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In advertising, it’s crucial to maintain efficiency and cost-effectiveness through every campaign. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just starting with programmatic advertising, finding the best deal for programmatic TV ads is essential. In this blog post, you’ll learn about the intricacies of programmatic TV and how you can uncover the best paths, platforms, and strategies to maximize your advertising budget.
Typical paths to programmatic TV ad buying
Programmatic advertising has revolutionized how businesses reach their target audience on television and has become an increasingly popular marketing approach. So far, in 2023, 87% of connected TV (CTV) ads have been bought using programmatic methods. That percentage is expected to continue rising as more advertisers take advantage of this buying method.
To find the best deal for cheap programmatic TV, it’s essential to understand the typical paths to programmatic media buying: direct deals and programmatic auctions.
Direct deals
One common route for programmatic ad buying is direct deals with publishers and broadcasters. This approach gives you more control over your ad placements, allowing you to negotiate pricing and secure prime time slots. However, this method can be expensive as premium placements often have a premium price tag.
Programmatic auctions
Another option is programmatic auctions, where advertisers bid on available ad inventory in real time. These auctions can be public or private, each with its own benefits.
Public auction
Public auctions are the primary marketplace for cheap programmatic TV ad buying, and advertisers compete in real-time for available ad slots. This option can be cost-effective if you are strategic with bidding. However, it can be highly competitive, which could drive up prices.
Private auction
A private auction provides a more controlled bidding environment. These auctions offer access to premium inventory and the ability to negotiate directly with publishers and broadcasters. Prices are typically higher at private auctions, but they can lead to more exclusive, high-quality ad placements to better reach your target audiences.
Auction vs. direct
The auction vs. direct debate is crucial for finding the best deal in programmatic TV advertising. Direct programmatic ad buying involves establishing personal relationships with publishers and broadcasters. This approach offers more control over ad placements, creates the potential for long-term partnerships and premium positions, and allows for more negotiation power on pricing.
On the other hand, the auction route relies on real-time programmatic auctions that give advertisers more efficiency, dynamic pricing through competitive bidding, and access to diverse ad inventory. This approach also allows better data-driven decision-making to help advertisers with precise targeting and optimization.
What platforms can your programmatic ads show on?
Programmatic ads are limited to traditional television. You can use various platforms to broaden your audience reach, including blogs, lifestreams, and more. Multiple platform options also let advertisers search around for cheap programmatic ad buys.
Some popular platforms include:
- Display and video
- YouTube videos
- Custom publisher formats
- Audio ads
Unexpected platforms where you can buy programmatic TV ads
Some unexpected platforms offer unique opportunities to find the best programmatic TV deals. Some of these examples include:
- YouTube shorts
- Mobile games
- Music streaming apps
- TikTok
Try local
Local (linear) television advertising often flies under the radar, but it can be a goldmine for finding cheap programmatic ad buys. Customize your messages to local audiences by focusing on specific geographic regions. This level of specificity can lead to highly efficient ad campaigns with lower costs compared to national or global placements.
Where to get started with programmatic TV buying
When it comes to programmatic TV ad buying, you have two main options: using an agency or going directly to the marketplace.
Using an agency
Advertising agencies have the expertise to navigate the complexities of programmatic TV ad buying. By working with one, you may be able to find better deals and get help negotiating terms and optimizing your campaigns. However, remember that agency fees could take up a large portion of your budget.
Going to the marketplace
For a more hands-on approach, you can explore programmatic ad buying directly through the marketplace. This approach gives you direct control over your campaigns and the ability to explore different deals and platforms. However, you’ll want to understand programmatic advertising strongly to ensure you make the most of the marketplace.
How to optimize your bids for smarter ad spend
Finding the best deal doesn’t end with choosing the right options for programmatic buying. You need to focus on smart bidding strategies to optimize your advertising budget.
Choose placement based on segmentation
Segmentation is vital to maximizing your ad spend. By targeting the specific audience segments most likely to convert, you can make the most of your budget. Platforms often offer options to narrow your audience based on behavior, interests, and demographics.
