by Kyle Buzzell | Apr 13, 2017 Programmatic advertising has averaged 71% year over year growth from 2012 to ‘16 and is expected to grow another 31% in 2017. Real-time bidding, or RTB technologies, have been the primary vehicle for programmatic’s growth. So, why is programmatic important? You have probably used programmatic methods to buy or sell traffic, directly or indirectly… …and RTB? It is the primary programmatic method employed and will likely continue to be so in the near future. This leads us to our first point: programmatic advertising is not synonymous with RTB. Instead, programmatic is the process of using software and algorithms to trade data-rich media while RTB is one method of execution. What is RTB? Your no-nonsense overview RTB is the trading of traffic on a per-impression basis in a second-price auction format via ad exchanges. A second-price auction format is where the highest and clearing bid are different. Therefore, although the highest bidder w