Ahead of this year’s Ad Trader conference hosted in Berlin, Graham Moysey, AOL, head of international, tells publishers there that selling ads programmatically need not involve selling inventory at bargain basement prices.

The idea that ad buyers and sellers should have to choose between a programmatic or premium path is a false one. Simply put, these two are not opposites.

Programmatic means an automated way for buyers to bid for ad inventory. Premium is a term used to describe the quality of inventory or website content. In fact, a strategy that views programmatic and premium advertising as opposites is in our view unbalanced.

The real question that publishers and advertisers should be asking is this: what are the best ways to leverage programmatic opportunities within the context of a balanced and holistic advertising strategy?

For publishers, programmatic technologies offer new and unprecedented opportunities to capture demand well beyond the reach of an in-house sales team. They allow advertisers to put personally relevant ads in front of consumers in the right moments, based on real-time data.

Finding the right balance between programmatic and premium ultimately requires greater efficiency and simplicity in an automated landscape that has never been more bloated, confusing and complicated. With programmatic spend in the EMEA region expected to reach €15bn by 2017, at AOL our current estimates indicate between €8-11.3bn will be lost on the multitude of ad technologies sitting between the advertiser and the publisher. We call this a technology tax, where as much as 75% of a client's spend will be lost to mid-market feature-led companies.

Rececntly, AOL announced its plans for a new global programmatic advertising platform for brands, agencies and publishers. I believe One by AOL will streamline the digital advertising process and create an open and unified ecosystem that will make programmatic trading a valued option for advertisers and publishers alike.

Programmatic will no longer be something to be feared, but an essential component to any advertising strategy. At AOL, we believe in clearing a path through the programmatic jungle. But to get the most out of this new and rapidly evolving technology, it pays to stick to a few golden rules:

Do your homework

Take the time to understand what areas of your business are best suited to a programmatic approach. For publishers, this means knowing your inventory. Pages with lower eCPMs and Sell-Through Rates are naturals for programmatic. You can lower the cost of sales and create the opportunity for a third party bidder/ buyer to actually raise the price in an exchange environment – by merging site data with their own customer data to discover a value for their brand(s) they couldn’t see before. For advertisers, programmatic requires a comprehensive strategy that outlines clear objectives: the type of audience you want to reach, at what scale, and the performance required. The more you define what you want from programmatic – and how it fits within your overall strategy – the better you’ll be able to identify the best options that match your brand needs.

Automate strategically

If a publisher lists its entire advertising inventory on an exchange and gets poor results, that’s not a failure of the programmatic channel, that’s a failure of strategy. Publishers need to segment their audiences clearly – by demographics, lifestyle and online activity – and make the research and tracking data available to bidders. Automation is about creating greater efficiencies; it’s not about abdicating responsibility for your strategy.

Follow the data

To bid most effectively, buyers need to know how to use all the data that is made available to them. Programmatic platforms make all the audience research available to buyers, including such key factors as content (where, exactly, the ad is running) and context (such as how much time a viewer has been on the site when they see the ad). When buyers use it all, they can discover that seemingly commodity spots actually have a premium value for their purposes.

Maintain control

An ability to control the parameters of automated bidding is critical. Publishers need to be able to determine what information to share with buyers on a case-by-case basis. On the buy-side, where performance and content quality are critical factors, advertisers should also be able to set targeting parameters that protect their interests. As more controls are added, the mutual value to buying/selling inventory programmatically becomes more apparent, as buyers and sellers can more effectively reap the rewards while mitigating risk.

Advertising isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. For advertisers and publishers alike, a fully integrated strategy combines both programmatic and premium approaches. Programmatic tools, engaged intelligently, simply take the busy work out of routine buying and platforms like One will allow for better execution and ROI across the board. This frees up resources to focus on premium custom executions, which publishers can offer to marketing partners. It’s time we focused our collective energy not on which to choose, but rather on how to get the balance right, and a better programmatic environment will only make this easier.