AOL’s Lord: 2014 Is All About ‘Programmatic 2.0’

AOL’s advertising chief says advertisers’ understanding of so-called “programmatic” technology improved at the tail end of 2013 – now the year ahead is about offering them the range of its benefits at integrated scale.

“There’s been a lot of great progress in the last three to four months since the programmatic upfront of people understanding the definition of ‘programmatic’,” AOL Networks CEO Bob Lord tells Beet.TV. “There was a bit of misnomer that programmatic equalled real-time bidding – in reality, programmatic is about automation.”

After acquiring the programmatic video platform Adap.TV, Lord says AOL will first look to integrate each other’s data layer, then their user interfaces.

“What we’re going to be doing in 2014 is a lot of betas and experiments in connected TV, the iTV environment as well as in the linear TV environment to see how we can insert advertising in linear TV effectively,” Lord continues.

“It’s a year of experimentation to build out what i’m calling the programmatic 2.0 platform – which is the integration across display, mobile and video – and bringing it through one console to the media planner.”

Adap.tv will be presenting a summit on programmatic video advertising  January 15 and Beet.TV will cover.