Marketers’ interest in programmatic advertising is picking up, with 66 percent planning to increase their ad spending in 2016, more than double the number that had such plans in 2015. In programmatic marketing, advertising is automatically triggered by set events and deployed according to rules applied by software and algorithms, and developed by marketers beforehand.

Advertising platform AdRoll, in its “2016 State of the Industry Report,” reports that marketers are turning to the campaigns for their time-saving optimization and increased ROI. Eighty-seven percent of marketers are seeing greater return through programmatic ads compared to traditional media buying.

"Marketing is becoming an increasingly technology-driven discipline, and practitioners are being held to higher standards of measurement and accountability than ever before," says Adam Berke, president and CMO of AdRoll. "It therefore makes sense that marketers and business managers want their advertising efforts to be driven by the same innovations in data science, AI and automation that have driven advancements in other parts of the modern enterprise. The results from this survey make it clear that 2016 is staged to be a massive year for digital advertising, and programmatic technologies will be the driving force."

AdRoll’s findings show that mobile and video marketing are trending towards programmatic as well. Programmatic buying on social is now 50 percent more popular than programmatic display for B2C marketers, with 75 percent of all B2C marketers using the technique. On mobile, a third of marketers are now buying programmatically, and retargeting jumped from 54 percent to 82 percent this year, with 87 percent of marketers indicating they plan to increase their mobile retargeting investment in 2016. Furthermore, a quarter of marketers reported they are now buying programmatically on TV, and 20 percent of marketers reported buying programmatically on online video.

AdRoll’s annual report draws on a survey of 1,050 U.S. marketers, who were questioned about their perspectives on the changing dynamics of the marketing and advertising landscape.

Click here to download AdRoll’s report.