Best Programmatic Ads Agencies for 2023

If you ever googled “what are programmatic ads,” you likely know that this form of advertising is much more cost-effective than manually buying media placements. However, it’s also a lot more complex and requires advanced knowledge of programmatic advertising and software algorithms. 

The best way to leverage programmatic ads is to partner with the best programmatic advertising agency. With hundreds of agencies and programmatic advertising platforms to choose from, how do you know which one is the best for your business?

In this guide, we review the 10 best programmatic ads agencies, so you can make an informed choice and find your ideal programmatic advertising partner. 

The 10 Best Programmatic Ads Agencies for 2023

To ensure your advertising campaigns are effective and that you’re getting a good return on your investment, you need to choose a reputable programmatic ads agency that’s the right fit for your business. 

Here’s our pick of the 10 best programmatic ads agencies for 2023:

1. War Room — Overall the Best Programmatic Ads Agency in 2023
2. AMP Agency — Laser-Targeted Programmatic Advertising Strategy Based on Large Data Sets
3. Sparcmedia — Fully Managed Programmatic Ads Campaigns Based on 2 Billion Monthly Data Points
4. Digilant — Omnichannel Programmatic Advertising With a Custom-Build Dashboard
5. Single Grain — ROI-Focused Digital Advertising Agency
6. Uplers —  All-in-One Digital Advertising Agency With Extensive Programmatic Advertising Experience
7. Rise Interactive — Award-Winning Digital Agency that Executes Custom, Grantual Programmatic Ads Campaigns
8. MediaPlus — Real-Time Programmatic Ads Campaign Analytics and Ongoing KPI-Based Optimization
9. DEPT — Real-Time Bidding Strategies to Secure the Best Ad Placements
10. Merkle — Global Advertising Agency With Over $1.7 Billion in Managed Ad Spend

The Top Programmatic Advertising Agencies Reviewed 

If you’re planning on investing thousands of dollars in programmatic advertising, it’s crucial to partner with a renowned agency whose services perfectly align with your business needs. To help you make an informed decision, we reviewed the 10 best programmatic ads agencies in 2023.

1. War Room — Overall the Best Programmatic Ads Agency in 2023

War Room is a digital agency that focuses solely on programmatic advertising. It offers programmatic display ads, programmatic search ads, programmatic native ads, programmatic audio ads, programmatic video ads, and shopping ads. With over 90,000 publishers in its network, War Room generates over 355 million impressions a month for hundreds of clients in dozens of different niches. 

What sets War Room apart from other programmatic ads agencies is its proprietary programmatic advertising platform, Kedet. This omnichannel advertising platform allows you to manage all of your programmatic advertising efforts from a single platform and optimize your campaigns based on real-time data.

Kedet lets you leverage demographic and behavioral data to build custom audiences, use contextual and geographic targeting, create lookalike audiences, retarget people who have already shown interest in your business, and much more. 

That said, you won’t be left to your own devices. War Room’s team of advertising experts will work with you to create a fully customized campaign strategy based on your business goals, whether it’s boosting brand awareness, generating leads, or driving sales. On top of that, every War Room client is assigned a personal account manager who will help you set up your campaign, monitor ad performance, and discover untapped advertising opportunities. 

War Room will also handle reporting and analytics, so you’ll gain actionable insights based and expert recommendations on how to fine-tune your campaigns to beat the competition and get the most out of every advertising dollar. 

2. AMP Agency — Laser-Targeted Programmatic Advertising Strategy Based on Large Data Sets

AMP Agency executes strategic programmatic campaigns by relying on huge data sets to make informed decisions and help you place your ads where they’ll perform the best. 

The agency’s approach involves reviewing your brand’s point of sale (POS), analyzing existing purchase and customer relationship management (CRM) data, and cross-referencing the information with the agency’s proprietary MomentAware data set. This allows AMP Agency to apply laser-focused audience targeting to your programmatic advertising campaigns and ensure your ads are served to the right audience, on the right platforms and devices, at the right time.

AMP Agency relies on demographic and psychographic insights, shopping behaviors, and digital footprints — cookies, purchase history, brand affinity, and social sharing — to develop an ideal customer persona for your campaigns. This ensures that the advertising copy and visuals will deeply resonate with your audience and prompt them to take the designed action, ensuring a high return on investment.

Once AMP Agency helps you formulate a rock-solid programmatic advertising strategy, you can either choose to run the advertising campaigns yourself or leverage the agency’s paid search and paid social managed services. The agency also offers creative services, which include design, advertising copy, video production, and animation.

3. Sparcmedia — Fully Managed Programmatic Ads Campaigns Based on 2 Billion Monthly Data Points

Sparcmedia is a full-service advertising agency that specializes in search advertising, social media advertising, and programmatic advertising. 

The agency relies on the digital footprint left by your target audience to serve engaging search, display, native, and video ads to people who have already expressed interest in your industry and the products, services, or solutions your brand offers. 

