Ask CI: What Is Programmatic Expansion?
Let’s level with each other: “programmatic” is a marketing buzzword that has been thrown around for the last decade, but even savvy marketers don’t always know how to define it. Simply put, programmatic advertising means buying/serving ads, across digital channels, based on behavioral data, as opposed to based on placement or context.
- Behavioral example: people who have a certain set of interests based on their browsing data, or people who have previously visited your organization’s website
- Contextual example: people reading an article about the arts, or people living in a certain set of zip codes
- Placement example: any reader on nytimes.com
Most of the marketing you may already be doing across channels like Google is, by definition, programmatic! And though it does not check the multi-channel box in the same way, marketing on social platforms like Meta is certainly behavioral. For many years, CI emphasized these channels as top priorities for arts organizations, since they were particularly cost-effective and had particularly wide reach. Our motto was (and is!), “Be where the eyeballs are.”
However! The digital landscape is always changing. Enter: what we have started calling “programmatic expansion.”
