Programmatic Advertising Trends Shaping 2016
The developments that defined programmatic advertising in 2016, from header bidding's rapid adoption to mobile overtaking desktop volume.
Programmatic advertising had already become a mainstream line item by 2016. What made that year distinct was a set of specific technical and structural shifts that changed how buying and selling happened under the surface.
Header bidding went from niche to standard
Header bidding, letting multiple demand sources bid on the same publisher impression simultaneously via code in the page header, rather than in the older sequential “waterfall” model where sources were offered inventory one at a time, saw rapid, real adoption across major publishers through 2016. For advertisers this meant more competitive access to inventory that previously went preferentially to whichever exchange happened to be first in line, and for publishers it generally meant meaningfully higher yield on the same inventory.
Mobile overtook desktop in programmatic volume
As mobile browsing and app usage kept climbing, programmatic spend followed it. 2016 was the year mobile programmatic volume caught up to and, in a growing number of advertiser accounts, passed desktop. That shift forced a lot of teams that had been repurposing desktop creative for mobile placements to finally build mobile-native ad units instead.
Native programmatic started scaling properly
Programmatic buying of native ad units, which had been gaining ground since around 2015, matured further in 2016 as more exchanges standardized native ad formats enough to transact them at scale through the same automated pipes used for standard display. This let advertisers run native creative across a much wider set of publishers through a single buy rather than negotiating placements individually.
Viewability enforcement got stricter
The Media Rating Council’s viewability standard, in place since 2014, moved from a benchmark buyers referenced loosely to something increasingly built directly into deal terms and vendor guarantees. Ad verification vendors did steady business helping buyers hold sellers accountable to viewability commitments rather than taking reported numbers on faith.
Programmatic television took its first real steps
Addressable and programmatic TV buying, long discussed as an inevitability, started showing up in real campaigns in 2016 as more cable providers and platforms opened inventory to automated, audience-based buying. It remained a small share of total TV spend that year, but it signaled where the format was heading and gave early-adopter brands a preview of what audience targeting could look like outside of digital display.
What tied the year together
Every one of these shifts, header bidding, mobile growth, native scaling, stricter viewability, early programmatic TV, pointed toward a maturing ecosystem where automation kept expanding into new formats while accountability tightened around the formats already in wide use. Advertisers who kept up with both halves of that, the new opportunities and the higher bar for verification, got more out of programmatic in 2016 than those chasing volume alone.
More from Paid Advertising, the 2016 archive or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
