• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, November 19, 2014

For years now, the digital ad industry has claimed that programmatic ad technologies would be applied to more “premium” ad buys; that programmatic would graduate from the real-time bidding (RTB) of remnant inventory and move on to bigger and better things.

This shift seems to be occurring, and it is now fully reflected in projections of the future.

From GroupM’s decision to pull out of open ad exchanges to Procter & Gamble’s desire to buy 70 to 75% of its U.S. digital media programmatically by the end of 2015, to what looks like a private future of programmatic, the back half of 2014 has been littered with headlines that share a common thread: programmatic is moving up the chain.

Included in this “flight to quality,” as I like to call it, was this week’s news of Rubicon Project acquiring two programmatic direct ad platforms, which helps marketers mix the worlds of automated and direct trading.

A new forecast from Research and Markets predicts the global RTB market will grow at a CAGR of 41.18% from 2014-2018. In an executive summary, Research and Markets highlights the trend of blending automation with direct sales tactics.

"One of the major emerging trends in this market is the increasing demand for RTB-based direct ad sales,” stated an analyst from Research and Markets in the executive summary. “Factors such as publisher control of inventory and flexibility in pricing for advertisers are expected to help direct ad sales gain a larger share of the market during the forecast period of 2015-2019." 

The Research and Marketers global RTB market 2015-2019 report can be found here.