Here's why programmatic advertising is becoming more important in times of COVID-19

As marketing spends come under pressure this year due to the impact of coronavirus on purses, brands are looking for better return on investments.

This is why more advertisers are focusing on programmatic advertising.

Before knowing why more brands are taking the programmatic route, let’s first understand what is programmatic advertising.

“Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of digital advertising. According to me, programmatic is nothing but a much more systematic and process-driven approach of buying and selling all kinds of digital and traditional ad spaces, said Rahul Khanna, founder BARCODE entertainment, a marketing agency.

He further said, “At Barcode, we use algorithms to purchase the display space. These algos utilise targeting mechanisms to identify a target audience so that the brands can reach out to the correct audience. For instance, Barcode’s programmatic tool called Phygits helps identify a brand’s target audience online based on interests, demographics and consumer behaviour.”

But why is programmatic becoming more important this year?

Khanna pointed out that in the current times there has been a sudden shift from offline to online advertising for many traditional advertisers.

“For example, if you were to buy an OOH media space in the pre-COVID-19 era, you would need a physical recce report highlighting various insights which rely on human intervention. But with programmatic advertising one can gauge all the insights at a press of a button,” he said.

In addition, advertisers who take the programmatic route, there is a significant reduction in price as compared to those who go by the human driven approach, added Khanna.

“Few of the prominent startups in the edtech, food delivery and healthcare industry are working with us in this space. Additionally, programmatic advertising uses a real-time bidding system which determines price based on the supply and demand as identified by the algorithms which minimises the risk of overpaying significantly,” he added.

Highlighting how big programmatic advertising is, Khanna said that it accounts for almost 84 percent of the digital ad space spend today.

Even for the Indian Premier League this year more brands are looking to go the programmatic way.

“IPL the way it is viewed has changed since its debut in 2008 and 12 years later there are multitude of touch points through which brands can reach its viewers whether it's streaming service, telecom operators, radio or traditional TV channels. This year the overall ad spend of Rs 1,200 crore will be on digital medium during IPL and majority of the ad revenue is going to be utilized through programmatic advertising,” said NeoNiche Integrated Solutions founder and CEO Prateek N Kumar.

Last year during the ICC Cricket World Cup brands like Myntra, Paytm took the programmatic route to advertise during the mega sporting event.