COLOGNE — Programmatic ad-trading technology has been used to automate and refine the process of buying and selling online display ads. Now it is also making in-roads to online video. Next, many hope it will similarly revolutionise TV advertising.

But is programmatic automation really all it’s cracked up to be?

“When people talk about programmatic and they reference automation, the irony is it’s actually far more manual and far more inefficient, and, on a cost-per-dollar standpoint, more costly, than a traditional linear TV transaction,” says James Rooke, marketplaces GM of the programmatic video ad-tech platform FreeWheel.

But Rooke does see a glowing future in which advertisers can benefit from greater programmatic video efficiency, if they focus on their business models.

“There’s an opportunity to reduce the number of back-and-forth conversations that go on between the buy and the sell side, automate the RFP process … and, through API connections, be able to go from the pitch-to-paid process, with less hand-offs, less emails, less conversations,” Rooke says.

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.