Members of our team, from the US and beyond have descended this week to San Francisco to connect face-to-face with friends and partners at Programmatic I/O.

This year the agenda was filled with rich and relevant content on programmatic strategies and technologies. We couldn’t help but notice the spike in programmatic video and in particular, transparency and format-related topics.

Talking about topics, lately we have been spreading the word about programmatic video and the need for an omni-channel approach. Thankfully, AdExchanger has devoted a whole workshop to this grail of marketing and the need to move away from outdated attribution models.

Most notably, when it comes to programmatic, the needle is shifting back in favor of the publishers, empowering them with more negotiation leverage and better programmatic technology tools. But, from what we can see here, as programmatic advertising in display has grown up, the knowledge and technology gap in video is still far too wide.

Many industry players are still baffled by the complexities and pitfalls along the way to programmatic video, yet not enough effort has been afforded to helping publishers make sense of relevant issues such as video header bidding.

Our team on the Programmatic I/O floor reported that they have been approached by many contacts on programmatic video, and in particular on video header bidding.

Oddly enough, video header bidding as a topic for discussion or as a workshop, was missing on the Programmatic I/O agenda this year. The absence of this crucial piece of the programmatic video puzzle is very noticeable, considering the rising popularity of header bidding, and the fast pace of growth of video advertising.

Most interestingly, an entire session was devoted to the next generation Private Marketplace – once of the pillars of the tech stack. In video, where CPMs are higher, the ramifications of a Private Marketplace that transitions to win rate and yield, rather than traditional deals, are huge.

Inevitably, all this strategy talk needs to be backed up with powerful technology tools and a team with a global footprint that gets video.

As video consumption grows and the market becomes more sophisticated on both end of the value chain, we look forward to seeing more programmatic content related to video specifically in the upcoming events.