A growing number of U.S. marketers are taking programmatic trading into their own hands, according to Casale Media‘s latest Index Quarterly Report on programmatic trading.
The report, released this week, shows the share of trading seats held by marketers more than doubled between 2012 and 2013.
Share of trading seats held by marketers, agencies and managed DSP services.
The growth seems to have come at the expense of managed services offered by networks and demand-side platforms, whose share shrank 18% in the same period.
That means fewer marketers are letting their DSPs do the trading for them, and are opting instead to use buying technology on a self-serve basis.
Although some media agencies are concerned that in-house trading could take digital dollars out of their hands, so far in-house growth has not led to a decline in agency trading. In fact the share of trading done by agency desks also grew year-over-year, suggesting that both agencies and marketers are turning away from managed services and doing more self-serve trading.
For brands, bringing trading in-house means greater data ownership, transparency and control — but it comes at a large resource cost, in technology, strategy development and talent. Casale’s data suggest that agencies have been able to offer an attractive counter-offer, by building their own trading desks and gaining expertise in programmatic buying, rather than outsourcing trading to DSPs.
Tax season spending bumps finance ahead of auto, telecom
The top 10 U.S. brands by programmatic spend
Casale’s Index Report ranks the top U.S. brands and sectors by how much they spend on RTB exchanges. Its Q1 2014 rankings show a significant uptick in finance and telecom spending, though retail remains by far the highest spending sector.
Finance spending shot up thanks to a massive tax-season investment by H&R Block. In Q4 the company did barely any trading and was largely off the radar. But in Q1, it became the seventh highest spender overall, and spent 40% more than the next-highest finance spender, Geico.
Telecom giant AT&T leapfrogged Target, Ford and Motorola to become the largest programmatic spender in the U.S. Verizon and Sprint are also in the top 10 spenders, a stark contrast with Canada, where no telecom companies appear on the list.
CPG brands also made significant gains, with Unilever, Nestle, Mars, Mondelez and Johnson & Johnson all breaking on to the top 25 list at some point in Q1. In the first half of 2013, no CPG had invested heavily enough to rank.
More small and local brands investing in programmatic
Together the top three sectors – retail, finance and telecom – accounted for more than half of all programmatic dollars spent in Q1.
However, spend was far less concentrated in the hands of big brands; the top 100 spenders accounted for 57% of all spend, down from 64% in Q1 2013. By comparison, in Canada in Q4 2013 the top 100 spenders accounted for 77% of all spend.
The share of U.S. spend coming from local businesses also grew, from 2% in Q1 2013 to 5% in Q1 2014.
The numbers suggest more spend is coming from a growing number of small and local businesses, who are either getting their feet wet in programmatic or bumping up their investment as they see results.
Casale Media’s data comes from all transactions taking place on exchanges that use the Casale Index Platform, which includes billions of impressions sold over the quarter. Casale has not yet released Canadian data for Q1 2014.
