IAB Europe Attitudes to Programmatic Advertising Report 2020

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 sixth year, the study has become an industry benchmark to show how programmatic advertising attitudes, adoption and strategies are evolving.

The IAB Europe Attitudes to Programmatic Advertising Report 2020 attracted respondents who command significant volumes of advertising supply and demand. More than half of the respondents across advertisers, agencies and publishers manage annual advertising budgets of €1m or above.

The survey asked about 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

The 2020 IAB Europe Attitudes to Programmatic study highlights the following:

• Digital advertising budgets continue to increase, with programmatic once again benefitting from greater investment. The percentage of advertisers investing more than 41% of their display inventory via programmatic methods increased to 70% in 2020 from 55% in 2019.
• Video remains a key driver of programmatic investment amongst agencies; 54% of agencies now buy more than 41% of their video inventory programmatically compared to 50% in 2019.
• With the rise in advertiser investment in programmatic, ads.txt inventory purchasing is increasing, as is awareness. 52% of Publishers meanwhile said they were selling more than 81% of their ads.txt inventory.
• The trend of in-housing that the industry was talking about is now moving in the opposite direction as advertisers with an in-house model have decreased from 38% (2019) to 20% (2020)
• Now, the buy-side continues to evolve towards hybrid models. In 2019, 15% of advertisers stated that they had a hybrid model for programmatic trading. This has increased to 30% in 2020.

Download the report here - IAB Europe Attitudes to Programmatic Advertising Report 2020