The mobile Internet booms in Germany, both in terms of users and traffic. Even shopping on a smart phone is becoming more popular. At the same time, programmatic advertising has established itself as a fixed value, at least in online media business. As a consequence of both developments, mobile programmatic would therefore have to be a big hit. But the advertising volumes in this segment – beyond the silos of Facebook and Google – do not grow to the extent which one would expect. Why is it that mobile programmatic advertising does not yet use its full potential in Germany?

When we talk about mobile advertising today, we mean primarily in-app advertising with formats such as banners and video ads, all the way to full-screen interstitials. Three out of four advertising dollars are presently spent with apps. Apart from the fact that there are significantly different and fewer web formats in apps than on the desktop and the use of data on Apple devices is made difficult by the lack of cookie acceptance, in terms of programmatic possibilities, the mobile web works in a very similar wayto the web that we access on the desktop computer.

German marketers have overslept the topic

And indeed, mobile apps have already experienced a boost through programmatic advertising: before the era of DSP and SSP, coverage could only be booked via aggregators. A third-party control via the agency’s or client’s ad server was not possible. Due to the advertising ID from apps today, a very stable identifier is available which permits a longer-lasting profiling than a browser cookie. Via programmatic advertising, an advertising client can control his campaign, targeting these profiles for the first time in an app-encompassing way.

And there is another important advantage: data providers make data available that permit new and effective campaign approaches, especially in the area of hyper-local targeting – to address potential customers in close proximity, directly and accurately.

So why the hesitation? German marketers of quality apps have slept through the topic of programmatic advertising. They are only slowly making their coverages for in-app advertising reasonably programmatically usable – because this includes more than simply adjusting the app to the supply-side platform. This carelessness means that large parts of the programmatically available offer of mobile advertising in Germany still consists of opaque ranges of international marketplaces.

Not the technology, but the advertising formats are the obstacle

And in the “Global Exchanges” there are considerable deficits concerning transparency and technical control. The consequence: AdFraud – traffic which is generated, not by human users, but by so-called bots – is a significant problem for mobile in-app advertising, both in terms of reach and data, and thus represents an obstacle to growth for the industry as a whole.

With the extensive possibilities of programmatic advertising, mobile advertising also becomes easier to book and to control in a targeted fashion. But programmatic, too, cannot solve a central problem which advertising on smart phones generally still has: there is still the lack of large-scale, attractive advertising formats which are indeed eye-catching, but still do not annoy the users. If we can cope better with this challenge, the boom will be yet to come for mobile advertising.

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