Let me put it plainly: You’re taking a huge gamble on your company’s ability to reach its target audience, and time is running out!
By focusing on whether streaming is bigger or better than linear TV – or any other delivery platform for that matter – the ad-buying industry is not asking the right questions to successfully connect marketers and buyers with people.
In the ever-evolving digital advertising landscape, CPGs face unique challenges in achieving their KPIs. The demand for developing cost-effective media programs that drive a brand’s desired outcomes is daunting.
With 2024 on the horizon, advertisers are evaluating how to invest in AI – particularly, generative AI. Reliable and practical applications, however, can be hard to find.
How should a business begin thinking about its generative AI strategy against this buzzy backdrop?
Commerce media has been stirring up a ton of buzz as the next big disruptor in digital marketing. What lies behind this buzz? Cutting through the hype is as simple as following the numbers.
As supply-path optimization (SPO) becomes the rallying cry of our entire industry, the complexity of the CTV landscape is in the spotlight. Calls are growing louder for publishers to dramatically slash the number of SSPs included in their unified auctions. A more centralized approach with fewer SSPs, these folks argue, will bring clarity and efficiency that will draw buyers. But this view oversimplifies the situation.
We’re less than 6,500 hours from the single most significant third-party signal loss our industry has faced: the end of the Chrome third-party cookie. And it’s time for us all to stop hopping from lily pad to lily pad looking for Band-Aids. There are proven solutions to this signal loss – ones that offer the advertising performance and measurability we collectively need. In particular, authenticated inventory offers publishers and advertisers the ability to reach premium, authenticated audiences, driving better results and building stronger relationships with consumers.
As streaming platforms navigate a seismic shift – pivoting to profitability after a decade of all-out growth mode – they’re racing to develop their subscriber-retention muscles. But they also need to step back to ensure they’re flexing those muscles in the right way (specifically, getting a better and broader understanding of the full subscriber journey) to make sure they’re targeting retention spend where it counts.
Most performance marketers’ experience with connected TV starts with sticker shock and ends with broken promises.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When CTV burst onto the scene as the holy grail of reach and targeting, eyes popped at the rates quoted by the big CTV players. Marketers held out hope that the promise of hyper-targeting would make the high costs worth it.
The number of online 5G devices doubled between 2021 and 2022, reaching nearly 162 million active 5G devices in the US alone, according to CTIA data. And based on data from Omdia and 5G Americas, 5G wireless connections will reach 5.9 billion devices globally by the end of 2027.
The B2B marketing space has never been as dynamic and powerful as it is today. Much of that power comes from the evolution of the data and tools available to drive precision targeting and messaging at scale. At the center of these evolving capabilities sits audience data, an essential component of today’s successful B2B campaigns.
Advertisers are laser-focused on the seismic shift happening next year with the deprecation of third-party cookies on Google Chrome. But it’s not just cookies on Chrome – Google’s Sandbox initiative is also targeting mobile signals on Android.
There are over one billion connected TVs globally, with US advertisers expected to spend nearly $27 billion on Connected TV (CTV) in 2023 alone. And as the rise of CTV disrupts the industry, it’s generating new marketing opportunities for advertisers.
Third-party cookies, once widely used by marketers to track consumers online and target and measure digital ad campaigns, have fallen out of favor with international regulators keen to protect consumer privacy. Since Google originally announced its intention to phase out the use of third-party cookies on its market-leading Chrome browser, the ad tech industry has been developing ways to ensure that marketers and publishers can continue to deliver effective and measurable advertising, while respecting user choice and rights through consent.
There is no shortchanging the complexity of today’s media industry or the impact that the ever-expanding range of choice has on effective cross-media measurement. That complexity, however, doesn’t grant marketers any leeway when it comes to delivering on business objectives. In reality, increased complexity amplifies accountability.
The last few years saw the app giants take over the mobile app ecosystem, wielding brute strength to overwhelm the smaller publishers whose innovation and risk-taking historically drove things forward. But generative AI is leveling the playing field, giving small and midsize app developers the ability to create new apps and innovate on existing platforms dramatically faster with substantially fewer resources.
