Despite the soaring popularity of programmatic of late, there remains a number of barriers refraining businesses from increasing their real-time ad spend.
UK-based Infectious Media has reported that 65% of marketers cite ‘lack of transparency of financials’ as the main barrier to increasing spend on real-time bidding.
“Although marketers plan to put more investment into programmatic, it’s clear transparency is still an issue,” says Martin Kelly, Infectious Media’s CEO and co-founder.
“The IAB forecast programmatic would account for nearly half of display advertising last year, so imagine how high it could be in 2015 if transparency wasn’t an issue.”
The programmatic advertising specialists also found that 55% of marketers cited the complexity of the ecosystem as a significant barrier to increasing spend, followed by a lack of appropriate measurements (50%).
‘Lack of trust in agency relationship’ and ‘lack of transparency of delivery’ were also issues, both cited by 45% of marketers.
“Brands are struggling to build a programmatic advertising strategy that fits into a wider media mix and marketing plan,” says Kelly. “It’s up to us as an industry to provide the guidance they need to overcome this challenge.”
Smarter decisions
Despite the apparent hurdles, Infectious Media’s survey found that 75% of marketers plan to increase programmatic brand spend in the next 6-12 months.
From increasing sales to the ability to personalise ad messages and utilise CRM data, marketers are quickly recognising the potential of programmatic and are keen to explore its benefits.
Infectious Media found that 55% of marketers consider ‘synching of on and offline campaigns’ as the biggest opportunity around programmatic in the next 6-12 months, with 50% citing ‘connecting up of new data sources’ and 45% favouring programmatic video.
“These results highlight that brand marketers are now well aware of the benefits of programmatic advertising,”, states Kelly.
“It allows advertisers to use data to make smarter buying decisions and with large, premium ad formats now available programmatically it’s a shrewd investment.”