With the global programmatic video advertising industry being further on the rise in 2022, it’s time to embrace and take leverage from the hottest trends in the niche.

One thing is clear, from what the experts have been tracking in the online video advertising niche in the beginning of 2022, it still grows increasingly automated, and this trend isn’t likely to decline in the upcoming months. 

Namely, according to the eMarketer forecasts, digital advertisers in the US are likely to spend about ~63B USD on programmatic video ads in 2022, which constitutes an impressive 20.6% rise, compared to 2021. More importantly, the analysts expect the further ~19% increase of ad spending volumes in the niche in 2023, and such optimism simply can’t go unnoticed. 

Well, since programmatic video advertising will, obviously, steal the limelight this year, it’s quite the right time to take a deeper dive at some of the key trends to shape out the market in 2022. 

CTV and DOOH to Dominate the Programmatic Landscape

Following the past year’s path, the industry’s greater focus is likely to remain on programmatic DOOH and CTV niches in 2022. 

In this respect, even though the programmatic DOOH subset is still relatively small, compared to other market segments, its recent sharp ascend happens to be even more noticeable, with the forecasted YoY growth in the US up to ~16.5% in 2022 (per eMarketer). 

From the technical standpoint, the programmatic DOOH ecosystem will undergo essential improvements, including a greater flexibility of video ad delivery, significant simplification of workflow (both in terms of campaign setup & optimization) and, certainly, better ad measurement.

As for programmatic CTV, the analysts forecast the market YoY growth by a staggering 39% in 2022, with video ad verification and measurement remaining the key focus points for businesses, particularly on the Demand side. 

In this respect, great expectations are being put on the market-wide adoption of newest IAB Tech Lab’s standards, including OM SDK for CTV, OpenRTB 2.6 with ad pod bidding capabilities, ads.cert 2.0, as well as the automated supply chain validation, all of which should help combat video ad fraud and contribute to the greater transparency of programmatic ad buys in the niche. 

AI-Fueled Contextual Targeting in Programmatic CTV

Blame it on the lack of the unified content taxonomy or tech infrastructure for the scalable CTV video content analysis, but the contextual targeting capabilities haven’t been fully embraced in the OTT environment until 2022. 

Well, hopefully, this will soon be changing, in view of the forecasted launch of new AI-powered video ad tech solutions, whose development has been accelerated by some of the largest M&A deals of 2021. Quite predictably, these will encompass deeper video analysis, keyword extraction and inventory management, as well as the more precise prediction algorithms on bid requests and the overall campaign performance. 

Next to Emerge: Programmatic Video Ads in Metaverse

While metaverse advertising is still the new notion itself, 2022 is a good time for discussions and considerations on where the industry will evolve further on, and the programmatic segment is definitely one of the promising dimensions to explore in 2023 and beyond.

However, we’ll probably know more about whether and how fast this trend will be emerging closer to H2 2022.