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Having already overtaken the majority of digital ad spend, programmatic buying continues its rapid rise.

In the US, programmatic already accounts for over two-thirds of all display media. Magna Global forecasts programmatic-driven ad spend in 2015 to hit $20.5 Bn worldwide. Growth for years ahead is projected to remain steady.

To deliver the right message to the right audience, advertisers and agencies have put about 30% of their programmatic spend, $6 Bn, into targeting technologies like DSPs and DMPs.

And yet despite spending billions, the promise of delivering the right message still hasn’t been realized.

Research by AppNexus shows that 97% of programmatic campaigns lack a targeted creative for each audience segment. That means the vast majority of programmatic campaigns use generalized or generic creatives, a factor that has lead to heavy concerns from marketers about driving ROI from big data.

It’s not all wasted data, however. Many companies have figured out how to make creative work in the programmatic era, and they are reaping the rewards:

• RocketFuel conducted an extensive analysis that shows simple creative optimizations can routinely lead to performance impacts of 30-160%

• Yahoo demonstrated that personalized creative significantly outperforms generalized creative at a margin of being 54% more engaging and 45% more memorable

• A comScore report from 2010 found that quality creative contributed 4X as much sales lift as a quality media plan

• Anagram, a programmatic specialty agency, has been able to routinely beat DoubleClick benchmarks by 2X by combining tailored creative with programmatic media

Technology created incredible efficiencies for programmatic buying, but that has exposed billions of dollars of inactive data. Now technology is stepping up to make that data meaningful via the creative, by streamlining multi-format ad production, brand storytelling at scale, and making true message optimization a reality.

The technologies that are solving the six billion dollar creative problem have been aptly dubbed programmatic creative.

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This article is the introductory chapter from the ebook The Essential Guide to Programmatic Creative Technologies. Download your free copy of the book to continue reading.