Display Advertising started way back in the early 90s when the only ad unit was the 468x60 banner visible larger than 728x90s in 800x600 pixel Desktops. Over the years Display advertising has gone through major changes right from introduction of standard ad units like Leaderboard, Medium Rectangle, Sky Scrapers etc. to Masthead, full page, Interstitial etc. While display was changing it was continuously competing with the likes of Search & Email Marketing to live up to the expectations of Clicks & ROIs. Email marketing has not grown as much but still there are types of Businesses that want to be with it, whereas Search being a Pull-Marketing system strives to grow YoY.
The evolution of Display was greatly depended on the Advertisers who wanted to use digital as a branding option, for all others who wanted to use Digital as a result based advertising opportunity the bucks were spent on Search or Email which were able to meet advertiser’s requirements for CPA or ROI targets.
Websites increased, IPV6 was introduced as compared to IPV4 , New Ad Networks came up however in all this the Display Advertising eco-system was continuously facing the challenge of not being able to commit or assure CPA or ROI to its advertisers. The boom of eCommerce just added to the challenge, since these companies were ready to spend a lot but where bent towards capturing ROI for their campaigns. Ad Networks did try to provide CPC & CPA models but they were never very productive and actually increased the chances of Fraud clicks and conversion.
There was another challenge that I forgot to discuss till now and it was Geography. Whereas most Websites had presence across the globe they hardly had the bandwidth to expand Digital business globally, hence used to lose out on monetizing most of their non-local inventory unlike Search or email who had that covered better.
This is when Programmatic Advertising came into picture. The RTB eco-system opened the floodgates for the Display Advertising and since then there has been no looking back. Programmatic and Mobile advertising came into being simultaneously and hence the quick success of Mobile Display advertising. Had this not happened concurrently, the picture would be quite different. Why I say so is because if you will notice a lot of apps do not succeed in their country of origin hence it would have been really difficult for the developers to reach out to the users based out of other geographical locations as well as find local Advertisers. You can read about the success of Programmatic
here.
With Audience based targeting, options to target audience with similar behavior or target look alike audiences apart from wide range of targeting facilities available today Advertisers are able to calculate their CPA & ROIs with ease and these numbers are close to numbers as compared to search. Hence Display Advertising all of a sudden is seeing an upward surge and this will only continue to increase considering the fact that currently Programmatic is used to sell only Remnant and second level inventories and with multiple technologies being invented to optimize the revenue time is not far when Premium inventories will also be sold through RTB platforms.
Overall, I would say that Programmatic has helped the Display Advertising market evolve from the recession (I know the above image does not seem to indicate this however ask the Sales guy and they will vote in my favor) that it was facing because of its incapability to scale as was required.
