Programmatic Media and its Indian journey !!

The Indian advertising market has been growing steadily. Although the pandemic has been a deterrent, digital ad buying or programmatic buying has had stellar growth. When the whole country was locked in inside homes, programmatic ads helped companies to reach out to customers. Moreover, programmatic ads help brands to target their potential customers at a greater scale. It has also been a blessing for advertisers since programmatic buying streamlines the media buying procedure.

Programmatic buying market in India:

Programmatic buying started its journey in India in 2014. Since then, India has increased its share of digital display ad buying three-fold, totaling around 25% of the ad spending in digital ads in 2019. By the end of the year, the digital ad market stood at a revenue of 1.93 billion US dollars.

Market analysts suggest that the expenditure of digital ad buying will increase at an annual compound rate of 27.42%, reaching $8.25 billion by 2025.

Needless to say, digital advertising has taken the lead in the Indian advertising space. 80% of Indian advertisers have reported increased reach and brand efficacy with programmatic media buying. According to a Statista report, programmatic media buying comprised 41% of the total expenditure on digital advertising in India. This number will increase up to 74% by the end of 2022. Therefore, the ad impressions created by programmatic media will create giant ripples in the Indian advertising industry in the next two years.

Among all the ad formats, the video format is the most popular one. People engage more with in-app videos and vertical videos, especially in social media apps. In addition, India ranks fourth in the list of global video consumption. All of these have gradually led to the increase in investments in the video ad format, mostly in social media platforms. Inspired by the trends in video consumption, Indian advertisers made the biggest global expenditure on programmatic media buying in 2020.

Furthermore, mobile ads have also been successful in programmatic advertising. The year 2020 saw a 41% growth in mobile device advertising, taking its share to 52% in the digital advertising market. However, there are a few roadblocks in programmatic advertising in India.

Market Anomalies:

• India is yet to fully understand and utilize programmatic advertising to its fullest advantage.
• A survey shows that only 2 out of 3 advertisers possess the basic functioning knowledge of programmatic buying.
• Even though programmatic advertising is expanding in India, it has to battle with a few obstacles like ad fraud, visibility issues, privacy issues in data and the absence of a common measurement system of digital ads.

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