Work with an identity resolution provider
Identity resolution is the process of matching online and offline customer data, giving you a comprehensive view of your target audience. By working with an identity resolution provider, you can make informed decisions about where and when to place your programmatic TV ads for the best results.
Create an omnichannel view of your campaign
To find the best deals on cheap programmatic ads, it’s essential to have an omnichannel view of your advertising campaign. By coordinating your programmatic media with other channels, you can create a seamless and cohesive brand experience for your audience.
Get started with programmatic TV today
Now that you better understand programmatic TV ad buying, you’re ready to get started. But how can Experian help you make the most of your programmatic advertising efforts?
At Experian, we offer a suite of data-driven solutions to enhance your programmatic TV advertising campaigns. Our extensive data and identity resolution capabilities empower you to make informed decisions to improve your targeting capabilities, optimize engagement, and more. By working together, you can unlock the potential of your programmatic TV ads and find the best deals to optimize your advertising budget.
Get started today
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Traditional audience signals are fading, and the industry is facing a new reality: identity is no longer just about connectivity, it’s about outcomes. At Cannes Lions 2025, leaders from AdRoll, LG Ad Solutions, Magnite, MiQ, OpenAP, PubMatic, Stirista, Tatari shared how innovative identity approaches are cutting through the noise, improving performance, and delivering real ROI. Their insights reveal a clear path forward for those ready to turn identity into a performance driver. Here’s how you can apply the same principles to drive performance. 1. Make identity a performance engine Treating identity as a performance driver leads to measurable results by creating a clear connection between marketing efforts and outcomes. Identity resolution enables the effective retargeting of audiences, accurate performance attribution across connected TV (CTV), and personalized campaigns across multiple channels. By building household-level graphs and incorporating alternative identifiers, marketers can maintain accuracy as traditional signals change. Activating first-party data across both digital and offline channels ensures that every interaction, whether on-screen or in-store, can be tied back to specific actions, helping optimize campaigns, and improve ROI. How Experian helps Experian’s Consumer Sync solutions create a clean foundation and persistent identity spine by resolving and expanding your first-party data across digital and offline IDs (hashed emails, mobile ad IDs, CTV IDs). This enables activation across omnichannel campaigns, from CTV to social, and connects data to outcomes. "Identity resolution is very important to our overall strategy today. Without that identity linkage, we couldn’t speak the same language as our clients. For example, a client might want to target people who engaged with their brand’s website four days ago via CRM data. Without identity resolution, that’s not possible. But with it, we’re changing the narrative – making TV a hospitable place for deploying first-party data and driving outcomes."Mike Brooks 2. Build trust through responsible data practices Consumer trust begins with responsible data practices that prioritize transparency and privacy. Deterministic match rates ensure accuracy by connecting data points with confidence, while clear methodologies provide visibility into how data is used. These practices improve overall campaign performance and protect consumer privacy by ensuring that every interaction is respectful. How Experian helps Experian’s privacy-first approach ensures that all data activation occurs with compliance and consent. By maintaining high match rates and adhering to transparent methodologies, Experian helps build trust and strengthen long-term connections with audiences. "If people don't take any precautions and they don't actually care about data in the public, they probably don't care about it in private. Experian cares about data privacy and compliance, and that made it a no-brainer for us to work with them. When we combined our focus on privacy with Experian’s expertise, we knew we had to do it right – and we did."Henry Olawoye 3. Expand reach while maintaining high match rates Having more data points to identify individuals leads to higher match rates and broader reach. Enriching records with additional identifiers, like hashed emails, MAIDs, and CTV IDs, makes it easier to connect data across channels and create a unified view of each person. This approach ensures that campaigns can scale effectively while maintaining the accuracy needed to deliver personalized experiences. How Experian helps With a database of over 5,000 attributes spanning 15 verticals and categories, Experian provides a comprehensive view of consumers through a single provider. By sourcing data from over 200 sources (including public