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It used to be that ad agencies were the ultimate source of programmatic know-how. That’s not the case these days as many advertisers are becoming much more educated about programmatic advertising and ad tech in general. The need for transparency is driving advertisers to bring programmatic in-house. Many are seeing the DIY approach as the best way to garner insights and knowledge.

Such a shift is tipping the balance of programmatic smarts and control away from the agencies and to the advertisers themselves, allowing them, among other things, to keep command over their sensitive first-party data. It’s worth noting talent restraints and lack of implementation strategies are the key challenges these advertisers now face.

What Every Tech-Savvy Marketer Should Know About the Future of Programmatic Advertising

Here’s something marketers should mentally bookmark about the future of programmatic advertising: it lives in private marketplaces because that’s where big brands are starting to spend more of their money. By 2016 they will be an $8.6 billion industry.

When considering private programmatic, remember how private marketplaces allow brands and publishers to choose the partners they work with. The models may vary, but firms can customize campaigns and optimize for brand-centric metrics. Advertisers hold more sway over the impressions they purchase. Some private auctions may have preferred buyers participating. Reach can be a drawback. Finally, the next iteration of the private marketplace will likely enable spending commitments and inventory guarantees.

All that said, while private marketplaces do have several advantages, they also have their limitations.

Top Programmatic Trends for 2015

A year ends and a new one begins. Here are some programmatic trends the IAB has said will turns heads in 2015.

Watch for the death of the campaign. We are transitioning into an era of the constant online presence, the always-on campaign that continuously pushes tailored messages. Also, there is finally a standard API for purchasing premium programmatic advertising in OpenDirect.

The industry has fraud in its crosshairs, as that challenge continues to be an issue for programmatic skeptics. Expect mergers and acquisitions in the programmatic space to keep going strong in the New Year. Also look for the industry to begin tackling more long-term issues such as attribution and the “race to the bottom” on CPMs.

Read More from IAB UK…

If you think marketing during the holidays feels fast and furious, you’re not alone. Keeping pace with today’s consumer demands an agile multi-faceted strategy.

This holiday season, we’re seeing that, more than ever before, customers – your customers – have taken the wheel when it comes to shopping. If you’re not on every channel, offering bargains of every kind, there’s a solid chance you’ll get passed by.

Today’s holiday shopper is omnichannel -- browsing and buying both online and offline. They know a good deal when they see one (mostly because they’ve done plenty of research and read tons of reviews). And they’ll wait to purchase in order to save with last minute deals and free shipping.

Speaking of free shipping, if you don’t get in this game, you might as well close your virtual doors today. Customers expect free shipping and, turns out, it’s working. Almost half of all retailers offered this incentive in 2013.

When it comes to understanding this season’s holiday shopper, here’s what you need to know:

And if you don’t offer up some freebies or discounts – you’ll get about as much love as a stale fruit cake.

To help you evaluate your current holiday strategy, and make it easy to leverage what you learn this year for next, we’ve compiled the latest holiday shopper stats for your consumption. Review the information. Save it. Be thankful for all the success you’ve had thus far this year. And get ready to shoot for the stars in 2015.

At this point, media plans have been approved. Buys have been completed. Promises have been made. As you hold your breath waiting for campaign metrics to start trickling in – there’s good news. Experts are predicting some pretty healthy numbers in terms of holiday spending this season. In fact, 82% of shoppers plan to spend more on shopping and 52% are planning to buy online (Accenture, eMarketer). The bad news: you won’t be able to attribute an unsuccessful campaign to the lack of buying.

If you want to make sure your campaigns deliver everything you and your clients are hoping for, it’s not too late. There’s still time to optimize your plans and reap the rewards of the 2014 retail season.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll deliver a series of infographics to help you understand and assess the holiday shopper, including how they’re shopping as well as ways to reach them in the most effective and timely manner.

Happy Friday, peeps, and welcome back to our famous Five on Friday! It’s been a week packed with events, excitement, and holiday cheer and we just want to share it with you in this quick review. So grab yourself a hot cup of cocoa, slide into your fuzziest slippers and cozy up to this Five on Friday!

That wraps up this week’s Five on Friday. We hope you have a wonderful weekend! Until next time, be happy and be kind.

Employee Accolades and Feedback Propels Centro to the Top Spot on AdAge’s Ranking of Workplaces;

Centro Continues to Garner Recognition for Building a Great Culture and Creating Happiness

NEW YORK, NY - Dec. 2, 2014 – Centro, a provider of unified, enterprise-class software for digital advertising, today was named the No. 1 Best Place to Work in Advertising & Media, according to Advertising Age. The leading industry publisher ranked 40 companies based on criteria such as hiring practices, benefits packages, salaries, office perks, workplace environment and design. Nearly 20,000 people were surveyed as part of the selection process.

