Welcome to the Basic Programmatic Course!
Over the next hour and a half, you will gain the foundational knowledge required to begin your journey with programmatic advertising.
We will help you understand the nuances of the landscape and gain behind-the-scenes access to the technical components of both the buy- and sell-side of the ecosystem. Additionally, you will obtain tangible basic strategies that can be applied to your current and upcoming campaigns!
A few housekeeping items before getting started:
- This is a basic level course and contains 4 core modules.
- Please follow along with your instructors as they guide you through the content and take the quiz material when prompted throughout the presentation.
- To become certified during this session, you will need to pass all of the required test material.
- For a faster learning experience, switch to 1.5x in the video window.
- If you have any questions, or feedback during the presentation, your instructors will be happy to help you!
We’re excited to help you take your programmatic knowledge to the next level.
Thank you,
The Blaster Academy Team
Welcome to the first module of the course:
The State of Programmatic Advertising.
In this section, we will cover three main areas:
An overview of programmatic, a look at the programmatic ecosystem, and a snapshot of different types of programmatic advertising.
To start, what does it mean when we hear the term “programmatic advertising”? By definition, programmatic advertising is a system that automates the processes and transactions involved in buying and dynamically placing ads on websites or apps. Programmatic advertising makes it possible to purchase and place ads, including targeted ad content, in less than a second. So, now that we understand the definition of programmatic advertising, let’s go back and see how it got to where it is today.
We’ll do this by going through a timeline and highlighting some key moments. Let’s start in the early 2000s. At that time, online ad buying was still in its early stages.
To buy ads online, advertisers and publishers had to establish a direct relationship and negotiate to place an ad. This meant that each advertiser had to contact each publisher individually to buy different ads. For example, if you wanted to place your ads on CNN or ABC News, you would have to contact that network directly to purchase the ad space.
Overall, this was not very efficient. Moving on to 2005, this marks the launch of the first ad exchange. This launch would lay the foundation for a more automated way of buying and selling ads online.
Following the first exchange, the first demand-side platform (DSP) and supply-side platform (SSP) were introduced in 2007. These two platforms helped serve the advertiser and publisher sides of the business. We’ll go into more detail on this later in the course.
In 2009, we see a pivotal moment in programmatic history: the introduction of real-time bidding, or RTB. This process was integral to automating the purchase of online advertising.
From that moment on, we see the programmatic industry begin to take off. In 2011, RTB became the most popular model for buying ads, and additionally, we saw the creation of different data management platforms, or DMPs. Then, in 2015, the programmatic industry really started to scale.
The industry continued to find new ways to reach consumers with the introduction of new formats, like Connected TV (CTV). Then, in 2016, real-time bidding reached mainstream popularity in the advertising industry. This brings us to where we are today.
Programmatic advertising has various offerings and continues to be a major player in the digital advertising space. But how does this fit into the entire digital advertising ecosystem?