Digital Trading: Why creativity and automation are a perfect match

• 250 per cent increase in programmatic spend across Europe in 2014
• 650 per cent increase in spending for brand solutions (rich media formats) in 2014
• Q4 2014 programmatic ad spend: 72.62 per cent on desktop, 14.22 per cent on mobile inventory and 13.16 per cent on tablet

It seems brand marketers desire premium inventory to justify high quality creative – and why shouldn’t they? New services, such as HTML5 and responsive formats, let marketers create-once-and-deliver-everywhere.

But is all this spending on brand solutions and premium inventory delivering real results for brand marketers? Well, let’s take a look.

• 59 per cent increase in CTR across Europe in 2014. A large part of that growth was fueled by brand solutions (CTR for brand formats are 209 per cent higher than for standard formats)

Though brand solutions cost a lot more, the CPC for these premium brand formats is 13 per cent lower than the CPC for standard formats. In a very real way, brand formats are 13 per cent per cent more cost efficient than traditional banner ads.

But in terms of brand performance, the real test is engagement. How often do consumers engage with brand messages? And for how long? On that front, we continue to see excellent news:

• Average engagement rate reached 3.04 per cent in the UK
• Average engagement time reached an impressive 13.93 minutes in the UK

There’s no doubt that across Europe, programmatic branding has continued to prove its strength, and brand marketers are quickly embracing this channel to help them achieve their brand objectives. Marketers are getting increasingly sophisticated when it comes to programmatic and are realizing the real-time value of premium programmatic brand advertising.

Check out adform.com where you can find our blog, various product one pagers, creative case studies, loads of resources including white papers and a lot more.

Martin Stockfleth Larsen is chief marketing officer at Adform