Media buying used to occur directly between a publisher and an advertiser. Direct purchasing gave you prominent ad placement, but was unreasonably expensive. The advertiser also didn’t know who would see their ads or if the ads met their targeted demographic. Now programmatic advertising allows advertisers to buy ads in real-time through an ad exchange. This means a customer can be shown an ad across multiple websites. The bidding can be based on any number of criteria; including retargeting, search retargeting, geofencing, CRM retargeting and more. This also allows the right person to see the right ad at the right time and at an affordable price.