Advertising Age’s recognition showcases Centro’s commitment to building a corporate culture that creates happiness for employees, customers and partners. In 2014, Centro has also received national renown in Fortune, Crain’s Chicago and Crain’s New York for its workplace. The company continues to generate positive ratings (average of 4.6 out of 5) on career community site Glassdoor, illustrating that it is one of the best organizations to work for in the U.S. CEO and founder Shawn Riegsecker has been an advocate of workplace values and culture, recently presenting his views on employee happiness at the 4As Talent@2030 Conference. Now with more than 570 team members in North America, and looking to expand to 800 in 2015, Centro is experiencing healthy business growth while delivering on employee needs.

“With hundreds of companies applying and going through the rigorous employer and employee survey process for the 2014 Ad Age Best Places to Work list, the competition was tough. The organizations that rose to the top are incredibly deserving,” said Natalie Zmuda, deputy managing editor at Advertising Age. “In today’s dynamic business environment, talent is a key differentiator. The leadership teams we’ve honored have perfected the art of recruiting, developing and retaining talent, setting their firms apart from others in the advertising and media world. And they’ve carefully, thoughtfully crafted a culture and a work environment that anyone would be lucky to be a part of.”

“It is an honor to be recognized among our peers in the industry who are attracting and cultivating great talent,” said Shawn Riegsecker, CEO of Centro. “The Centro culture differentiates us from many companies in our space and we credit it for driving our growth. Getting culture right and keeping our employees happy directly affects our ability, as a company, to transform media and advertising through technology.”

Submissions were evaluated by Advertising Age research partner Buck Consultants LLC. With nearly a century of experience in employee and human resource consulting, Buck crafted two surveys to help Advertising Age find the companies with the best benefits and most-engaged employees. The employer survey contained about 100 questions, including questions about pay, promotions, health care and other benefits and hiring practices. The employee survey contained about 50 questions. It measured aspects of the workplace environment that contribute to an engaged staff, including matters such as fairness of pay, vacation time, relationships with management and co-workers, career development and other workplace issues.

Centro (centro.net) provides unified, enterprise-class software to simplify digital media operations. Our media management platform streamlines and scales ad buys across all channels, accessing both guaranteed and biddable inventory, to achieve any campaign objective. Our holistic approach gives marketers a single system of record to fulfill their research, planning, buying, optimization, reporting and reconciliation needs. Since 2001, Centro has successfully planned and executed more than 100,000 national and local campaigns across all digital display platforms and ad format types. Headquartered in Chicago with 33 offices in North America, Centro’s success and commitment to culture has led to many accolades, including #1 on Crain’s Best Places to Work in Chicago in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, #1 on Advertising Age’s Best Place to Work in Media & Advertising in 2014, and #8 on Fortune’s Best Medium-Size Workplace in 2014.

Advertising Age is recognized as the leading global source of news, analysis and intelligence for the marketing and media community. Advertising Age includes ongoing coverage of strategic topics for marketers from mid to large companies complemented by breaking news and a database of the world's best creative. The 84-year-old publisher produces more than 15 original rankings each year, including the 100 Leading National Advertisers and 100 Leading Media Companies lists, the Digital A-List, and the annual Agency Report.

Is it December already? Wow, time sure flies! We hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and are ready for the new week. Ours is packed with all sorts of events around the country. Take a look at the schedule below and let us know if you will be in the area. We’d love to chat, so email us at [email protected] or stop by to say hi. Let’s make it a great week!

What’s going on? Presented by Business Insider, this event brings together 700+ senior executives from tech, media, entertainment, investment, finance and internet to explore emerging business models in digital media and to discuss where the industry is headed.

What’s going on? This year’s forum gathers leading marketing executives from a variety of industry verticals to share best practices and innovative marketing strategies.

What’s going on? This digital media conference focuses on the interactive local opportunity and shines light on new technologies, content, and channels that are continuously being added. The latest tools and solutions to complement existing media channels are also big discussion topics. If you are slated to attend, be sure to check out Garrett’s speaking engagement on how local is going programmatic!

Who’s going? Michael Thill, Rocky Orozco, Ben Sarmiento, Amy Belton, Steven Torices, Jessica Hilgers, Ashley McBrearty, Jun Wang, Jamar Hadden, Katie Lynch, Jamie Bloom, Heather Vested, Marissa Enfield, Megg Sulzinger

What’s going on? thinkLA’s holiday and end-of-the-year party donates all proceeds to Toys for Tots. Centro is proud to not only help the cause but also have a great time with fellow coworkers and friends.

