Programmatic advertising is a way to automatically buy and optimize digital campaigns, rather than buying directly from publishers.

It is designed to replace human negotiations with machine learning and AI-optimisation. The goal is to increase efficiency and transparency for both the advertiser and the publisher.

This is done through real-time auctions where ads are bought at the same time a visitor loads a website.

Simply put, programmatic advertising is the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to buy advertising real-time, instead of going through human negotiations and pre-set prices.