In the same week as ATS London saw presenters and panelists debate the merits of open and closed ad ecosystems, Noel Penzer, AOL, managing director, UK, argues the case for a 'alignment' in a world wherer consumers' media consumption habits demand cross screen campaigns.

Let’s be clear: we are already in the brave new world of programmatic advertising, but this world is in its infancy. The potential for growth — for evolution of the industry and the way we operate — is exponential, but what are the obstacles to overcome before we can get to the promised land?

The single biggest challenge we face is to align the increasing number of consumer channels into one stack. In a world where we are quickly moving to cross screen marketing as the norm, the complete picture of the consumer is one of programmatic’s greatest strengths. Only then can we unlock everything programmatic trading has to offer for publishers, agencies and brands, as well as consumers.

By integrating automation and attribution across all screens, advertisers will be able to use data and insights at a much more granular level, which will allow them to make more insightful, real-time decisions. These decisions are what will unlock programmatic’s promise — the big choice for marketers will not be to choose a channel but to choose a consumer.

This evolution will have far-reaching changes for the industry. Perhaps the most interesting is that humans can be human again. By automating the mundane tasks associated with digital inventory, planning teams will free up more time to work with creative teams to deliver richer, more engaging content for brands. Consolidation of the multi-channel ecosystem is not the opposite of innovation; consolidation makes more room for innovation and creativity.

Alongside this impact to sales teams, we will also see significant impacts on what we call the ‘Technology Tax’ — the money lost across the ecosystem to vendors during the process of buying and selling inventory. A recent AOL survey of top clients in the US found they typically work with up to 20 feature-driven ad tech vendors. That’s both a waste of time and money.

These are some of the reasons we are building ONE by AOL, a unified platform for driving powerful brand insight and marketing executions across all screens. Our goal is to bring buyers and sellers closer together so the creative and innovation-driven benefits ripple out across the whole ecosystem.

We estimate that up to 75% of digital budgets are sucked out by the technology tax, whereas with TV, 75% goes directly to the publishers. These publishers are then able to drive the money back into better programming and better consumer experiences. The far-reaching benefits are clear and consolidation plays a major part in this — with more money going directly to digital publishers, the more they can innovate and reinvest faster in better content and solutions.

At AOL UK, we’ve committed heavily to programmatic and we recently announced 100% of our premium inventory is being made available through our proprietary DSP. Through acquisitions such as Adap.tv we can provide better solutions across the whole digital spectrum.

Our industry’s number one objective should be to unify and simplify the technologies that automate the planning, buying, execution, optimisation and measurement of cross-screen and cross-format campaigns. The innovation exists.

Our job is to harness it, simplify it and deploy it to increase the power and reach of every advertising pound so that it goes back into the ecosystem spurring innovation and growth.

This isn’t a case of future proofing against what is to come; the future of programmatic is already here. Our job now is to help it evolve and the industry needs to get on board or risk being left behind.