Last week Rockshake was on the scene at  Programmatic I/O conference (Oct 15-16, 2018), which aptly took place in New York City, the birthplace of the Madison Avenue agency world we know and love from Mad Men, the series that tells the struggles of 1960s advertising firms. Fast forward, and the drama of the show has been replaced by growing tension and excitement about the rise of mobile programmatic and the explosion of mobile video.

Latest numbers from Chocolate reveal programmatic advertising investment in mobile video increased 41% in the second quarter of 2017. That’s almost 2X the overall growth in programmatic ads. Chocolate data further shows that programmatic investment in in-app video ads grew by 38%, representing 86% of overall spend on mobile video ads, and full-screen video ad spend increased by 38%. Little wonder that programmatic dominated discussion during and after panels.

A world of opportunity and a ton of topics

 
The conference attracted attention and attendees from around the world, including Europe and Asia. However, companies from the U.S. and Israel appeared to represent the most visible contingent. The variety of countries was reflected in the variety of themes that headlined the conference.

Topics included the future of programmatic, the growth of programmatic media buying among agencies and brands, the rise in the number of brands “in-housing” programmatic, the advance of blockchain, the importance of audience data and targeting, merging data from the offline and online worlds, viewability and the inevitable advance of, Connected TV. Other topics that held our interest included tips and tricks to drive creative innovation at scale and methods to join up the dots to measure across devices and consumer touchpoints.

By far, the main attraction was the caliber of speakers, a roster that included Sir Martin Sorrell, the founder and former head of WPP, and Terence Kawaja of Luma Partners, best known for the Lumascape map of the adtech and martech business ecosystem. Top execs from Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon--fast becoming the third largest digital ad platform set to bring in a whopping $4.61 billion this year, according to a new eMarketer study, up 60% from the research firm’s projection of $2.89 billion in March -- were also on hand to speak candidly about industry opportunities and challenges.

While the team couldn’t sit in on every session, we did take note of the topics and talking points you should have top of mind.

• Mounting interest and activity focus on ways to properly and appropriately monetize app data. Consumers are doing a lot on their apps and the data gathered here, in a privacy-friendly way, of course, provides the missing link, allowing companies to deliver campaigns that are effective because they are personal and relevant. But increased interest by publishers and marketers is matched by increased complexity in the rules and regulations--GDPR in Europe and California’s recent privacy laws--that impose new restrictions on how consumer-facing digital companies collect and use data. The recent move by InMobi to acquire Pinsight Media, the mobile data and advertising company belonging to mobile carrier Sprint, shows how the lines between companies that enable advertising and companies that power audience targeting and intelligence are blurring.

• Appetite for in-app advertising is robust, but the supply isn’t. This continues to be a challenge for all in the industry – increasingly both supply and demand are “aggregating” into exchanges that cover both sides of the business, or SSP or DSP side respectively. But also, more and more top app companies or web publishers are finding ways to intelligently increase “ad load” or ads per user – freeing up some ad inventory among the top publishers.

• Connected TV is coming, and now is the time to prepare for the impact. Growth in Connected TV is on the rise, but it’s not been matched by a comparable increase in addressable advertising--yet. A lack of scale and concerns around the accuracy and consistency of CTV measurement tools are just a few of the hurdles the industry must overcome. It’s work in progress and attendees agree there is a payoff because Connected TV will also enable the automated delivery of “addressable” ads which are vastly more relevant to individual households than the ads we know from broadcast TV. But before the ads move the needle (it’s already being traded on a CPM basis, for instance), attendees agreed that media owners will have to address issues such as brand safety and ad fraud first.

Everything you need to know about programmatic

 
If you’d like to learn more about programmatic, attendees at the conference called out Jounce Media as the go-to source. The company,  which bills itself as a “full-service programmatic advertising consultancy,” offers a Little Black Book series on programmatic, which is very extensive. Other resources include AdProfs, Reddit’s AdOps Community, Digiday’s “WTF Programmatic” series, eMarketer, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)  and, of course, AdExchanger (which also organized the Programmatic I/O Conference). AdExchanger is also publishing sessions from the conference on its dedicated AdExchanger’s Youtube Channel.

On a separate note, if you’d like to discuss plugging into our SDK Supply as a Programmatic Demand partner, Data Partnerships, or working with our DSP team, feel free to reach out here!