Heads in the sand, or genuine lack of interest?
Marketing teams with the budgets and ambition to run sophisticated paid media strategies are increasingly including programmatic in their briefs. For independent agencies, that creates a growing challenge. Without this capability, some may find themselves unable to respond fully to national and international advertisers looking to consolidate partners, control costs and cover a broader paid media mix.
The first misconception to address is simple: not everything automated is programmatic. And programmatic is far from marginal in France. According to the SRI/UDECAM Observatoire de l’e-pub, it accounts for 65% of display investment.
It is perfectly possible to run highly automated campaigns on Meta or Google without doing programmatic in the strict sense. When agencies and advertisers refer to programmatic media buying, they are generally talking about campaigns activated through a DSP — a demand-side platform that enables advertisers to buy inventory across multiple publishers, environments and formats.
That distinction matters.
Google Ads and Meta Ads primarily provide access to inventory within their own ecosystems. A DSP can provide access to a much broader media landscape, including publisher websites, connected TV, digital audio, digital out-of-home and retail media.
Yet the terminology is still frequently blurred. Some agencies consider paid social and automated buying synonymous with programmatic, which can mean overlooking a significant part of the addressable media landscape.
One of the main reasons independent agencies make limited use of programmatic is access.
Unlike Google Ads or Meta Ads, where an advertiser can open an account relatively easily, access to many of the major DSPs may require a licence, contractual commitments, minimum spend levels or specialist partners.
More importantly, using these platforms effectively requires expertise.
Account architecture, audience strategy, inventory selection, activation, optimisation, measurement and the use of advanced features all require a level of technical knowledge that cannot simply be improvised.
For a 20-person independent agency, building that capability entirely in-house can therefore represent a significant investment — particularly when the volume of programmatic business is still developing.
That challenge is real. But it is increasingly solvable.
There is also a second challenge: agencies naturally tend to recommend what they know how to deliver confidently.
If a team has never activated a campaign through a DSP, it is much harder to include programmatic in a media recommendation, estimate the associated costs, defend the strategy in front of a client or answer detailed questions about execution.
The result can be a self-reinforcing cycle: limited expertise leads to fewer recommendations, which in turn means fewer opportunities to build expertise.
Commercial structures can reinforce that dynamic. Agencies specialising in search or social have built teams, processes and revenue models around those channels. Expanding into another buying environment requires new capabilities and sometimes a different operating model.
There is also the question of execution.
An agency that wants to offer programmatic without building a full trading capability internally will often need an external partner. Historically, many trading desks have belonged to larger communications or digital marketing groups, which can create understandable concerns for independent agencies about sharing campaign execution — and potentially parts of the client relationship — with an organisation linked to a competitor.
None of these barriers is insurmountable.
A growing number of DSPs now provide more accessible entry points for smaller teams, with fewer commercial commitments and simpler operating models. They may not provide access to every premium inventory source or advanced capability, but they can give agencies an opportunity to learn, experiment and build experience under real market conditions.
The major DSPs — including DV360, Amazon DSP and The Trade Desk — can also be accessed through licensing partners or specialist trading desks.
And importantly, not every trading desk belongs to an agency group.
Independent technology and activation partners can provide white-label programmatic services without competing for the agency's client relationship. In this model, the agency retains ownership of the client, the strategy and the recommendation, while specialist partners support the technical activation and execution.
For independent agencies, this can significantly lower the barrier to entry.
Programmatic does not require every independent agency to become a specialist trading desk overnight.
What matters is being able to understand where programmatic fits within a broader media strategy, include it when it is relevant and have a credible way of delivering it.
Done well, this extends the skills agencies already have.
It can help connect channels that are too often managed in isolation, bringing display, video, search, social and emerging media environments into a more coherent view of audiences, activation and performance.
More importantly, it allows agencies to respond when the demand comes directly from advertisers — something that is happening increasingly often.
For independent agencies, the question is therefore becoming less about whether they should build a complete programmatic operation themselves, and more about how they ensure they can confidently include programmatic in their recommendations.
Because in the long run, the greater risk may not be getting programmatic wrong. It may be being unable to compete for the briefs in which it has already become an expectation.
Programmads, recognized as the only Belgian company certified as a Google Marketing Platform - Sales Partner, specializes in assisting marketing agencies and advertisers with the integration and use of Adtech tools. With offices in Brussels, Paris, Madrid, and Warsaw, it offers two main services to its European clients: Programmads Licensing, which provides comprehensive Adtech tools along with training and technical support, and Programmads Consulting, focused on programmatic buying and analytics consulting.
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