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Programmatic

School House to In-House: Knowledge is Fueling the Programmatic Shift

By Matt Nally | Vice President, Americas

November 27, 2014 | 4 min read

There’s been plenty of commentary on the shift toward in-house programmatic, detailing the hows and whys of the phenomenon. However, one aspect that’s been omitted from the discussion is the real catalyst driving this change – knowledge. A combination of the pursuit of knowledge along with the acquisition of said knowledge has provoked advertisers to take their media operations in-house and out of agency.

Matt Nally, VP Americas, Yieldr

Weaning off the teat of Agencies

For a long time, agencies stood as the privileged minority within the ad-tech industry because of their inherent knowledge. This can be likened to the reign of the Holy Roman Empire when clergymen stood as the gateway to knowledge because of their privileged ability to read and their access to literature. As they educated the masses, their words quite literally became gospel because the illiterate general population simply had no other means of gaining information. They abused this position to manipulate the masses and ensure they stayed in control. Eventually, knowledge became available to the masses and the Empire gradually lost power as the general population began to educate and think for themselves.

A similar modern day metamorphosis is occurring in the ad-tech world. Advertisers are becoming more educated on digital marketing, and are therefore demanding more insights and transparency from agencies. This new found shift in knowledge is causing agencies to lose a stranglehold on an industry where they used to reign supreme.

Learning Experientially

A number of advertisers are already seeing this fight for transparency as a lost cause and are instead taking their programmatic in house, as the best way to gain insights and more knowledge is experientially through doing it themselves. This not only shifts knowledge from agencies to advertisers, but also control. By going in house, advertisers are keeping the wraps on sensitive first-party data instead of what comes down to paying for agencies – who could do a number of things with it behind their opaque walls – to seize control of it.

Through their first-hand learnings, advertisers are now putting themselves in a position of privilege. They’re putting themselves in the 99th percentile of programmatic knowledge, which not only sets them up for success in the digital marketing world, but puts them light years ahead of competition from their respective industry. The old adage of “learning by doing” certainly applies here.

Making the Leap

There is one obstacle, however. Some advertisers would love to go in house and have the knowledge of all the benefits of doing so, but simply don’t have the ability to because of talent restraints and a lack of a clear implementation strategy.

Fortunately, there are initiatives popping up to fuel the revolution, one of which is Yieldr Academy. The programmatic-marketing platform has launched its own academy, which provides advertisers with the support needed to go in house through the training and education of their marketing talent.

The prior status quo of ignorance is being challenged by knowledge-hungry advertisers. They have wet their appetites and understand that going in house is the way forward. As Peter Drucker quipped, “today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.”

Matt Nally is vice president, Americas for programmatic marketing platform, Yieldr.

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