Dive Brief:
- Like all hot new trends in advertising, sometimes it takes a while to catch up and understand what programmatic actually is.
- To help those hopelessly behind, Adweek has pulled together a "Programmatic for Dummies" guide to help ad execs who don't quite "get" programmatic yet.
- Included first in the guide is the explanation that, at the moment, programmatic is a catch-all phrase being used to describe several new ad practices, including real-time bidding, exchange-based buying and behavioral and intent-based buying. This disagreement on the term's meaning is at the core of all the confusion.
Dive Insight:
The reason the ad industry as a whole can't come to a consensus on what programmatic actually means is because so many new things are happening with ad tech, we have yet to identify them properly. It's a common problem in any industry when big changes happen. The best that ad execs can do is read about and participate in the process of programmatic—in all its definitions—as much as possible.
