IAB Europe Attitudes to Programmatic Advertising 2021 Report

In order to understand the status of programmatic adoption across Europe on both the buy-side and sell-side of the digital advertising industry, IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee developed the Attitudes to Programmatic Advertising survey in 2015. Now in its seventh year, the study has become an industry benchmark to show how programmatic advertising attitudes, adoption and strategies are evolving.

The survey attracted respondents who command significant volumes of advertising supply and demand. More than three quarters of the respondents across advertisers, agencies and publishers manage annual advertising budgets of €1m or above.

The survey dives into the following areas:

• How much programmatic is used for different formats (display, mobile and video)
• Drivers and barriers to programmatic investment
• Operational models used for programmatic
• Measurement and data strategy
• The future of programmatic investment

Download the report below to discover the following highlights and more:

• Despite a global pandemic, programmatic advertising investments have remained fairly stable and in fact some growth has occurred in programmatic video.
• In terms of investment in other formats, connected TV is the forerunner; 19% of advertiser respondents allocated between 21-40% of their programmatic trading budget into CTV in 2021.
• In-housing is a key trend again after seeing some decline in 2020; in 2021 50% of advertisers stated they have an in-house model for programmatic trading compared to 20% in 2020. This was 68% for agencies compared to 50% in 2020.
• Supply chain transparency is now less of a concern to the buy-side but brand safety has made its way to the forefront again with 42% of advertisers citing it as a barrier to programmatic investment.

Thank you to the following members that helped to compile the report:

• Gilles Giudicelli, Head of Research, Insights and Marketing Analytics, Criteo and Vice-Chair, IAB Europe Research Committee
• David Goddard, VP, Business Development,, DoubleVerify
• Akshay Bhattacharjee, Senior Programmatic Solutions Specialist, Integral Ad Science
• Lisa Kalyuzhny, RVP Advertiser Solutions EMEA, PubMatic
• Maria Shcheglakova, EMEA Marketing Director, PubMatic
• Umair Malik, Head of Smaato Programmatic Strategy, Smaato
• Anita Caras, Research Director for EMEA, Yahoo!
• Zuzanna Zarebinska, Junior Strategy Analyst, Yieldbird