Programmatic marketing is automated bidding on advertising inventory in real time, for the opportunity to show an ad to a specific customer, in a specific context.

Programmatic is growing rapidly in importance across devices. Whilst originally programmatic was about coordinating media buys for desktop banner ads, it has quickly become a leading method of ad spending on mobile devices in the US market. New research from e-marketer shows how mobile programmatic ad spending has grown to account for 60.5% of total programmatic ad spend this year. This is predicted to increase to over three-quarters of total programmatic ad spending in just two years.

Programmatic ad spending on mobile has usually meant banner ads. However this too is changing. Programmatic video buys are becoming ever more common, which are growing extremely fast so that within two years they will make up 18% of programmatic ad spending, up from just 4% in 2014.