That’s it for this week. Be sure to check out more of these Feet on the Street posts to see where we are headed to next!

As digital video becomes increasingly popular, Centro talks to more and more clients who have an interest in transitioning traditional TV assets to digital. Recently, a tier 2 automotive dealership approached us with just such a request. The dealership had historically relied on broadcast television campaigns, but wanted a video-focused digital strategy for consistent messaging and resonance with its target audience of in-market auto consumers. This meant the solution needed to source video inventory and layer in targeting at scale. In order to measure the campaign’s performance against traffic and awareness, the client selected CPC and CTR as the primary campaign KPIs.

Centro was selected to be one of many partners on the dealership’s initiative. Centro’s Audience Buying team went to work to develop a comprehensive solution that covered off all aspects of the campaign objective. Using a combination of 1^st and 3^rd party data, layered with contextual channels and retargeting techniques, the plan offered a full-funnel approach to both target the in-market consumer audience and add to the dealership’s perspective customer pool. As the campaign evolved, Centro’s optimizations spanned various tactics, sites, bids, budgets, and channels to deliver the best business results.

Centro’s Audience Buying solution outperformed all other partners on the plan, delivering a CPC that was 7x more efficient and a CTR 100% higher than the average of the others on the campaign. Additionally, Centro’s optimizations resulted in a 94% improvement in the CPC and a 500% improvement in the CTR over the course of the campaign. The client was more than satisfied, and continued to leverage Centro for further campaigns, eventually investing 15x the original budget.

At Centro, we offer a modern approach to digital media. With over 13 years and 100,000 campaigns to our name, we leverage advanced technology, proven tactics, and industry expertise to build campaigns around the channels and platforms that drive the greatest results for our client’s specific business needs. People and technology are at the heart of Centro, and are the essential parts in every #CentroInAction story.

At its recent Programmatic Summit in Los Angeles, the IAB highlighted 10 things people should really know about programmatic advertising. Here are some of the key takeaways.

Programmatic is big and it’s getting bigger. Real-time bidding (RTB) and programmatic aren’t exactly one and the same because RTB is actually just a subset of programmatic. Also, programmatic still has its fair share of challenges to overcome if it will to truly live up to its potential. While fraud and trust are particularly challenging issues, they’re being addressed by the industry through the development of an accountability program, as well as other initiatives.

Measurement is even more important in a programmatic environment. Attribution is also critical in order to make programmatic spending more efficient. Finally, creativity and programmatic are not enemies.

A super accessible beginner’s guide to programmatic buying and RTB

Given programmatic’ growing ubiquity, it’s crucial that clients understand exactly what it means.

Programmatic buying just means that the buying of ad space is automated. There are two types of programmatic buying: programmatic direct and programmatic real-time bidding (RTB). RTB, basically, serves users with online ads wherever they are on the internet. Ad space is bought auction-style on an impression-by-impression basis, the price of each impression being determined by what buyers are willing to pay for it in real-time.

Programmatic direct is the automation of a process wherein guaranteed ad space is bought without the auction format. It’s also known as ‘automated guaranteed,’ programmatic guaranteed’ and ‘programmatic premium.’ For a more in-depth explanation, check out eConsultancy’s beginner’s guide to programmatic buying and RTB.

Now even wearables have programmatic ads

A new wearables ad network called FitAd has started facilitating automated promos for Amtrak’s Acela Express service to people who like to golf at courses along America’s Eastern Seaboard. The ads are being served to those who’ve downloaded a mobile app called Golfshot on their Sony or Samsung smartwatches.

FitAd is only running on Android wearables at the moment, but it will be expanding to iOS systems soon. Expect even more ads to come to wearable tech very soon. WPP media agency Mindshare recently unveiled its own global wearable tech group called Life+. It will operate across across wearables including Google Glass, Samsung Galaxy Gear, Garmin devices and the Jawbone fitness wristband.

Hey there, folks! We’re glad you stopped by for today’s Five on Friday. This crazy polar vortex has us in the holiday spirit and we’re looking forward to Thanksgiving next week. But before you all don those sweaters and dig into your turkey dinner, why not cozy up to this edition of Five on Friday?

That’s it for this Five on Friday. We hope you all stay warm in this cold, crazy weather! Until next time, be happy and be kind.

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What Every Tech-Savvy Marketer Should Know About the Future of Programmatic Advertising

Top Programmatic Trends for 2015

A super accessible beginner’s guide to programmatic buying and RTB

Now even wearables have programmatic ads

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