Sparcmedia’s data-fueled programmatic approach takes into account preferred devices, channels, and formats, as well as demographics, shopping habits, hobbies and interests, transaction history, and influencing factors. 

The agency relies on over 2 billion monthly data points to develop and optimize cost-efficient, effective, high-ROI programmatic advertising campaigns and help businesses in a dozen different industries boost brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales. 

Sparcmedia employs a multi-channel advertising approach and measures the contribution of every advertising channel, so you’ll know exactly what works best for your business. On top of that, the agency delivers detailed reports with actionable insights to help you fine-tune your campaigns and maximize return on ad spend. 

4. Digilant — Omnichannel Programmatic Advertising With a Custom-Build Dashboard

Digilant is an advertising agency that aims to simplify media buying. The agency accomplishes this by developing simple, straightforward media solutions and custom programmatic campaigns that are fully tailored to each client’s specific business needs. 

Digilant employs a multi-channel approach to programmatic advertising and creates holistic campaigns that encompass the entire customer’s journey. This helps brands engage target audiences in all the different stages of their marketing funnel and convert them from website visitors, prospects, and leads into paying customers. 

As a digital advertising agency, Digilant is platform agnostic. This means that it can help you advertise on any marketing channel you prefer, so you can reach your target audience wherever it hands out online. 

The best part about Digilant is the fact that it creates a custom dashboard for each client. This way, you can see all the relevant metrics for your target audience and your programmatic ads campaigns without being overwhelmed by the plethora of settings, options, and metrics that aren’t relevant to your business. 

The dashboard will allow you to see the performance of your campaigns in real-time, understand exactly what works best for your audience, and fine-tune your campaigns for optimal performance. 

5. Single Grain — ROI-Focused Digital Advertising Agency

While not a programmatic ads agency per se, Single Grain offers programmatic advertising services focused on maximizing your return on ad spend (ROAS). 

Single Grain specializes in PPC advertising and can help you manage your paid advertising campaigns across all marketing channels, including Google adveritisng, YouTube advertising, Facebook advertising, LinkedIn ads, Amazon, Spotify, and TikTok ads.

If you partner with Single Grain, their dedicated team of paid media experts will work with you to understand your business objectives, target audiences, and the benefits your products and services provide to your customer. 

After developing a data-backed programmatic advertising strategy, Single Grain will conduct in-depth keyword research and competitive analysis, create ad copy and visuals, set up and optimize your campaigns, and provide in-depth reports with accurate ROI measurement. 

The agency also offers advanced campaign consulting, landing page creation, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) services. 

What makes Single Grain stand out from other advertising agencies is its knowledge of cryptocurrency and NFTs. If you’re in the cryptocurrency industry and want to advertise your own crypto coin or an NFT collection, Single Grain will be your ideal marketing partner. 

6. Uplers — All-in-One Digital Advertising Agency With Extensive Programmatic Advertising Experience

Uplers is a digital advertising agency based in India that offers digital marketing, web development, design, white label, and email marketing services. Simultaneously, the agency offers talent acquisition services, helping brands around the globe grow their teams and expand their businesses by hiring experienced, professional Indian talent.

When it comes to digital Programmatic advertising, Uplers offers a fully managed service. This includes everything from campaign planning and development to ad creation, A/B testing, and conversion rate optimization. 

The team of programmatic advertising professionals at Uplers is experienced with all major Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), including DV30, TTD, Amazon, MediaMath, and Xandr. The in-depth knowledge of programmatic technologies and extensive hands-on experience with managing dynamic, display, video, and CTV programmatic ads allow Uplers to develop and execute effective campaigns with a high return on ad spend.

Uplers provides real-time campaign measurement and optimization, so you’ll always know how well your programmatic ads are performing, and your campaigns will be consistently fine-tuned for performance. 

7. Rise Interactive — Award-Winning Digital Agency that Executes Custom, Grantual Programmatic Ads Campaigns

Rise Interactive is an award-winning advertising agency that partners with leading programmatic advertising platforms to deliver sophisticated, custom campaigns tailored to your business goals. 

The company’s approach to digital programmatic advertising is full-funnel and audience-first. In other words, the campaigns are designed to follow the user across the entire buyer’s journey. Each prospect is served the most appropriate ad at the right time, based on what stage of your marketing funnel they are in.

What we like about Rise Interactive is the fact that their programmatic advertising campaigns are granular. The agency kicks off each campaign by covering every funnel entry point across all your marketing channels, then leverages the raw data to determine what channels and approaches work best for your business and scales the top-performing ads to achieve a high return on ad spend.

The company also features a proprietary Connex platform, which lets you monitor the performance of your programmatic ads campaigns in real-time, manage media spend, and easily tweak every aspect of your ads, including placements, copy, and creative.

8. MediaPlus — Real-Time Programmatic Ads Campaign Analytics and Ongoing KPI-Based Optimization

MediaPlus is a German-based digital agency that puts emphasis on processing and optimizing programmatic advertising campaigns. The agency’s process involves in-depth data analysis and strategic campaign development based on your brand’s needs, industry, target audience, and preferred advertising channels. 

