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In a market overflowing with digital content and endless ad options, standing out has never been harder. Brands are constantly vying for users’ attention, striving to deliver messages that are not only noticed but acted upon.
Catching up with competitors is a challenge for many digital communication companies, when overtaking them is a goal. As one of the bargaining chips might be an engaging ad, it should hit the mark and leave no chance for a mobile user to pass by.
What do brands have in common? This is the willingness to customize ads according to consumers’ wants, needs, or online behavior complemented with adding value to them in the shortest time span.
And here lies the strong suit of programmatic advertising and RTB as a means of purchasing ad inventory — the ability to instantly give a user a valid message, service, and product.
Let’s take a closer look at programmatic advertising vs RTB, comparing the full automated ad buying system with real-time bidding as a specific method within it.
Programmatic advertising stands for automatic buying of an online advertising space, as opposed to doing business directly with publishers. This advertising method is characterized by streamlined ad delivery and leveraging data-driven approaches to maximize an ad’s reach.
Digital advertising continues to grow at record speed, so brands are racing to capture user attention with timely, personalized messages. The global market is expanding rapidly, with forecasts projecting growth to over $2.75 trillion by 20301, driven by automation, AI-driven targeting, and advanced ad formats.
A wider reach for advertisers thanks to the support of various ad formats and channels, data-driven insights vital for the real-time ad campaign optimization or ensuring better ad relevance, and significant time savings via automating and structuring drawn-out negotiation and transaction processes form only a tiny part of what programmatic ad has to offer.
While its cornerstone is high quality data about the existing consumers and prospects, which paves the way to the efficient targeting scenarios, the concept also can’t do without the software to manage the ad buying and selling procedures and take care of the lightning-fast digital ad placement.
The primary software components commonly involved in the digital ad framework sound as follows:
Programmatic Ecosystem
Another pivotal aspect that still remains in the shadows is, “What are the possible ways to purchase advertising inventory?” Programmatic implicates several buying models, according to which advertisers can gain an ad placement. Let’s look at these options.
Oxagile’s AdTech team can help find the most optimal solution to speed up ad buying, selling, or your specific case.
The choice of a programmatic buying model usually comes down to how much control advertisers want over inventory, how pricing is handled, and how competitive the buying process is. Based on this, choose direct deals, restricted marketplaces, or open auctions which are among the options.
As is clear from the term, a deal is carried out on the basis of the direct agreement between an advertiser and a publisher. The transaction is considered programmatic, since it’s facilitated with an automated system.
Privileged parties, invite-only access to inventory, auctions with starting prices set in advance, first-class inventory offerings — this is all about the interaction between buyers and sellers within the deal.
As the name suggests, the bids are immediately placed by advertisers and the ads themselves are purchased throughout the automated auction. Whereas several buyers at once are free to compete in a tender for a single ad impression, the end user will see only the ad provided by the buyer with a whopping bid.
Step 1. It all starts with an advertiser who intends to make a bid. After their ad campaigns appear in a DSP and some ad spaces are available, a bid request goes to an ad exchange through an SSP.
Step 2. The ad exchange monitors ad spaces via the connection to SSPs.
Step 3. As soon as there are any ad impressions to purchase, the auction between different demand-side platforms begins.
Step 4. DSPs compete in a tender, bidding for the ad impression suggested.
Step 5. The winner is the DSP making the most impressive bid. After a successful bidder is chosen, their ad is shown to end users.
How RTB works
As mentioned previously, RTB advertising technology is among the most widely-spread methods to place and purchase advertising. If we start exploring the difference between programmatic and real-time bidding, these two terms relate to each other like an entire puzzle and its piece, which highlights that real-time bidding can’t go without programmatic.
And, on the flipside, marketers and publishers have a chance to use alternative scenarios for ad buying and selling accordingly, without being limited by RTB only. But why has real-time bidding received the well-deserved title of a popular bidding method among both parties?
Publishers vote for an RTB advertising strategy thanks to:
In the meantime, advertisers appreciate that they’re getting more control over their ad campaigns, including ad placement, more precise audience targeting, etc.
Equipped with ample AdTech expertise, Oxagile’s team took on the project of rebuilding the DSP architecture to achieve better scalability and performance, enabling an extended set of features, and adding some new from scratch. Our contribution drove the increase in the client base, as the reimagined system architecture and functionality favored the competitive advantage of our customer over other AdTech providers.
Programmatic ad buying vs RTB are no longer new, but building and maintaining platforms that handle them well is still a real challenge. Knowing how the buying models work and how all the ecosystem pieces connect makes it much easier to run reliable and scalable systems.
Oxagile works with companies to develop, improve and scale programmatic platforms and RTB systems. From architecture and data management to adding new features, we make sure your AdTech platform runs smoothly and stays ready for whatever comes next.
Let’s talk about building or improving a system that handles programmatic and RTB efficiently and reliably.
1. Programmatic Advertising Market (up to 2030) — Grand View Research
It implies building architectures that support both automated ad buying and real-time auction processes, ensuring high performance, reliability, and seamless integration with DSPs and SSPs.
Typically, it involves end-to-end systems that handle multiple buying models, allowing to scale campaigns efficiently and maintain precise audience targeting.
This can be achieved if you optimize bidding algorithms, integrate real-time user data streams, and enhance system responsiveness to maximize win rates and ad relevance for each impression.
For example, Oxagile’s team can deploy advanced RTB advertising technology, including dynamic auctions, low-latency processing pipelines, and personalized ad delivery, improving both platform performance and scalability.
