• MarTech Today
  • Sections
    • Advertising
    • Marketing
    • Content
    • Social
    • Commerce
    • Sales
    • Analytics
    • Management
    • All
    • Home
  • Follow Us
    • Follow
  • MarTech Today
  • Ads
  • Marketing
  • Content
  • Social
  • Sales
  • Analytics
  • Mgmt
  • More
  • Events
    • Follow
  • SUBSCRIBE

MarTech Today

MarTech Today

Customer Data Platforms

Why are they so hot now?

Podcasting's Rise

Creating new marketing opportunities

Events

Attend the MarTech conference

  • Advertising
  • Marketing
  • Content
  • Social
  • Commerce
  • Sales
  • Analytics
  • Management
  • All
  • Events
  • Newsletters
  • Home
Martech: Advertising

Subscribe to MarTech Today to receive news and insights of where marketing, technology, and management converge.

Note: By submitting this form, you agree to Third Door Media's terms. We respect your privacy.


AOL’s “Programmatic Upfront” — Still An Oxymoron

Rebecca Lieb on September 25, 2013 at 11:20 am
  • More

aol-logo-3Programmatic upfront? AOL’s much-ballyhooed event at New York’s Advertising Week was positioned to provoke.

Upfronts are ginormous, splashy, boozy, star-studded, A-list, steak, lobster and caviar TV blowouts for advertisers, not digital media buyers. It’s where broadcasters preview the next season’s programming. (And, as a Starcomm executive mentioned before AOL’s event kicked off, “We’ve always had an opportunity to see AOL’s premium inventory in advance.”)

Programmatic buying — real-time, automated bidding for ad inventory, is the opposite of carefully negotiated premium display advertising. So what’s a programmatic upfront? It’s still an oxymoron, and a lot of people left the AOL event scratching their heads.

What AOL really announced at an “upfront” that featured precisely one live celebrity (Nate Silver), a velvet rope and mini-skirted, high-heeled models checking agency and client-side guests into a midtown Manhattan venue was a sort of VIP buyers’ club.

Commitment = Right Of First Refusal On Premium Inventory

Beginning next year, the company will make reserved premium inventory (e.g., the Huffington Post, TechCrunch and StyleList home pages) available via its automated real-time buying system, the AdLearn Open Platform, to buyers who have committed multi-million-dollar investments upfront (hence “upfront”) — said to be in the $10M range, per Advertising Age.

So far, two brands and five agencies have signed on: Hyatt Hotels and Resorts, LG Home Appliances, Accuen, Amnet, Havas Media, Horizon Media and MagnaGlobal. DigitasLBi, Razorfish and VivaKi are thinking about it, according to AOL Networks CEO, Bob Lord.

AOL is clearly trying to decouple associations such as “remnant inventory” from “programmatic buying.” It’s looking for deeper and longer-term commitments for brand campaigns and is emphasizing the amount of planning that’s required for such initiatives, programmatic or otherwise.

Effectively, what AOL is offering is not an upfront, but rather a private, reserved marketplace where a group of high rollers get right of first refusal on premium inventory.

Substantial advance monetary commitments to premium ad inventory — not to mention the technology that powers it — are clearly advantageous to AOL. Simplifying the process of buying, placing, targeting, optimizing and re-targeting messaging across platforms and formats, including desktop, Web, mobile, apps, smartphones, tablet and rich media, clearly has advantages as well.

Do Media Buyers “Get It”?

What’s less clear is if AOL didn’t almost completely obfuscate this message in its buzz-building insistence to provocatively brand its event a “programmatic upfront.” Exit polls and post-event email exchanges indicated that there was little more understanding of what the term meant after the event than before it. “And we talked about it for days beforehand at the office,” said one strategist from Universal McCann.

AOL claims to be streamlining online ad buying, to be simplifying the process. “What would you do with more time?” asked banners, signs and projections at the New York event, implying that AOL’s promise is to deliver something newer, more streamlined and simpler.

We’ll take it! But please, call it something different. Because the morning after the event, people who had been there were still asking, “What the heck is a programmatic upfront?” In that one very important sense, AOL still can’t get out of its own way.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here.



About The Author

Rebecca Lieb
Rebecca Lieb has published more research on content marketing than anyone else in the field. As a strategic adviser, her clients range from start-up to non-profits to Fortune 100 brands and regulated industries. She's worked with brands including Facebook, Pinterest, The Home Depot, Nestlé, Anthem, Adobe, Honeywell, DuPont, Fidelity, Save the Children, and The Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Rebecca was until recently an analyst at Altimeter group, and earlier launched Econsultancy's U.S. operations. She was also VP and editor-in-chief of The ClickZ Network for over seven years, also running SearchEngineWatch.com. She's also held executive marketing positions with major global media companies. Rebecca has written three digital marketing books, the most recent is Content: The Atomic Particle of Marketing.

Popular Stories

Tappx teams with Pixalate for industry-first OTT fraud solution
Exclusive: IAB Europe to release updated consent framework later this year, Google to sign on
LinkedIn adds custom list sharing, Salesforce tie-in to Sales Navigator
Brightcove to buy video ad tech platform Ooyala for $15 million

Related Topics

Channel: Martech: AdvertisingDisplay Advertising & MartechProgrammatic Advertising & Media Buying

Subscribe to MarTech Today to receive news and insights of where marketing, technology, and management converge.

Note: By submitting this form, you agree to Third Door Media's terms. We respect your privacy.


We're listening.

Have something to say about this article? Share it with us on Facebook and Twitter.

Attend Our Conferences

Gain new strategies and insights at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management. Our next conference will be held:

April 3-5, 2019: San Jose

September 16-18, 2019: Boston



×

Attend MarTech - Click Here


Learn More About Our MarTech Events

White Papers

  • The Ultimate Guide to Site Search User Experience
  • The Marketing Analytics Buyer’s Guide 2019
  • Mission Possible: Quality Content Marketing
  • 2019 Marketing Trends: Nine factors reshaping marketing and how you can stay ahead of them
  • The Dummies Guide to Enterprise Customer Data Platforms
See More Whitepapers

Webinars

  • 2019 Martech Trends You Need To Know
  • How to Prepare for a Successful Marketing Analytics Implementation
  • Get More From Your Customer Data With Open Marketing Cloud: A Demo of Mautic’s Marketing Automation Platform
See More Webinars

Research Reports

  • B2B Marketing Automation Platforms
  • Account-Based Marketing Tools
  • Enterprise SEO Platforms
  • Call Analytics Platforms
  • Paid Media Campaign Management Platforms
  • Local Marketing Automation Tools
See More Research
Master these trends of martech
Sign up for our daily newsletter
Martech Today
Download the Martech Today app on iTunes
Download the Martech Today App on Google Play

Follow Us

Facebook Twitter

© 2019 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.