Programmatic advertising
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
The word does more damage than almost any other in this vocabulary, because it is used to imply that everything worth buying can be bought this way. In the UK it cannot. Cinema and addressable television transact as booking briefs, clearance steps and insertion orders — paperwork with lead times — and a platform describing those as programmatic is either wrong or reselling somebody else's paperwork. Of the twenty-five rails AdBuyMCP registers, six are booking workflows rather than APIs, and the supply page grades each one rather than blurring them together.
Goes deeper: Every rail, graded
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Real-time bidding (RTB)
The auction mechanism underneath most programmatic advertising: when an impression becomes available, buyers are invited to bid on it and the winner's advert is served, all within roughly a hundred milliseconds.
Demand-side platform (DSP)
Software an advertiser uses to buy advertising across many publishers through one interface, bidding on impressions in real time. It sits on the buyer's side of the market and charges a fee, usually a percentage of the media spent through it.
Insertion order (IO)
A contractual document committing an advertiser to buy specified advertising from a specified seller at agreed terms. The mechanism by which media that is not bought programmatically is bought instead.
More on channels and formats
The seven things you can actually buy, and the words the sellers use for them.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through