results manually in order to see the performance of their advertisements. Advertisers typically purchased media on a Cost per Mile model, where CPM is the amount an advertiser pays to have its Ads served against videos 1,000 times. They used to buy impressions in huge quantity - the same Ad on the same App.  

As the demand of advertisers increased for programmatic buying, publishers become more willing to release their premium inventory for programmatic buying. Other maturing advertising technologies help in ensuring the quality of media inventory and because of that, meet the increasing attention and needs from advertisers which in turn helps solve issues of Ad view ability, fraud and brand safety.

Programmatic advertising is defined as the automation of buying and selling of Ad inventory, supported by the Open RTB (Real Time Bidding) ecosystem. Programmatic advertising has become the ultimate solution to improve digital campaign ROI (Return on Investment) and ensure strategic business goals as it automates the media buying process. As programmatic advertising is an automated and data driven process, the task of buying and selling ad inventory has been eased across channels and formats including display, video, native, audio and digital outdoor ads.

As the internet grew, it caused a massive Ad Oversupply that resulted in a significant amount of inventory being left unsold and unmonitored. In the mean time, publishers grew faster than advertisers, making it hard for buyers to consume available Ad supply.

Ad networks played a main role in programmatic advertising as it categorized a publisher’s unsold Ad inventory. It was easier for buyers to access and include it in media campaigns. Ad inventories can be classified into two categories: premium and remnant. Premium Ads are the ads which can be sold when there is a direct relationship between buyers and sellers, while remnant Ads are those left unsold or leftover, which publishers sell via Ad networks. The Ad buying process was more complicated for publishers as the agencies had more than a single channel to source Ad inventories.

Real Time bidding is the automated process of buying display ad space in real time, by bidding based on the target audience whom advertisers wish to reach.  Ad exchange is where the publisher’s inventory is sold via an auction, and bid on and bought by advertisers. Supply side Platforms (SSP) is a system which allows publishers to access the Ad exchange and list their inventory to be sold in auction. SSP provides publishers with a way to manage those who gained access to Ad inventory for resale to agencies and advertisers. SSPs help publishers maximize revenue earned via Ad networks because they act as a middleman between the seller and the advertising networks. SSPs create a bidding environment wherein publishers are able to extract the most revenue possible from their Ad inventories. Demand Side Platforms (DSP) helped agencies and advertisers to scoop up ad inventories which enabled them to buy media via a single platform. Thus, Programmatic advertising has evolved till date and has drastically changed the landscape of digital marketing. With the evolution of Programmatic Advertising, the whole complex procedure of programmatic buying is thus simplified.