Lowdown: Programmatic
Nick Hirstadam&eveDDB
Programmatic advertising - much vaunted, but often complicated. So, let's look at the three big differences between programmatic and traditional buying.
First, where traditional media deals are negotiated by humans, programmatic buying and selling is done by software. (Ads are often, but not always, sold programmatically because human sales teams have failed to sell them. A kind of media version of university clearing.)
Second, where traditionally you'd buy impressions in bulk (for example, a whole print run of Vogue, or the masthead on AOL.com), a programmatic sale is a single impression:...