Programmatic has been an industry buzzword for a few years, but now that it is reaching traditional industries, it's important to understand how it works given the role it will play in advertising's future.
For radio, things are night and day with the introduction of programmatic buying. SpotPlan is the only programmatic platform for radio, allowing you to streamline your planning and buying processes. By eliminating the inefficiencies in the traditional processes, advertisers can now bring more targeted radio campaigns to market faster and more cost effectively.
Planning
Workflows: Gone are the days of traditional RFP workflows, radio buying today is self-service thanks to cloud-based technology.
Transparency: Lack of visibility into available inventory was the norm, but today you can access live avails and pricing.
Targeting: Traditional targeting parameters were limited to dayparts, stations, and traditional demographics, today you can still use traditional targeting parameters as well as new psychographic and interest based targeting.
Duration: This one is a pretty big deal because what used to take weeks can now be done in a few minutes!
Buying
Process: The days of building and submitting RFP's are no more; today, buyers have exclusive access to the industry's largest marketplaces — iHeartMedia and Expressway from Katz.
Revisions: Manual revisions are tedious due to the offline back-and-forth, but now you can experiment with "what-if" scenarios and share the plan when you're happy with it.
Reserving: Buyers have always been able to reserve plans but now you have the power to book them too, guaranteeing the pricing and inventory.
Reporting
Timing: We're all familiar with waiting 60-90 days post air-date for discrepancy reports, but those results are now available in real-time.
Make-goods: You no longer have to manually schedule make-goods months after a campaign airs because we have completely automated the make-goods process.
Invoicing: Much like discrepancy reports, invoices can be delayed by months but programmatic buying accelerate this process.
The importance of programmatic radio is growing quickly so we decided to create a resource for marketers. The Marketer's Guide to Programmatic Radio talks about the audio boom, covers programmatic buying benefits for different personas, and dives into the importance of analytics and targeting.
