“Right now, we’re still somewhere at the forefront,” Starcom’s video investment director Zach Isaacs tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “(Programmatic’s share of video spend is) probably a limited percentage.”

But Isaacs says “a massive shift” is coming in the next 12 months.

“I think it would be, at least from a digital video perspective, pretty significantly high. When you look at desktop video and mobile video, north of 50% potentially as we start to ingest more data in to everything we do.”

Ultimately, Isaacs, whose role has emerged from a TV-centric one to cross-platform video as more TV spend comes in to digital, wants to see programmatic fuel TV, cinema and gas station ad buying, as well as online.

He was speaking with Furious Minds CEO Ashley J. Swartz for Beet.TV at TubeMogul’s TubeMogul University customer event. For more of our videos from that event, see here.

“The opportunity is to take out that big ad ops piece – the inefficiencies and frictions in the marketplace – and free people’s time up so they can spend more time on strategic planning, but also on the the reporting side,” Pate tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

Many folks compare the effect of programmatic with how automated stock trading wiped human traders off the floors of Wall Street, expecting a similar wave of automation on Madison Avenue.

eMarketer sees programmatic spend comprising 29% of US digital display ad budgets in 2013, rising to 29% in 2017.

But Pate says it’s not just about replacing humans with algorithms.

“You can also get reach that you just couldn’t get before,” he says at TubeMogul‘s TubeMogul University customer event. “It just doesn’t scale to do buying manually, person-by-person.”

Find all our coverage of the TubeMogul event here.

“Most of our clients are on board with the concept and are shifting considerable budgets over in to the concept of programmatic buying,” Phil Cowlinshaw, Head of Technology at Australian media agency Ikon Communications tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re starting to see the majority of them get involved in programmatic.”

Together with TubeMogul, Ikon has built a platform to aggregate online video ad space from Australian broadcasters.

“The relationship is between Ikon Communications commas and the publishers rather than with a third-party trading desk and a publisher,” Cowlinshaw adds, speaking at TubeMogul University, the vendor’s customer gathering.

Find all our coverage of the TubeMogul event here.

“The buzzword of the year, ‘programmatic direct’ is where the rubber meets the road,”  LiveRail client service VP Vijay Balan told Beet.TV in this video interview. “(It) allows a publisher to open up their inventory, whether it’s direct sales or it’s network, on a single unified platform.

“It allows them to have the best available pricing across all of these demand partners. It democratizes the actual process of buying and gets the publisher what they need, which is higher CPMs.”

AdExchanger says “programmatic direct” emerged in April when several ad tech firms got together and decided it was better than “programmatic premium” at describing how automated technology can support direct ad deals with publishers. In video, SpotXchange operates a “programmatic direct” technology, helping buyers and sellers negotiate direct deals but using automated processes.

For LiveRail, whose platform is responsible for helping a large proportion of premium publishers sell their inventory using programmatic techniques, next stop is figuring outs its programmatic place across the multi-platform video chain.

Interviewed at the TubeMogul University customer event, VP Balan says the company is asking itself: “What does the future look like? What is a TV? Is it programmatic access to inventory? Is it content being consumed? Is it just a 42-inch tablet? Answering those questions is our next step.

Update:  10.21 – LiveRail announced today the ability for publishers to put their ad pod into an RTB offering.  Here’s the story on MediaPost.

Find more of Beet.TV’s coverage of the TubeMogul event here.

Online video tech firm SpotXchange‘s CEO Mike Shehan tells Beet.TV such moves are being provoked by newly empowered advertisers on the buy side.

“Through RTB and programmatic, buyers started to see the value of having a little more control on their side … to control what ad is served to whom at what frequency,” he says in this video interview at the TubeMogul University customer retreat.

“Agency trading desks are saying ‘I’ll buy a lot from you at a high CPM – but I want to have a little more decision-making in terms of when I serve that’. That is forcing the changes on the supply side.”

Summing up the trend neatly, Shehan adds: “It’s not that they’re wanting to do programmatic – they’re trying to meet the needs of the buy side.”

Find more of Beet.TV’s coverage of the TubeMogul event here.

“Creative optimization and getting creatives more involved in programmatic is important,” she says in this video report. She also notes that programmatic buying is shifting from an operationally driven method to a more strategic one centered on ROI and performance now. But the data available for targeting needs to become more specific and nuanced, she says. “If we are just defaulting to age and gender, we have a ways to go as an industry.”

Liquidity also remains a hurdle as there’s still a shortage of premium video, she says. “As that changes and supply and demand meet, does the liquid marketplace afford and fund content?”