When it comes to recruitment for your professional association or organization, you already know that purchasing digital ads is a key part of success within the process. What you likely also know is that negotiating with advertisers, finding the right placement for your ads, and monitoring markets can be not only a pain, but also a money and time waster. To combat this, many associations and organizations are now turning to programmatic advertising.

SEE ALSO: The Publisher’s Guide to Programmatic Advertising [Infographic]

What is Programmatic Advertising?

In a nutshell, programmatic advertising is ad buying on automation. Traditional ad buying strategies generally involve contacting an agency, discussing your needs, negotiating prices and ad locations, and then seeing if everything works out in the end. Using programmatic ad buying, you are removing the human component, and instead, you’re relying on digital systems to find locations and place ads for you. For example, if your association caters to electronic engineers, you could use programmatic advertising to have ads automatically placed in specific locations across the web that already have a high level of activity from electrical engineers. Basically, this is done without having to haggle over each ad placement.

Expanding Beyond a Single Channel

One of the greatest benefits of programmatic advertising is its ability to take your message across multiple channels. At its core, programmatic advertising relies on the gathering of user data. This is to say that a provider of programmatic advertising will know what websites an Internet user visits, what social media sites he or she frequents, what his or her interests are, what purchases he or she has made, and so on. Using this data, programmatic advertising can reach the right people through television, social media, mobile advertising, and more. Essentially, the idea is that marketing funnels can not only exist, but they can target users across a broad spectrum of media.

How to Use Programmatic Advertising Wisely

One of the biggest drawbacks to programmatic advertising is the reputation it has gained due to fraud. One key example is when an advertiser masks its true URL in order to lure in unsuspecting visitors. In some cases, the fraudulent advertiser may even pretend to be the original advertiser in order to scam people. This is easier to do using programmatic advertising because there isn’t any human review or intervention. As a result of such nefarious practices, programmatic advertising as a whole is kind of in flux at the moment.

Automating Your Advertising is Still Worth Investigating

Despite the potential negatives, programmatic advertising is still a great choice if you want to target specific potential association or organization members while reducing the hassle. It’s true that traditional ad buying has its place, but as the Internet continues to expand and dominate the recruiting environment, you’ll need to investigate every tool available in order to find the right fit.

To a large extent, programmatic advertising in the recruitment space is still in its infancy. Might ads that target you based on your digital footprint persuade you to engage more with a product or make you feel too much like you are being watched? Have you noticed any programmatic ads in your digital life? Are there any ads that seem to work better on a mobile phone vs a tablet vs a desktop?