Clients are increasingly grasping the idea that programmatic is not just an item on a media plan, but a technology that can give them a consumer-centric view of the world, says MediaMath’s Dave Reed.

Reed, the programmatic specialist’s managing director EMEA, was speaking to M&M Global at last month’s DMEXCO event.

MediaMath’s MD EMEA Dave Reed talks to M&M Global about the biggest trends in programmatic, and what the future holds for media owners.

From a client perspective, Reed is seeing a “big movement to more efficiently using first-party data – CRM, on-side data, purchase data from offline events and data taken from partnerships; whether those be FMCGs working with retailers or travel companies working with related travel companies”.

“That level of data is super interesting and I think exciting from a data-driven standpoint,” he says.

“What we’re seeing clients moving towards is, rather than viewing programmatic as a line item on the media plan, they’re starting to think of programmatic in the first way, which is a very consumer-centric way of seeing the world where it doesn’t matter exactly what the channel is, what the activation mode is – you’re having a conversation across channels with a client. And that’s exciting.”

But where does that mean programmatic is heading? While Reed says that MediaMath got some good press out of being one of the first groups doing programmatic print, and the agency is doing programmatic out-of-home, he stresses “those are obviously smaller compared to other channels right now”.

“But I think if you said at a high level, the proposition is ‘will things get more automated, or more manual?’, automated usually wins.”

“The end advertisers are starting to understand: ‘Hey, this is something interesting that has real business value and drive real meaningful outcomes’.”

But it is not just pure clients that can benefit from the programmatic explosion. Publishers and those that bridge the retailer-publisher gap can too. While major players such as Amazon, eBay or Rakuten run “very successful data-driven marketing operations”, Reed expects to see greater numbers of smaller publishers and retailers embrace more innovation.

“I think there’s a whole set of other publishers or traditional retailers or other folks that are going to start finding these other business models that aren’t just monetising necessarily their data with other people, but doing it in co-op models, doing it in models with partners, with people they consider to be part of their extended ecosystem. It’s driving some interesting M&A developments that I think will continue.”