Last week an ISBA survey laid out just some of the concerns brands have about programmatic advertising, with a survey showing that only one-third of advertisers have a positive perception of real-time media trading, indicating the extent of concerns about the ad tech sector among brands.

ExchangeWire caught up with Ron Amran, Heineken, senior media director, USA, to get his take on the sector ahead of his participation on a panel session about brands and programmatic at this year’s Cannes Lions event.

How do you anticipate the growth of programmatic media-buying will develop?

As fast as programmatic has grown over the last 18 months, I think we’re going to see a pivot, and that it will grow twice as fast in the next 18 months.

So what is Heineken’s take on buying media using programmatic channels?

What we’re finding is that when you can stack technology and stack data, with the scaling of quality inventory, as well as improvements in transparency, what you find is that it’s a very effective way to not only buy media at scale, but really learn what’s effective, and optimise media-buying overall.

What used to be about direct marketing, is now becoming a scaleable, real-time, brand building media play, as well as learning platform.

As the wall between digital and traditional media comes down, what we’re getting a site of is that the future is programmatic, as that’s going to enable holistic video-buying across all screens.

Presently, most media-buying is done on a silted basis. But from a brand perspective, the more you can look at things on holistic basis, then the less you have to think about let’s do a bit of this, and a bit of that, then you can start to actually think about more of how you can engage with the consumer.

So then you can start to concentrate on things like, which media resonates better, and then all of a sudden you ca buy more impactfully [sic].

How do you sell the idea of programmatic media trading internally at a huge brand like Heineken?

It’s not one big step, you take one small step here, and another there, and next thing you know you’re 15 steps into programmatic [media trading]. It starts with different paths. For instance, social media, whether you like it or not, is programmatic.

The question is, how do you get there. You can have your agency do things, or bring on board a PMD partner to help [in-house], and then when you start peeling the onion, and getting closer to the data, you see that the results get better.

For us, the people who we ant to traditionally target are young men, and the most relevant way to target them is programmatic. We’re now trying t scale that out to hit as many demographic people that we want to hit.

What do brands think of the ever-changing myriad of tech vendors out there in this space?

Well, you get a lot of coma pines out there that used to be seeding and digital video networks, but now you find them more-and-more merging with the ad tech industry, so they perform both types of services. SpotXchange is an example of that. TubeMogul is an example of a company that’s going the other way, they were an ad tech company that’s going into the media side.

As the lines blur, they are all starting to work together to some extent or other to scale the inventory; and what you want from them is that they make the technology more transparent, plus more customisable to a brand’s needs.

As ad tech comes increasingly comes on the agenda for marketers there have been concerns around issues such as viewability, etc, what’s your take?

Ad tech is what will remove the opaqueness from digital video buying. By literally being able to see where your video has run, or how long it has been viewed for, you can trust it more. With the old network model, things were opaque, or you could even say dar, a lot of people didn’t know what was going on with their advertising. So for a lot of brands it just wasn’t feasible [where they would take the risk of advertising on digital].

But now, you can save money and be more targeted using the technology that’s available these days. So a lot of the ambiguity has been removed from the sector.

How does the emergence of ad tech companies affect your relationship with the traditional media-buying companies?

Currently, the key thing for me is that when I bring another vendor on [to the media plan], my agency Starcom Mediavest is on board with that decision. For instance, when we moved away from a trudging desk to a PMD solution for social media, they met with the final two companies at the pitch phase, and had an input into the decision.

How is this going to work in the long term? Well, while there are some concerns [over disintermediation] from media agencies that work on staffing models, the technology can remove the need for headcount, and we’re not all the way there [in terms of figuring out how things will pan out].

But what I will say, is that what Starcom Media does for a lot of our brands is not replaceable. The strategy element they have to play – such as understanding the brands and ad tech vendors – is not something that can be done programmatically. So as long as they keep doing that they’re fine.

But will media agencies remit on how they can work with us change? Yes, potentially.