All channels are "programmatic." Programmatic rightly gets a bad name, but the core idea of marketing channels being accessible via an input like an API is a really important concept. Right now that’s true of the social channels, and increasingly, the rest of the digital marketing channels, but over the next five years we’ll also see traditional channels like radio and television open themselves up to receive marketing assets programmatically. No more social. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you know a new medium has succeeded when we don’t talk about it anymore. No one mentions going online because we’re all just always connected. Technology moves upstream. If you look at how technology has moved through marketing, it started at the edge (distribution of marketing assets) and has continued to move closer and closer to the actual planning and development of marketing itself. Over the next five years we’ll see technology complete this transition and become a part of the core fabric of marketing itself. Good agencies will act like product companies, not service companies.
Noah Brier of Percolate makes his FastCo Predictions for the Marketing Discipline