WPP bought programmatic buying agency Essence Digital

 

    WPP, the world’s largest advertising company by revenue, has recently acquired the “programmatic buying” agency Essence Digital. Essence Digital is one of the fastest-growing media agencies and the largest independent buyer of online advertising according to Financial Times. Its clients include many big names such as Google, HP, Viber etc. The agency is specialized in “programmatic ” buying, which refers to utilizing computer algorithm and big data to buy ad space, either in time or not, to reach target customers more precisely and efficiently, resulting in great improvement on ROI of marketing budget.

    Programmatic advertising is said to be the future of advertising. Magna Global, the internal strategic consulting group of IPG, estimates that nearly $21 billion will be spent on programmatic ad buying this year alone.  The traditional way of ad buying involves negotiation between sellers and agencies as well as agencies and clients. Now, with programmatic advertising, those “human” interactions can be replaced by computers and software, while achieving better results in terms of delivering the right message to the right place and right people.

    However, we should probably be more careful when using this robotic way of conducting marketing activities. More work should be done on audience segmentation and content should be crafted more carefully tailoring to different clusters of audience. 

Reference: 
http://www.business2community.com/marketing/how-to-incorporate-programmatic-marketing-into-your-marketing-strategy-01350285
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3cd7cc80-82e9-11e5-8095-ed1a37d1e096.htm