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 2021 IAB Europe Attitudes to Programmatic Advertising study 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 2021 Attitudes to Programmatic study highlights the following key trends:

• Despite a global pandemic, programmatic advertising investments have remained fairly stable and in fact some growth has occurred in programmatic video.
• There is an increase in the adoption of industry standards such as App ads.txt, Sellers.json, Buyers.json, Supply Path Object, Demand Path Object, among both agencies and advertisers.
• 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. We have included a more detailed CTV section in this year’s report to explore this trend further.
• 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. This is mainly driven by the desire for increased control of operations, first party data management and greater transparency on where campaigns run.
• There hasn’t been a change at the top of the league table when looking at key drivers for programmatic investment in 2021. Most buy and sell-side decision-makers cited better use of data to be the main accelerator for programmatic investments in 2021. Additionally, half of advertisers are investing in programmatic to access premium inventory at scale.
• In 2020, the top barrier amongst advertisers to investing in programmatic advertising was supply chain transparency with 60% citing this. Interestingly, in 2021 this dropped by more than 50% to just 25% of advertisers suggesting that the industry is making significant paths to enhancing transparency on the buy-side.
• In terms of data and measurement, consent management platforms have grown in usage for all stakeholders except agencies highlighting an opportunity for further education/transparency amongst this group.
• There’s a consistency in success metrics: three quarters of agencies use the same measures of success regardless of whether they are trading programmatically or non-programmatically with the key ones being sales KPIs and brand awareness.
• The use of first-party data continues to grow with more than 90% of all stakeholders currently using first-party data.
• The outlook for programmatic is positive with more than 80% of all stakeholders predicting an increase in their programmatic investments / revenues over the next 12 months.