records, consumer surveys, and purchase records), Experian enables the creation of detailed audience profiles. This enriched data focuses on identity, creating a unified view of individuals that helps pinpoint the best opportunities to engage effectively across channels and deliver measurable outcomes tailored to specific audience needs. "We’ve been able to extend our IDs by an average of 6.5 different identifiers, with a 70% match rate. That extension is huge – it underpins a lot of the connectivity in our platform and allows us to bring 300 data feeds together to make the most of them."Georgiana Haig 4. Create unified campaigns with interoperability Fragmented data often leads to fragmented results. Interoperability ensures that data from different platforms and systems can work together, creating a unified view that makes measurement and attribution more actionable. How Experian helps Experian simplifies interoperability by ensuring consistent data usage from activation and measurement. By connecting data from various sources, Experian enables a cohesive strategy where insights can be shared across publishers, measurement providers, and ad servers, ensuring campaigns remain aligned and effective at every stage. "The ecosystem benefits from optimized interoperability. We’re focused on allowing advertisers to work seamlessly across IDs and identity solutions – from activation to resolution – so the same data set is used consistently across publishers, measurement providers, currencies, programmatic ecosystems, and ad servers."Chris LoRusso 5. Use AI to amplify, not replace, strategy Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming how campaigns are optimized, but its success depends on clean, consented identity foundations. AI can analyze vast amounts of data to refine targeting, manage frequency, and uncover new efficiencies, but only when built on a strong identity framework. How Experian helps Experian uses AI and machine learning to deliver highly personalized marketing solutions. Advanced clustering algorithms in Experian’s Digital Graph analyze and create household and individual device connections, improving targeting and measurement accuracy, while machine learning models improve consumer insights by inferring household composition where data is limited. These innovations enable AI tools to quickly generate tailored audience solutions, analyze contextual signals in real time, and identify opportunities that improve results while maintaining a human centered approach to decision making. "AI is a copilot to your marketing initiatives. For it to perform, it needs insights and information to learn from. That’s why having a strong foundational data asset rooted in deterministic data is so important."Howard Luks Five moves to turn identity into profit Here are five steps to get started: 1. Audit your data health Make sure your audience data is accurate, up-to-date, and complete so you’re starting from a strong foundation. 2. Layer in more context Enrich your records with details, like lifestyle, interests, or buying behaviors, that help you speak your audience’s language. 3. Unify touchpoints across channels Link your data so you can see the same person or household whether they’re engaging on CTV, mobile, desktop, in-store, or through other touchpoints. 4. Activate AI for stronger campaigns Use AI tools to fine-tune targeting, control ad frequency, and find hidden opportunities once your foundation is solid. 5. Align data across systems Ensure interoperability so data from different platforms and systems can work together, creating a unified view for actionable insights. The common thread across these insights is connection: connecting data, teams, and outcomes. Marketers who act on these imperatives will be ready for whatever new channel, format, or privacy rule comes next. Let’s start a conversation about how Experian can help you turn identity into ROI Latest posts
Audigent, a part of Experian, now offers turnkey, outcome-driven deals for brands through Amazon DSP, expanding advertisers’ options for advertising across the open internet. While buyers continue to activate through established supply paths with Amazon DSP, this collaboration introduces sell-side curation that expands data access and reduces overall buyer costs. Three paths to activation With Audigent's curation services now available through Amazon DSP, buyers have streamlined access to premium open-internet inventory and measurable results. Advertisers now have three simple ways to build or tap into curated deals: Off-the-shelf deals in Inventory Hub on Amazon DSP Buyers can access hundreds of pre-built curated deals, each designed to align with common campaign goals and accelerate time to market. Custom deal libraries built around KPIs Advertisers can work directly with Audigent and Amazon Ads to build tailored deal libraries that reflect their unique performance objectives. SimplePMP with AI-driven intelligence Audigent's proprietary AI technology powers its SimplePMP product, offering advertisers sophisticated segment recommendations to identify relevant audiences and inventory with enhanced accuracy. Data that drives performance Turnkey curation only works if the data behind it is immediate, precise, and actionable. With Audigent providing curation via Amazon DSP, each deal fuses premium, real-world signals with hand-picked inventory so every impression can move the needle. How turnkey curation works Here are three ready-made examples to spark ideas 1. Weather in real time When the temperature climbs above 85°F, a beverage brand’s “Hot-Day Hydration” creative can launch automatically. Twenty-four hours before a heavy-rain forecast, big-box retailers can push “Storm-Ready Supplies” for generators and batteries. Weather-triggered audiences from The Weather Company mean you buy only when conditions drive demand. 