Dive Brief:
- A new survey from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) whose findings were made available to Marketing Dive found that 35% of the trade group's members are expanding their in-house programmatic media buying and reducing the role of external agencies in handling these tasks.
- The switch to in-house programmatic buying is a noticeable uptick from an ANA/Forrester report from last year, where only 14% of ANA marketers reported reducing the role of external agencies in favor of going in-house. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said they are concerned about brand safety issues around programmatic advertising; 85% are focused on programmatic desktop online display, 71% on desktop online video and 62% on mobile video.
- The top benefits of programmatic buying, according to those surveyed, are better audience targeting, the ability to build audience reach and real-time optimization. Most respondents said they have one staff member who is 100% dedicated to programmatic advertising duties and three employees who are involved in some way in programmatic initiatives.
Dive Insight:
Marketers' wariness toward programmatic has grown sharply this year as problems such as brand safety, fake news and general non-transparency in the digital media space have bubbled to the top of the industry conversation. Nearly half of marketers don't know where their ads run online due to programmatic strategies, according to a study by the Society for New Communications Research of the Conference Board released earlier this month.
Programmatic will remain the go-to approach for many — a Publicis Groupe Zenith forecast estimates programmatic will make up 67% of all display ads by 2019 — but, as evidenced by the ANA survey, more industry professionals are looking to wrest back control of their media investments by moving activities in-house. The ANA's findings are supported by other recent studies, including one from Adobe released this week that forecasts 62% of marketers will bring their programmatic media buying in-house by 2022, per The Drum.
The trend is another potential blow to agencies which have in the past several years seen their relationships with brand clients shaken by myriad issues pertaining to transparency and a failure to address the challenges of digital transformation. The ANA research found that undisclosed programmatic models with agency partners — which can hide agency margins and fees and sometimes doesn't disclose final bid prices to clients — are on the decline, with only 19% of respondents reporting they opted-in to that model, down from 34% in last year's ANA/Forrester survey.
"[Marketers are] making important changes to their programmatic buying practices to address media transparency concerns," ANA CEO Bob Liodice said in a statement made available in the release. "Specifically, they're moving sensitive responsibilities in-house and enhancing decision making by better understanding their costs and media investment transactions. We urge all marketers to contemplate these developments and consider following suit."
