Twenty-four per cent of respondents said targeting is the most important factor in campaign success, with creativity in second place at 18%. In total, 89% of professionals consider programmatic to be the future although only 42% have a specific programmatic strategy in place. A quarter of marketers haven’t even heard of programmatic.

Agencies are ahead in terms of programmatic with 79% of media buying agencies using it compared with 48% of publishers, 46% of ad agencies and only 22% of marketers. But the data collected through programmatic advertising can provide marketers with valuable information to evaluate and shape campaigns that can respond to consumers’ behaviour online.

The report, ‘Why and how programmatic is emerging as key to real-time marketing success’ is a joint report from ad tech company, AppNexus, WARC and IAB Europe. In total 600 respondents from agencies, publishers and marketing departments across Europe were questioned by Circle in April and May this year.