2. Moments that matter to fans Live Nation ticket-purchase signals that pinpoint two peak travel-booking windows—right after fans secure out-of-town concert or game tickets and again during the week leading up to the event—so airlines, online travel agencies, and hotels can serve timely seat-sale or last-minute lodging offers when intent (and conversion rates) are highest. 3. Intent you can see Bombora B2B signals surface companies researching topics like “zero-trust security” or “cloud cost reduction.” A cybersecurity SaaS can reach those accounts with demo ads, and an office-furniture brand can court firms exploring “hybrid-workspace redesign.” Media spend zeroes in on buyers already in-market. A customer-centric approach Audigent delivers turnkey, customer-centric solutions across the open internet through Amazon DSP, prioritizing quality over quantity through premium web inventory. As buyers and sellers embrace more direct, transparent, and addressable supply paths, this streamlined approach boosts efficiency and drives meaningful outcomes for brands. Interested in trying this new path with Amazon Ads and Audigent? Email: audigent_sales@experian.com. What's next? Audigent is committed to enhancing our curation services available through Amazon DSP. We're focusing on: Expanding our suite of turnkey solutions to address evolving advertiser needs in the open internet space Developing new data-driven insights to further refine audience segmentation and inventory selection Continuously improving our technology to deliver even greater value and efficiency for advertisers As the advertising landscape evolves, Audigent will continue to innovate, ensuring our offerings complement and enhance the capabilities available through Amazon DSP. Ready to cut supply path costs? Connect with us to design your first curated library Latest posts

Marketers aren’t thinking in channels anymore: they’re thinking in audiences. As consumer media habits have scattered across devices, platforms and formats, brands have shifted their focus from managing one channel at a time to delivering a connected experience. That’s the core of omnichannel marketing: meeting people where they are and making each touchpoint feel like part of a larger narrative. However, most brands still encounter the same roadblocks: siloed data, fragmented planning and tools that don’t integrate. And while the industry talks a great deal about omnichannel marketing, few are actually doing it well. The brands that figure it out won’t just reach more people; they’ll improve brand perception while improving the customer journey, achieving better outcomes, and optimizing their media spend more efficiently. Learn more about this trend in our 2025 Digital trends and predictions report. Learn more Why omnichannel is no longer optional Omnichannel marketing has long been a goal, but recent shifts in media and technology now make it a necessity. According to Forrester, 21% of global B2C business and tech professionals identified enhancing omnichannel or cross-channel customer experiences as a top priority for their organization today. Connected TV (CTV) and commerce media networks are emerging as dominant channels, necessitating the coordination of messaging across an expanding ecosystem of streaming, programmatic display, and commerce-driven environments in addition to the multitude of other addressable (and non-addressable) channels. Fortunately, identity solutions continue to evolve, enabling marketers to maintain audience addressability in digital channels even as traditional signals decline and privacy regulations intensify. Consumers expect this kind of cohesion. They don’t see “channels" – they just see a brand. A member of your loyalty program might browse a product online, see the exact item later on their socials, and then receive an email offer. If those messages feel disconnected or out of sync, this will not be a good customer experience, and a brand risks wasting impressions and losing conversions. Omnichannel isn’t about showing up in more places. It’s about showing up with a consistent message. The opportunities inherent in true omnichannel execution Despite the industry’s movement toward omnichannel marketing strategies, there are a few untapped opportunities brands would benefit from pursuing. Break down planning silos to optimize performance Many marketers still plan and measure media in silos: programmatic