Financial marketers notably increased their investment in programmatic media during the third quarter, according to Casale Media’s Index Exchange.
Programmatic spending by financial and brands increased 53.2% over the previous quarter in Q3 2014, the company said Thursday in its quarterly programmatic spending report. Casale/Index Exchange was unable to provide YoY change in financial industry spending.
American Express, Citigroup and Progressive Group were among the top spenders on programmatic within the financial sector. Casale said the surge is related to programmatic dabblers – particularly Progressive – getting serious.
“Those who have been historically involved are now allocating more, in a more meaningful way. And their competitors are now all recognizing the potential and are following suit,” said Alex Gardner, VP of platform solutions at Index Exchange.
“Progressive has not historically been among the top financial spenders, but they’re now representing meaningful spend, not only within that specific sector but more broadly across sectors,” Gardner added. “Overall, there’s an increasing level of competition.”
The sequential increase was not limited to finance. Investment in automation increased across all verticals except business, which remained flat relative to Q2, with a notable uptick in spend from the financial sector.
Index Exchange tracks impressions traded across US exchanges. It looks at more than 100 billion impressions monthly across 50,000 advertiser brands, and uses indices to evaluate impressions won, the quantity of bids generated, price points, campaign stats, ad formats and ad sizes. Global and national brands represented 70% of the total market in Q3 2014 – rising 2% from the second quarter.
Gardner predicted that media sellers will be pleasantly surprised by the adoption of “programmatic direct” technologies.
“I think we’re going to see more spend allocated on a deal ID, or private basis,” he said. “Which is music to the ears of premium publishers everywhere. I think the true promise of programmatic was to bring buyer and seller close together, and ideally it creates a more transparent environment overall with fewer intermediaries, which isn’t a bad thing.”
But deal ID has been slow to catch on.
“I won’t pretend to suggest that deal ID has been an easy process, there have been a lot of hurdles,” Gardner acknowledged. “My hope is that people haven’t been off-put by that. I think we’ll eventually have evergreen deal IDs available for major buyers to streamline the process.”
