Monday, July 11, 2016

It's Neither Programmatic Nor Print

Can you really sell print ads
without the use of alcohol?
Programmatic print, which is mostly still a concept, involves selling advertising for printed magazines in the automated, highly targeted manner of many web ads.

Programmatic print ads would be delivered to a reader not based on the magazine she reads but on her specific interests and apparent intent to buy certain products or services. It would require sophisticated customization of copies that is way beyond the current capabilities of most publishers and publication printers.

As currently envisioned, programmatic print wouldn’t be truly programmatic because the interval from purchase to delivery would take days instead of seconds, page-load times would not be slowed to a crawl, and most of the revenue would actually go to publishers instead of to a dizzying array of ad-tech intermediaries.

And it wouldn’t be truly print advertising because there would be no guaranteed competitive separations, no “value adds,” and no three-martini lunches.


Dead Tree Edition is celebrating July with a 31-part Publishing Word of the Day series, which includes new definitions for such familiar words as virtual reality and gravitas. For a more thorough discussion of programmatic print, see The Perils and Promise of Programmatic Print.

1 comment:

Bas said...

Programmatic, as defined in the digital advertising industry, is difficult to apply to the print industry for obvious reasons. But automating the sales process and connecting print to the digital advertising marketplace is a good step in the right direction. The challenge is to digitalize a 300 year old trading principle and persuading the print industry to adopt it.

Adoptiq.com is probably the only print advertising platform that managed to do so.