When I began selling in June of 1984, the formula for transacting media might have been summed up by five words: “The drinks are on me.” Successful media selling then was about nurturing customer relationships – and it still is in many ways today. Along the way, trends have come and gone but the actual formula for any media transaction has been the aggregation of an audience, the communication of information about that audience and its relative value. Today in radio, we know a whole lot more about our listeners, which creates complexity that can’t always be conveyed one to one, whether at the bar or not. Programmatic advertising is the natural extension of sharing audience information between seller and buyer. Ads traded programmatically already make up about 40% of all digital media volume, according to a recent study by Forrester and the ANA.