Published on the 03/08/2015 | Written by Donovan Jackson
Digitisation of publishing means automation and information driven decision-making…
Where advertising was once sold on the back of a fag packet by a people’s person, trading media space is now more likely to be done by a data scientist and an algorithm.
That emerged in a chat iStart had with AppNexus president Michael Rubenstein. The company provides programmatic advertising solutions, and he pointed to the ‘tremendous evolution of media and advertising’. “New technologies are impacting on how business is being done.
“Buying and selling of advertising, once manual, is being automated. People are leveraging technology to create auctions for ad impressions rather than directly negotiating. Just like there are internet marketplaces for just about everything, the same is happening to advertising.”
One of the traditionally murky areas of ad sales is getting a direct dose of sunlight thanks to digital data. In the past, the number of people who would actually view an ad page was at best an educated guess and at worst a bare faced embellishment.
Rubenstein pointed out that programmatic advertising means buyers and sellers can make data-driven decisions, including how much to pay and what adverts to show any given individual. “That’s determined to a large extent by algorithms which run on buyer or seller systems.”
Outside of Google, Appnexus is the largest independent provider of those solutions.
Rubenstein said the industry is handling the change from manual to programmatic advertising with a combination of excitement and trepidation (something which is not entirely unfamiliar to those in the publishing environment).
“In terms of excitement, buyers and sellers can do things which were never before possible; rather than trusting opinions on whether or not target demographics or audiences were being reached, they can now assure themselves with actual data. Automation also means new areas of creativity are opened up.”
And trepidation? “Organisations have to shift the way they do things and the types of jobs they operate. Publishers and ad agencies are now hiring more data scientists and analytics types, rather than instinct-driven [people]. That’s reflected across society, not just in advertising.”
