Successfully marketing an app in today’s fast-paced mobile landscape depends on several factors: understanding how to reach mobile users in a meaningful way and taking advantage of the latest tech advances to do so. Optimizing your ad spend means reaching the right mobile users in the places they already spend time with a compelling reason they should engage or re-engage with your app. Failure to tick all these boxes means you’ll be sending ad spend out into the abyss; your engagement metrics will suffer as a result.

Mobile users are inundated with marketing messaging. The average U.S. mobile user now spends more than 5 hours per day on mobile devices—a number that has only shown year-over-year growth as people have increased access to Wi-Fi and mobile devices; plus more apps from which to choose. As a result, more marketers aim to target these users with mobile advertising. As a result, it’s safe to say most mobile users see their fair share of mobile ads on a daily basis. How can marketers convince mobile users to tap ads, install apps and engage by serving ads that stand out from the pack?

Undoubtedly, you’ve been hearing and reading the phrase “programmatic advertising” lately. Keep reading to learn more about the power of programmatic advertising—specifically video—for mobile app marketing.

Programmatic Advertising: The Basics

Put simply, programmatic advertising entails automatic ad buying via servers and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. This frees up marketers from having to manually bid, buy and serve ads. The end goal is to present the best messaging to the right people in a way that makes the most of ad spend. The rise of programmatic advertising coincides with the rise of the “big data” era in which customer data makes it possible to serve personalized ads to mobile users based on their demographics and usage habits.

Programmatic advertising enables Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), which “aims to create highly personalized and optimized ads keeping the customers’ specific interests in mind.” Dynamic ads assemble programmatically, drawing on mobile user data to influence the specific appearance and messaging of the final product. The goal is to reflect the user seeing the ad so they’re more likely to engage with it—and your app.

Advantages of Using Video Advertising

The use of programmatic advertising has even extended to mobile video ads. According to one digital advertiser for Forbes, mobile video ad is becoming increasingly popular because it “combines the power of sight, sound and motion allowing marketers to drive higher completion rates and encourage deeper engagement.” In other words, video tends to be a strong medium for storytelling, especially compared to static mobile ads of the past. Video has the potential to boost conversion rates because it can stand out in a sea of ads all looking to grab a precious resource: mobile users’ limited and precious attention span.

But the same marketer goes on to write that “mobile programmatic and the ability to deliver data-driven video advertising that fits consumer context” is what really differentiates campaign performance. For example, video ads should always fit the devices on which they’re served, whether it’s a mobile phone or a tablet. Other variables worth optimizing include the length of your video ads, their resolution and their aspect ratio.

Above all, programmatic in-app videos are strongest when they demonstrate the actual user experience people can expect from your app. There’s something powerful about seeing an app in action as compared to reading text on a static app; the storytelling aspect can play a powerful role in getting a target audience of mobile users to install and use your app.

The power of programmatic video for mobile app marketing resides in its ability to boost conversion rates by targeting the right mobile users with powerful video messaging that’s suited to specific mobile devices.