Reaching consumers across multiple channels via a single campaign has long been the ultimate objective for digital marketers and they've been increasingly looking at RTB as the most efficient method to do so. For example, the capabilities around audience buying and creative optimisation are a natural fit for video advertising.

Although it is difficult to predict how the competitive landscape for the RTB market will evolve over the next few months, the entry cost from a technological perspective is lowering and differentiation has become essential. While display still accounts for the bulk of RTB dollars, major players operating in this space have started to capitalise on this trend by developing cohesive multichannel solutions.

Ajay Sravanapudi, Founder & CEO at LucidMedia (DSP), emphasises this trend:

We'll soon start to see RTB display dollars become 'integrated digital dollars', with campaign spend migrating across display, video, mobile and social. As RTB platforms further build their multichannel

access, analytics and optimisation pipes, proof-of-cross-channel-concept will further emerge, enticing marketers to focus on reaching their right audience and goals, no matter where the digital consumer is.

One of the most significant benefits of real-time bidding is the ability to precisely identify and target desired audiences and behaviour directly, on a one-to-one basis (as opposed to the more traditional approach which relied on packaged impressions). When this is coupled with intelligence attribution models and analytics, it can guide a marketer’s strategy not only at the campaign level, but also across their overall digital media efforts.

This is where data management platforms or DMPs (such as Demdex, Red Aril and Krux) come in. The ability to go beyond basic segmentation, integrating multiple data sets such as CRM, social signals or transactional data and extending audiences via lookalike modelling, are just some of the benefits of DMPs that appeal to advertisers. Sophisticated DMPs –...(Read more)