Banner and rich-media ads bought and sold at scale through automated auctions form the backbone of the open web's ad economy — every free news site, blog and app you use is largely funded by this category. What separates "programmatic" from a simple banner buy is the AUCTION: instead of a human negotiating a fixed placement, software on the buy side (a DSP) and sell side (an SSP or ad exchange) settle who wins each individual impression in the milliseconds between a page starting to load and it finishing.
Standard Display Banners
Fixed-size image ads (the IAB standard sizes: 300×250 medium rectangle, 728×90 leaderboard, 160×600 skyscraper) served across the Google Display Network and third-party ad exchanges. The oldest format on this entire list, and still the cheapest way to buy raw impressions at scale.CPM · Awareness
Responsive Display Ads
You upload a set of assets — images, headlines, logos, descriptions — and the ad network's algorithm automatically assembles and resizes them to fit whatever ad slot is actually available on a given page, rather than you designing every size by hand.Auto-assembled
Rich Media Ads
Interactive banners embedding video, expandable panels, mini-games or 360° product views directly inside the creative unit itself — far higher engagement than a static banner, at a production and CPM cost to match.High engagement
Expandable Ads
A standard-sized banner that grows on hover (desktop) or tap (mobile) to reveal a larger interactive experience, then collapses back to its original footprint — a way to fit a bigger story into a small ad slot without permanently taking over the page.Interactive
Interstitial Ads
Full-screen ads shown at natural content transitions — between articles on a publisher site, or between levels in a mobile game. High visibility, but also the format most associated with user annoyance if frequency isn't carefully capped.Full-screen
Gmail Sponsored Promotions
An expandable ad unit that appears at the very top of the Promotions tab in Gmail, styled to look like a collapsed email — click it, and it expands into a full landing-page experience without leaving the inbox.Google-only
Real-Time Bidding (RTB)
The open, second-price auction mechanism underlying most programmatic buying: as a page loads, an ad request goes out, DSPs bid on behalf of advertisers in real time, the highest bidder wins, and their creative renders — all in well under 200 milliseconds.Core mechanism
Programmatic Guaranteed
A fixed-price, fixed-volume programmatic deal negotiated directly between one advertiser and one publisher ahead of time — you get the automation and targeting of programmatic buying with the price certainty of a direct IO (insertion order).Fixed price
Private Marketplace (PMP)
An invite-only programmatic auction where a publisher offers premium inventory to a hand-picked set of buyers — you still bid, but only against a curated pool, which usually means better inventory quality than the open exchange at a still-negotiable price.Curated auction
Header Bidding
A publisher-side technique letting multiple ad exchanges bid on an impression SIMULTANEOUSLY before the site's primary ad server is even called — this pushed programmatic CPMs up industry-wide by forcing exchanges to compete in parallel rather than being called one at a time in a waterfall.Publisher technique
Retargeting / Remarketing Display
Banner ads shown specifically to people who already visited your site (or a specific page, or abandoned a cart), following them across the display network with a reminder to come back. Consistently one of the highest-ROAS format on this list because the audience already has intent.High ROAS
Contextual Display Ads
Ads matched to a PAGE'S content and keywords, rather than to who the visitor is — a cooking-equipment ad on a recipe blog, say. A privacy-friendlier targeting model that's seeing renewed investment as third-party cookies fade out.Privacy-friendly
In-Page Push Ads
Notification-styled ad units, common on lower-cost publisher networks, designed to visually mimic a system push alert inside the page itself rather than looking like a traditional banner.Notification-style