Having time to prepare for major changes is generally regarded as a good thing, both in life and the digital advertising industry. But when it comes to preparations for a privacy-first, post-cookie world, there’s been far too much talk about preparation and far too little action. This is hurting advertisers’ results today, not just in some theoretical future.
When you lose something important, you want to get it back. That’s the human instinct driving the conversation around signal loss. Marketers rightly feel an urgency to get back to a higher level of confidence targeting, attribution and measurement – particularly with broader economic pressures squeezing budgets.
If you scan the ad tech headlines, you’d assume artificial intelligence (AI) offers the solution to every challenge facing today’s brands and agencies. Even if marketers understand how the hype machine works, many are still willing to buy into the smoke and mirrors, especially when it comes to the power of AI to cure what ails them (e.g., the deprecation of third-party cookies and the loss of other previously relied-upon industry identifiers).
AI went from quirky novelty to dominant disruptor in a matter of months, taking over the headlines, as consumer-friendly and business-centric AI applications continue emerging in every sector. AI’s role in digital advertising is much more established, but rapid advances increasingly deliver unexpected and transformative capabilities for digital marketers.
Here’s how you succeed in ad tech: Analyze more data in more complex ways and turn that into differentiated products.
Ad tech players know it’s not that simple. Until recently, this path required obscure detours through data summarization and sprawling tech specialization.
Following the broader digital ad world, the TV market is rapidly moving to the impression-based model. Managed services for impression-based (including addressable) remain alive and well, but this year’s Upfronts demonstrated the most dynamic growth centers on the programmatic marketplace.
In truth, it doesn’t matter when – or if – third-party cookies go away for good.
Despite the industry’s collective hand-wringing, we’re in a moment rife with possibility. The advertising industry has never been better positioned to think differently about how to delight consumers with useful and relevant advertising while continuing to prioritize their trust. Of course, this requires making use of different, sometimes new technologies and tactics and embracing an open mind.
Will ChatGPT take all of our jobs or just make them easier?
I’m optimistic. Even early use cases for AI and tools like ChatGPT have shown to improve our efficiency and quality of life — and the ad tech world holds several early AI success stories. AI is improving performance, enabling us to finally scale up hyper-segmentation, real-time experimentation and one-to-one feedback loops. But, more importantly, AI is freeing up sharp human minds to be more strategic, curious and explore new ideas.
This isn’t another article about the death of third-party cookies.
Cookies are false precision and they always have been. Conversations about cookies and what advertisers are going to do when they’re gone are missing the point. It’s a distraction.
The media industry has a junk food problem.
Marketers and their agency and DSP partners have grown so focused on vanity media metrics, such as clickthrough rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC) and video watches, that roughly half of all ad supply is made-for-advertising (MFA) inventory – sites and pages that use clickbait headlines and filler content to generate traffic and cluttered layouts with awful user experiences to cram more display and video ads onto the page.
With screens omnipresent in modern life, the digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising channel continues to see growth.
One reason for this: We’ve modernized workflows such as conventional insertion order (IO)-based transactions and streamlined much of the manual process through the advent of advertising technology. Today, there are programmatic capabilities, real-time bidding (RTB) and streamlined automation of ad serving and delivery of campaigns.
Advertisers have been chasing cord cutters for the last 10 years. But the story in 2023 is viewers cutting streaming subscriptions – and most advertisers aren’t keeping up with this behavior change.
The growth of ad-supported CTV is completely upending our thinking on what an open marketplace or open ad exchange can deliver. Combined with new programmatic protocols and ad serving technology that’s finally delivering the transparency, control and security digital advertisers have come to expect, the open CTV ad exchange is about to democratize TV advertising in an exciting way.
As the digital advertising industry upgrades its privacy protections for consumers, some ad tech providers have wondered what the business impact for improving privacy will be. But how often do ad tech providers consider the cost of staying on legacy technologies such as third-party cookies?
