Programmatic Premium Advertising? What The Heck? by Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book, March 12, 2014 Performance marketing has long been a great testing ground for new marketing approaches and with the advent of mobile, we are seeing that kind of innovation coming back into the industry. There are so many ways to find cost-effective, quality traffic, and just as many ways to convert that traffic into revenues. A phrase in an interview on AdExchanger caught my eye today, “programmatic premium advertising”: “The problem with the RTB environment is that it’s a lower funnel, exchange inventory where everyone is bidding on the same inventory and it maxes out at about $1. When you look at the RTB environment, it isn’t a premium environment. I’m hoping that changes, but when you look at it, it’s mostly long-tail no-name sites. There’s no accountability and no confidence by large brand advertisers that their goals are going to be met. What we’re looking at is programmatic premium, which creates a frictionless way for brands or the agency to buy inventory a la carte. How do you define programmatic premium? What we call programmatic premium means the rate card is established. So people know what the price of the inventory is.” Much more in the AdExchanger interview with Kargo CEO, Harry Kargman, here. Filed under: Mobile Marketing, Revenue Tagged under: Ad networks, Advertising, Industry Trends, programmatic About the Author Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book Chris Trayhorn is the Chairman of the Performance Marketing Industry Blue Ribbon Panel and the CEO of mThink.com, a leading online and content marketing agency. He has founded four successful marketing companies in London and San Francisco in the last 15 years, and is currently the founder and publisher of Revenue+Performance magazine, the magazine of the performance marketing industry since 2002.