Programmatic Advertising
In short
Programmatic advertising is the automated buying of ad space: when someone opens a page, the free slot on it is auctioned in real time and the highest suitable bid wins. What you buy is therefore no longer a publication but a person – the ad slot is merely where that person happens to be.
What is genuinely new about it
Not the automation, but the reference point. Classically you bought space in an environment where you assumed your audience would be. Programmatically you buy the audience and accept the environment.
That is also where the best-known problem comes from: you do not always know afterwards where your ad appeared. Inclusion and exclusion lists are therefore not a detail but the part that decides how your name is seen.
Why small budgets rarely suit it
Because several intermediaries sit between the budget and the website, and each takes a share. At small amounts too little of the franc survives to buy reach with.
Then there is data volume. Automated bidding needs enough cases to learn from. A budget producing a few hundred impressions a month does not supply them – chance decides, and the automation confirms it.
For most Swiss SMEs the honest order is therefore: first capture the intent that already exists (Google Ads, SEO), and think about reach afterwards.
What additionally applies in Switzerland
Advertising has to be recognisable as advertising. Paid or sponsored content that looks editorial is misleading under Art. 3 para. 1 lit. b UCA (SR 241) – what counts is whether an average recipient recognises the commercial nature, not whether a label exists somewhere.
Where personal data is processed or lists are passed to a platform, the FADP duty to inform applies, and with providers abroad the conditions for disclosure abroad have to be assessed too.
How we handle it
We recommend it where reach is the goal and the budget carries it – and advise against it where it is sold as a more expensive version of search advertising.
For most companies the entry point is Google Ads and social media ads, where the same auction logic applies without the intermediate layers.
A term in your quote that nobody explained?
In a strategy call we translate the offer in front of you – even when it did not come from us.