The first one is certainly the so-called "Walled Garden". These platforms, such as Google, Facebook or Amazon, which require an identifiant and a password to let you access their service. This is a real challenge for all media, which were initially very resistant to the idea of adopting a "Walled Garden" strategy.

Nevertheless, as data has become the true yardstick for the valuation of advertising space and audiences, they have finally decided to exploit this opportunity to get to know their customers better, by harvesting their usage habits, through the implementation of Paywall or Freewall. The second business opportunity offered by programmatic is linked to its evolution, which tends towards the restoration of a publisher-advertiser balance.

While publishers were initially slow to make the transition from 2nd price auctions to 1st price auctions, the transition accelerated last year, with 43% of programmatic ads sold at 1st price auctions. This transition has had a profound impact on the ability of agencies and advertisers to estimate market prices, and has resulted in 78% of publishers increasing their revenues.

In addition, header bidding, which for the past two years has taken over from the traditional cascade bidding system, by generating several calls in parallel, has increased competition on the buy side of advertising inventories. Thus, 88% of publishers have announced an increase in their revenues following its activation.

 "Programmatic advertising is a way to optimize advertising investments and purchases by targeting the right audience at the right time. Today we are experiencing a transition in this media scene and programmatic is a powerful tool to support this transformation. Traditional targeting criteria are outdated, we are really looking to understand the different profiles of consumers and understand their center of interest, hence the importance of programmatic." ZINEB ZILAF Marketing Director - L'Oréal

THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF DATA

As an advertiser, when you work with several Walled Gardens, how do you reconcile and aggregate all the data generated? It is in this context that agencies, for example, can intervene to accompany them in this process, or in any case, help them to better understand and better exploit these data sets. However, the current trend is towards advertising disintermediation, i.e. the fact that advertisers are taking back control of the various tools previously managed by their agency partners. Their objective is to get to know their users better, by having direct access to their data.

 The data that belongs to them, first, and is called first party data.

The data they can share with a partner, then. This is called second party data. And enfin, the third party data, which they can buy freely.

In order to aggregate, segment and activate these different types of data, there is a tool called DMP, for Data Management Platform. This tool is increasingly used by advertisers and allows them to collect all types of data, whether it comes from their users or from the entire Web. Equipped with such tools, advertisers are able to implement more relevant advertising targeting strategies, which raises the question of the role of the agency in the exploitation of the data.

THE HUMAN FACTOR

Technological innovation, particularly programmatic, has enabled several significant advances in the modernization of the advertising market. Nevertheless, recently, the latter has tended to neglect the human factor, to the profit of machines and algorithms.

Yet, it is indeed Man who is at the origin of creativity in any communication strategy. Even if new technologies can contribute, only the human mind is capable of imagining and developing the creative ideas that will conquer the targeted consumers.

Thus, the players who will succeed will not necessarily be the most powerful, but those who will know how to adapt, who will know how to invent new business models capable of taking advantage of new technologies as well as capitalizing on the human capacity to constantly innovate.