display, CTV, commerce media, search, social, email, SMS, and each might have their own budgets, strategies, and KPIs. This disjointed approach leads to inconsistent messaging, inefficient spend, and overexposure or underexposure to key audiences. The opportunity? Shift toward integrated media planning and measurement. By aligning teams and KPIs across channels, marketers can optimize frequency, coordinate creative sequencing, and better attribute business outcomes. Breaking down internal silos improves the customer experience and drives more effective performance. With two-thirds of North American CMOs naming siloed data as their biggest obstacle, those who solve it stand to gain a clear advantage. Encourage interoperability to activate audiences consistently Omnichannel success depends on defining an audience once and reaching them everywhere. But in today’s ecosystem, where walled gardens control inventory and many tools remain disjointed, this is easier said than done. Just under a third of marketers say the tools they use don’t work well together. The opportunity? Invest in interoperable systems that give you control over your data and privacy-safe solutions like clean rooms or universal IDs that enable consistent audience activation across platforms. Advocate for a unified identity framework Audience data remains fragmented: commerce media networks control shopper data, TV platforms hold viewership data, and walled gardens provide limited data transparency and determine which data they will share, making it difficult to recognize, reach, and follow the customer journey across digital touchpoints. Without a unified view, campaigns remain disconnected and cross-channel attribution is difficult. The opportunity? Advocate for a centralized, privacy-conscious identity framework that bridges fragmented data sources. This would allow marketers to recognize consumers across platforms and deliver cohesive messaging. Marketers need solutions that enable connected audience activation while respecting privacy requirements and platform-specific constraints. Without this, omnichannel remains an aspiration rather than a reality. Data and identity: The tools you need in your toolkit to make omnichannel work Implementing omnichannel right starts with establishing identity. Brands need a foundation that lets them connect the dots: across data, platforms and channels. Here’s how: Build a unified identity foundation “A single view of the customer is the foundation of a successful omnichannel program,” says Forrester in a December 2023 report on omnichannel. This begins by connecting disparate data sources, including persistent offline information, such as addresses, emails, names, and phone numbers, with digital signals, in a privacy compliant way. And this, in turn, creates a strong identity foundation. Solutions that integrate hashed email addresses (HEMs), mobile ad IDs (MAIDs), IP addresses, CTV IDs, and universal IDs enable brands to resolve customer identities across different platforms, ensuring that campaigns remain addressable as users transition between channels. Activate audiences everywhere, without the hassle Brands should be able to define an audience once and activate it across all addressable channels without unnecessary complexity. Interoperability between demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs), clean rooms, and private marketplaces (PMPs) ensures that high-quality audiences are matched with premium inventory in a targeted, transparent, and efficient manner. This connectivity helps maintain consistent audience targeting—even as consumers engage in different environments. By working with a partner that seamlessly integrates with major platforms, marketers ensure that data quality and identity resolution remain intact throughout campaigns, avoiding data loss that occurs when data is transferred between different, disparate platforms. Measure across channels, and the customer journey Effective omnichannel marketing isn’t just about reaching audiences—it’s about understanding how different touchpoints contribute to conversions. Advanced attribution models, incrementality testing, and cross-platform frequency management enable brands to use consistent identity across campaign planning, activation and measurement so they connect ad exposures to real-world outcomes. Achieving this requires a strong identity resolution partner—one that can unify audience data across environments and power accurate, privacy-compliant measurement at scale. The future of omnichannel marketing Omnichannel is becoming the baseline expectation for modern marketing. The brands that figure out how to connect the dots across the increasingly disparate media landscape will drive better performance and build stronger customer relationships. By working with a partner that can offer you an end-to-end data and identity solution focused on consumers, not channels, you can better understand your best customers (and your next customers), reach them across channels, and measure cross-channel campaigns more effectively, making true omnichannel execution more achievable. Get started today Latest posts