In-housing Programmatic Advertising - Why is it an Accelerating Trend?

According to a recent article in The Drum, programmatic advertising spend is now accounting for more than 80% of digital advertising investment.

A shift has been occurring even as programmatic advertising has overtaken traditional media buying for digital advertising, according to a recent survey by the IAB and Accenture, 69% of brands have brought some of their programmatic advertising in-house.

Brands have always leveraged third-party media agencies and trading desks to manage all of their programmatic advertising investments. But many are seeking a more hands-on partnership due to concerns about the cost of the hidden fees and tech stack ‘tax’, campaign performance, and changes in the programmatic advertising environment (including GDPR and the looming deprecation of cookies). 

In our Ebook, A Guide to In-Housing Your Programmatic Strategy, we point out recent survey results that show the primary reasons that brands in-house some of their programmatic advertising functions. 

1 - Improve advertising performance, cost-efficiency, and transparency

2 - Better control and management of data and targeting

3 - Enhance real-time optimization capabilities

4 - Full accountability and focus on brand goals

As a result, more household brand names such as Procter & Gamble, American Express, and Unilever are moving to bring some programmatic buying in-house while looking to their agencies for strategic guidance.

Additional pressures to in-house include regulatory changes such as GDPR as well as privacy changes including the looming move by Google to deprecate cookies. The first pressure is driving brands that market in highly regulated markets to be more actively involved in managing their risk profiles. The second is causing brands to rethink their relationship with their own data, with the increase in value of first-party data in a cookieless world leading to potential competitive advantage. 

According to The Drum 

“Owning the data and making sure that the data collected as a result of your media campaign remains your own asset is absolutely essential. The merger between adtech and martech that we are all witnessing these days is key here. Putting a data strategy in place that helps your media activation, your site-centric data, and your client CRM data is absolutely key. And owning your DSP seat is absolutely essential for this.”

So a key to in-housing programmatic advertising is the integration and coordination with other in-house marketing efforts. Getting Adtech and Martech working hand-in-hand requires eliminating siloed data, which for organizations large and small can be a big lift, but one with extraordinary potential returns.

Media Agencies are responding, by becoming advisors to clients that seek to in-house some of their programmatic media budgets. Agencies have extensive experience in what works and what doesn’t in programmatic and it makes sense for clients to leverage this expertise even as they seek to bring some of this activity operationally inside. 

More resources for in-housing your programmatic advertising:

Programmatic Advertising Research - the IAB and Accenture

In-housing programmatic: the role of trust and transparency is key

Data Ownership and an In-House Programmatic Buying Approach