The Impact of Mobile Programmatic Advertising in 2016

As more brands continue to shift their advertising investment into mobile, the impact of programmatic trading will also grow as marketers continue to depend upon the technology to reach their target audiences. Tim Koschella, CEO and Co-Founder of AppLift, recently provided his insight what to expect for mobile programmatic in 2016.

Koschell has broad expertise in international mobile and online performance marketing (CPI, CPL, CPA, CPE) with a particular focus on the games industry. With AppLift he has been working with 100+ mobile companies to acquire users for their apps, among them many of the industry’s leading advertisers.

ADM: What is the big picture outlook for mobile programmatic for this year? 

Koschella: Programmatic trading continues to grab a share of the advertising budgets for the efficiency, transparency and control it provides marketers. I believe that the outlook for 2016 is a push from marketers to connect CRM and proprietary data to their marketing execution layer. Since programmatic trading was “built” for the task, we will see a deepening in advertiser > DSP engagement. This may further push for consolidation in the market, as advertisers will select only a few strong DSPs to partner with.

ADM: What’s specific about mobile programmatic in relation to desktop programmatic? 

Koschella: Mobile is a completely different breed of programmatic trading. Desktop programmatic enjoy a longer “runway” in terms of acceptance and adoption in the market, but desktop programmatic also has some unique challenges such as ad visibility, and premium supply being highly competitive with brand dollars representing the majority of programmatic trading. 

Mobile programmatic has grown substantially faster than desktop, with plenty of challenges in the way: diversity of devices, mobile browsing speed variability. 

ADM: What are the advantages of programmatic over traditional forms of advertising?

Koschella: The biggest advantage in programmatic trading is what marketers and a DSP can do with the data exchanged in the process of bidding. Marketers are sharing more and more 1st party CRM data with their DSP to make media trading more efficient. First party data helps “point” the DSP in the right direction, allowing to potentially find that single app download with substantially less “wastage.”

ADM: Is programmatic struck by fraud to the same extent as other forms of advertising? Are there ways to fight fraudulent activities in programmatic? 

Koschella: There was a recent article on AdExchanger titled: “If your DSP is suffering from fraud, you are doing something wrong.” Fraud happens across all digital advertising channels, but I would say that programmatic trading is likely the most equipped to win the battle against fraud. The main fraud cases in programmatic trading are related to traffic compliancy (traffic being sold as premium while it is 2nd handed through multiple mediators), impression fraud (false impressions generated under false pretence) and so on… (I’m not going to give anyone ideas ;-)

ADM: What is currently lacking for programmatic to "win over” advertisers?

Koschella: I believe it’s knowledge and transparency. Many companies make programmatic trading sound like buzz or magic, like something that “only the wizard engineering team understands and no one is to disturb them,” but programmatic trading is far from that. In essence, it is extremely simple, and while yes, it does require expertise, marketers have been trained to think that programmatic = complicated. At AppLift, we started an Academy to help show marketers that programmatic trading is quite simple once you understand the basics, and creative thinking to find your best sauce is not really rocket science… (pun intended).

ADM: There has been much talk about “header bidding” lately. What is it and how can it impact programmatic?

Koschella: To shortly explain it header bidding is a publisher's way of creating an 'auction of all auctions.’ Instead of getting the best single bid from one exchange, or falling back to another one, publishers call multiple SSPs and Exchanges at once to get the best bids from each of the players. 

Header bidding is both good and bad for marketers. Bad in the sense that it potentially pushes winning bids and cleared eCPMs upwards. However, it may at least standardize the look marketers can get into each impression rather than bid in a chaotic environment where it’s unclear if you are bidding on premium or remnant inventories.