doxa.comunicación | nº 27, pp. 253-271 | 255

July-December of 2018

Pablo Garrido Pintado, Raquel Caerols Mateo and Juan Gabriel García Huertas

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

between users and brands. This created the breeding ground for the emergence of programmatic advertising, which arose as a consequence of the automation of buying/selling spaces using modern technology.

These circumstances compel advertising agencies and the media ‘to have professionals with the skills to create, transform and distribute information in different media, both traditional and digital’ (Álvarez-Flores, et al., 2017: 137). This increases the demand for professionals capable of working collaboratively and remotely, managing different social platforms, and also interpreting and managing large volumes of data.

The present work is based on the following hypothesis: ‘Programmatic buying entails a change in the roles and functions of the media agency. Its development will lead to the reconfigurationof the landscape of the sector, permitting the entry ofnew agents, and encouraging the emergence of new professional job profiles and the disappearance of others’.

Based on this premise, and in order to understand the programmatic advertising sector and its expansion in the future, we will study the evolution of display advertising from its beginnings, and conclude by describing the scope of automatic purchase of media and audiences. This phenomenon changes the parameters of the advertising ecosystem by modifying in particular the role and function of the digital media planner.

After presenting the current state of play, we will apply the appropriate research methodology to achieve the following objectives:

●Present a terminological consensus on the concept of programmatic advertising.

Understand the new professional roles that are emerging with the rise of the automated purchase of advertising space.

Study the coexistence of the digital media planner with the new professional roles that are required.

Present an assessmentof the future of the sector.

1.1. Evolution of display advertising

On October 27 1994, the history of advertising changed forever. Hotwired, the online version of Wired magazine, published the first banner, a small graphic in which an enigmatic text appeared: ‘Have you ever clicked your mouse right here?’ (Sánchez & De Frutos, 2007: 160). The piece – which advertised AT&T technology – was new and intriguing, and enticed 44% of those who saw it to click on it (King, 2012: 122). Hotwired, which had no idea of the amount of traffic that could be attracted, nor had any socio-demographic data regarding its audience, charged $30,000 for 3 months of publication. Surprisingly, it quickly received requests from other advertisers such as MCI, Volvo and Sprint (Medoff& Kaye, 2016: 72).

Craig Kanarick, one of the digital consultants hired to work on the campaign, recalls that the team’s goal was to make an announcement that did not feel like an advertisement (Cook, 2016) and that genuinely offered users valuable content. ‘Let’s not sell somebody something,’ he recalled thinking, ‘Let’s reward them for clicking on this thing brought to you by AT&T.’

As Boone, Secci and Gallant (2010) note, advertising spaces were sold based on cost per thousand impressions (CPM) from the time that the first banner appeared until the end of the 1990s. This was not a new purchase method, given that