After setting up the campaigns, MediaPlus monitors and measures the performance of your ads, runs A/B tests to identify what works best for your business and target audience and leverages real-time analytics to fine-tune the campaign. 

The agency offers programmatic ads across all channels and devices, including traditional advertising channels such as TV and radio. The service is fully managed and includes ad copy and creative, analytics and reporting, and ongoing KPI-based optimization.

9. DEPT — Real-Time Bidding Strategies to Secure the Best Ad Placements

DEPT offers automated, tailor-made programmatic ads for agencies that want to leverage an automated, real-time bidding system to secure the best ad placements and get the highest possible return on ad spend. 

Apart from real-time bidding, programmatic advertising experts at DEPT can help you create and deploy effective programmatic display ads, as well as negotiate great advertising deals directly with the publishers. 

Everything DEPT does regarding your campaign is fully transparent, so you’ll know exactly how much money you’re spending on each ad placement. You’ll also be able to see the performance of each ad and the campaign as a whole and can work together with DEPT’s experts to fine-tune your campaigns and get the most out of every advertising dollar. 

10. Merkle — Global Advertising Agency With Over $1.7 Billion in Managed Ad Spend

Merkle is a global digital advertising company with over $1.7 billion managed ad spend for hundreds of clients around the world. 

The agency relies on in-depth data analysis to extract valuable insights regarding your target audience and develop precise programmatic advertising campaigns that leverage the best marketing channels and ad placements for your business. 

Merkle develops omnichannel marketing strategies based on your customers’ journey and prioritizes marketing channels according to the highest ROI. The agency will consistently monitor the performance of your programmatic ads campaigns, identify areas for improvement, and optimize each ad to ensure that not a single advertising dollar is wasted on ineffective media placements. 

Best Programmatic Ads Agencies Compared

What Services do Programmatic Advertising Agencies Offer?

The best programmatic ads agencies all offer fully managed programmatic advertising services. These typically include in-depth data analysis, target audience identification, campaign setup and optimization, and ad creative. 

Here’s a quick overview of the most common services programmatic advertising agencies offer:

Data Analysis

For programmatic advertising to be effective, the advertising company must analyze large data sets to help identify the best ad placements for your business and ensure your ads are served to the right audience. 

This analysis often involves keyword research, competitive analysis, your existing customer data, and target audience demographics and psychographics. The insights gained from data analysis help advertising agencies formulate effective programmatic advertising strategies that get the right ads in front of the right audience and generate a high return on ad spend.

Target Audience Identification

The success of every advertising campaign hinges on accurately identifying your target audience and using advanced filters and algorithms to ensure your ads are served to the people who are most likely to click on them. 

The best programmatic ads agencies will use a wealth of data — including target audience demographics, online behaviors, interests, preferred devices and marketing channels, cookies, and purchase history — to develop an ideal customer persona for your programmatic ads campaigns. 

This helps advertising agencies laser-target the right people and choose the best ad placements to ensure that the right ad is shown to the right people at the right time. 

Campaign Setup

Advertising agencies will typically handle everything on the technical side, including campaign setup, reporting, and analytics. 

You’ll often have access to a dashboard where you can review all your ad placements and monitor the performance of the campaign in real-time. If not, the advertising agency will provide detailed weekly or monthly reports with all the relevant data and actionable insights. 

Automated Media Buying

The best programmatic ads agencies will either use proprietary platforms and their own software algorithms or connect with a programmatic advertising platform to deploy media buying strategies and ensure your ads end up in front of the right audience. 

Put simply, rather than manually buying advertising space, the agencies rely on advanced algorithms and targeting filters to bid on relevant advertising opportunities. This makes the process faster, more accurate, and much more cost-efficient. 

Ad Creative

Advertising agencies often offer ad creative as part of their programmatic advertising services. They will write the ad copy, create the accompanying visuals, and often run A/B tests to determine what works best for your target audience and optimize the ads accordingly.

Conclusion — What is the Best Programmatic Ads Agency in 2023?

There are many excellent digital advertising agencies out there that offer programmatic advertising and have an excellent track record. Some of the agencies we reviewed in this guide have run programmatic ads campaigns for giants like Nike, Puma, Asus, and even LinkedIn and Microsoft. 

While it’s difficult to say which advertising agency is objectively the best, our top pick for the best programmatic ads agency is War Room, based on the programmatic ads examples on their website and the case studies and customer reviews we’ve read. 

The agency relies on proprietary technology — Kedet — to gather and analyze behavioral and demographic data, as well as take advantage of contextual and geographic targeting to ensure your ads are strategically placed in front of your target audience. 

The best part about War Room is that you’ll be assigned a personal account manager, so you’ll always have a go-to person for any questions regarding your programmatic advertising campaign. They’ll also help you set up, monitor, and optimize your campaigns to ensure the highest possible return on ad spend. 

The data-driven approach to programmatic advertising, as well as constant support from a dedicated advertising professional, is what makes War Room the #1 programmatic agency in 2023.

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