We recently covered what RFPs coming up in Q4 look like — including top spenders and the biggest categories. But what about programmatic advertising spend?
To get an answer to that, we can turn to what programmatic ad spend looked like last year and ad tech developments from this past year.
Ahead of this year, eMarketly predicted that programmatic ad spending would reach nearly $60 billion in 2019, accounting for the majority of digital display advertising. A big part of that spending will come in Q4, with nearly all the biggest retail holidays (except for the relative newcomer Amazon Prime Day) coming up.
Last year, MediaRadar saw big programmatic spending in Q4. This year, we expect programmatic spending to be up even more. Spend on programmatic advertising is up over 20 percent in Q1-Q3 of this year compared to Q1-Q3 2018.
So where will most of the spending be? The biggest industries based on percent of total spend on programmatic ads are:
- Technology, with 17 percent of spend on programmatic ads
- Financial & Real Estate, with 15 percent of spend on programmatic ads
- Retailer/Wholesale, with 13 percent of spend on programmatic ads
- Media & Entertainment, with 13 percent of spend on programmatic ads
- Professional Services, with 8 percent of spend on programmatic ads
Finance comes in a close second, with some of the biggest companies putting a good portion of advertising dollars to programmatic. These include TD Ameritrade, American Express, Capital One and Schwab.
Companies putting the biggest share of their advertising budget to programmatic include:
There’s no question that programmatic advertising is growing, and the activity of some of the biggest companies further confirm this growth. Walmart, for example, bought multiple ad tech solutions in 2019 to support their growing eCommerce presence. The retail giant bought Polymorph, which should help them build out their own programmatic advertising capabilities.
