The following is an unabridged version of an editorial written by ExchangeWire CEO, Ciaran O'Kane, for the Advertising Week Europe newspaper.

Ad Week Europe, at its core, is a celebration of advertising - and the power of engagement. The creative is still king, and in the end it really is about the brand experience. That’s what advertising is about after all, experience.

Many of the C-level types attending this year’s event will likely immerse themselves in the content emanating from the array of star-studded panels that Ad Week are putting on. Most will probably eschew the ad technology-heavy discussions.

Technology and data just isn’t as sexy as ‘Stringer Bell’ speaking evocatively about his passion for music. Who really wants to get bogged down in the semantics of targeting and real-time execution of advertising campaigns across multi-screens?

Joining the dots between offline and online data just won’t compare with the quips that James Cordon will doubtless serve up during his panel discussion.

The Rise Of Programmatic

The reality for all C-levels attending this year’s event is that they should ditch the A-listers and instead spend some quality time with the ad tech fringe. Over the past four years a quiet revolution has been taking place in advertising.

The rise of programmatic has fundamentally changed the way media is bought and sold in digital advertising. Having started in traditional display, the leveraging of data and tech is making the fabled one-to-one experience with users a reality. Micro-targeting and real-time messaging is shifting money away from the traditional way media was bought and sold.

And now we are seeing programmatic move into other channels, including online video, mobile, DOOH and TV. Magna Global estimate that 80% of all digital ad buys will be done programmatically by 2017. The world that you knew is changing before your eyes.

What this means for advertising as whole is a new rethink. The creative remains critical but the targeting and delivery is now being powered by technology. It is now a world of platforms, APIs and Hadoop clusters. We are entering a new phase for advertising, where the data wonks and tech experts reign supreme. Why is this important? Well, because it allows advertisers do something they simply struggled to do in the past: it allows them to be right there with the user, defining what that experience should be in an intelligent way. A million times a second.

Agencies have already begun to address the change by building specialist units around data management and ad trading (the best example of this being the Agency Trading Desk). Publishers too have made some advancements - albeit at a slower pace. They are now starting to aggressively staff up with data analysts and yield specialists to help them build out their own programmatic proposition.

Advertising No Longer Just About Inspiration; It’s Now The Customer Relationship Experience

Over the past three years the concept of the ‘marketing cloud’ has been talked to death by the big enterprise players. Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, IBM and Adobe have all got marketing platform strategies. They see huge opportunity in helping marketers join up all their data sources, allowing them to execute against their goals by knitting together the likes of analytics, media execution and CRM functions.

These enterprise plays have been spending billions on an array of marketing/advertising technology companies over the past 24 months. Sure but what’s this got to do with advertising?

Digital advertising, still a huge area of growth for traditional advertising companies, has been preoccupied with pushing potential customers down the sales funnel as well as reselling to those exhibiting intent to buy.

With an interoperability between various data sources (CRM, email, cookie data) marketers now see advertising as a means to manage the customer relationship not just the hard sell. Managing and upselling to existing customers is now a reality for the marketer.

New ad technology solutions like the Data Management Platform can act as a hub to optimise the user experience across various channels. This is important to you, as it fundamentally changes one of the most important relationships in the industry, namely the one between the agency and marketer.

We are no longer just talking about the execution of media here. This is a more holistic approach around the use of data. The conversations will ultimately change too - particularly around the use of client data and ownership of technology.

The entire advertising world is about to go programmatic. Advertisers are now understanding the power of this as a means to either connect with potential users or manage existing customers.

While this week’s discussions might be a little more high-level and probably won’t go into any real depth, now is the time for you to engage with the new wave of vendors and specialists who will come to dominate this industry. Programmatic is eating the advertising world alive. As Stringer Bell would undoubtedly observe of the current reality, “True Dat’!