Working frameworks, plain-English glossaries and channel deep-dives for the people who plan and buy this stuff. Written by someone who buys media for a living.
Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of digital ad inventory through real-time auctions, using software platforms and audience data to match brands with audiences across websites, apps, video, audio, TV and out-of-home media.
/ This is the version you can put in a board paper.
It's online ads, with five middlemen between you and the impression, each charging rent. Computers buy from computers in 200 milliseconds while you nurse a flat white. Welcome to the future. It's mostly fine.
/ This is the version you can use over a beer.
You open a website. Somewhere on it, there's a slot waiting for an ad to fill it.
Multiple brands bid in real time, based on who you are and what their software thinks you're worth.
By the time you've blinked, all of this has happened. You scroll past it.
Most brands come to programmatic when Google and Meta stop being enough. The duopoly is easy, but it's a walled garden with a turnstile, and at some point you want to reach people beyond it, demand more from the spend, and still run the thing yourself.
Video is no longer the upstart line on the plan, it's where the growth lives. If you're still treating it as a top-up to display, the spend has quietly moved on without you.
Double-digit growth across the year and an even stronger March quarter says demand is real, not a bubble. The story isn't "boom", it's a market compounding while everyone argues about AI.
Digital audio doesn't make the keynote slides, yet it's growing faster than the rest of non-video display, led by podcasting. Underbought attention is usually the cheapest attention.
Display, video, CTV, audio, DOOH, native, retail media. What each is good for, what it costs, where the catch is.
Reading the Australian numbers. Market trends, opinion and the bits you cannot get from a textbook.
Longer pieces and the published press, in one place. The full back catalogue as it grows.
The plan is a proper guide across every part of programmatic. These are being written now, in no great hurry, and the right way.