Content Studio

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?

5G can provide significantly greater speeds and accommodate more devices than dated 4G networks. For consumers, it’s revolutionizing communications and content.

But from a marketer perspective, the impact will be no less transformative. So, what do today’s brands need to know about this revolution?

As our industry seeks better ways to understand the size of audiences across platforms, audience reach continues to dominate the conversation. But what gets lost in these debates is the need to measure ad effectiveness beyond eyeballs.

Gamers’ affinity for ad-supported content presents a golden opportunity for brands

For app marketers, success comes down to answering one question: Which users are most likely to churn?

Just as it has democratized more data-driven approaches to so much other business decision-making, machine learning is fundamentally changing churn prediction from an inexact art into a precise science.

Every marketer knows the old adage: It costs much more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. How much more may vary, but the principle holds true, and it’s the basic idea behind retargeting.

So why is retargeting still overlooked and underfunded by almost every app marketer?

The media landscape is changing thanks to the looming phaseout of third-party cookies and changes being made by smartphone manufacturers. The largest demand-side platforms, meanwhile, are each tackling addressability differently. This makes it more difficult for decision-makers to plan their road maps, which they are working on as we speak.

Right now, I’m shopping online for a very important purchase: I’m trying to find the right remedy for my allergies. Your best chance of getting my click isn’t serving me an ad for the socks I bought earlier today or the car my demographics suggest I might buy. The smart move is to serve me an ad that helps me choose something that will take care of my allergies.

How well do you know your audience?

I’m not just talking about their age, location, gender or purchase history. I’m talking about the subtle details that really tell you who they are as people. Details that provide a clear understanding of how to communicate with them beyond superficial insights.

OOH advertising spend is nearly back to prepandemic highs as of Q2 2022. This rapid rebound and growth are creating an inflection point for the category – one that’s driving a renaissance for OOH and digital OOH ad experiences going into 2023.

We’re going back to the basics in 2023. After a few years of big spending on brand campaigns and doing test drives of emerging channels, inflation and recessionary pressures mean pumping the brakes on superfluous spending and the nice-to-haves. Here are the key trends I see driving digital marketing in 2023.

The golden era of digital streaming is upon us. YouTube is the largest connected TV platform, surpassing even Silicon Valley powerhouse Netflix. For creators, this is a shortcut to advertising opportunities, since ad-based streaming and commerce opportunities allow creators to increase their impressions and decrease costs.

While third-party cookies and other PII-based ad identifiers are going extinct, there are still too many players in the digital advertising ecosystem with their heads in the sand. Those that insist on using the discredited and increasingly rejected “personalized” advertising are naive at best, and arrogant at worst.

Only the strong survive: This has long been an inspirational tenet for ad tech, but it also describes the industry’s insidious malvertising problem.

Better technology and broader awareness have mostly constrained the most conspicuous breed of malvertising – forced redirects – that plagued us five years ago. What’s left now is a new strain of attacks that are more diverse, more profitable and harder to detect: malicious clickbait, tech-support scams and malware-infected software downloads.

Mid-core and hardcore gaming apps thrive when they have a core group of invested and engaged users with high lifetime value (LTV). App marketers can’t afford to wait for this engagement to happen organically. In fact, many marketers could benefit from focusing on retargeting three key audience groups: payers, lapsed payers and new installers.

Publishers need to rethink their monetization strategies.

As the shift toward privacy takes away the low-hanging fruit of tracking users and selling user data, publishers need to play the long game – cultivating a dedicated audience by delivering authentic, high-quality experiences based on relevant content for their users.

Scroll through the articles on any site about advertising and technology, and you’re bound to run across enough Mad Men and Don Draper references to put you at risk of secondhand smoke. That’s understandable. It’s a helpful shorthand for distinguishing between the creative side of advertising – catchy slogans, beautiful imagery, emotional storytelling, product heroes – and the dominating world of algorithms, data segments and attribution models.

Back in 2016, Apple introduced search ads for the first time. Since then, it has transformed this new source of revenue into a growth strategy. As a result, today, the ad tech industry is no longer a titans’ dual between Google and Meta. Apple is also taking a prominent position.

You can read hundreds of think pieces on new approaches to targeting in a cookieless world. I’m here to tell you they’re all wrong.

The most viable, sustainable and effective alternative isn’t new: Contextual targeting is the only proven approach to targeting that fundamentally embraces the privacy-centric paradigm.

It’s no secret the holiday season is a key sales period for retail, travel and many other industries. This season can make or break a business, large or small. But with high inflation and fears of consumers pulling back, there are a lot of unknowns this year.

To help brands prepare, Commerce Signals has produced a Holiday Spending Forecast that predicts consumer behaviors between Thanksgiving and the week of Christmas.

The mobile marketing landscape is changing. While many marketers are focused on getting back to business as usual, the reality is, the world has changed.The playbook they leaned on in the past is in need of evolution.

Advertisers’ increasing reliance on paid digital advertising channels to drive brand and sales growth, coupled with looming macroeconomic uncertainty, is urging them to understand how to get more out of their digital ad investments.

As consumer behavior continues to evolve, so do the opportunities and challenges for today’s marketers. Consumers who used to be easy to reach are now much more challenging to connect with in a consistent, contextually relevant, privacy-compliant manner. And true business results are difficult signals to extract from the noise.

Mobile phones have come to play a large role in today’s commerce landscape, driven in part by consumers being confined to their homes for much of the past few years. In fact, 90% of adults in the US are shopping with their smartphones.

Life is about balance. Day and night, predator and prey, birth and death. Many view these as opposites, but I consider them counterweights that keep our world in balance. We can say the same about the cookieless and future-proofing discussions currently taking place.

It’s nearly impossible to accuse ad tech of being behind on automation. In fact, ad tech is now built on algorithms, all designed to maximize yield for buyers and sellers.

Today, every impression has multiple systems evaluating every data point to determine its value. The price is negotiated without human intervention. The creative itself might be dynamically generated to be specific to the individual that will see it. And all of this is done in a fraction of a second.

Even as Google announced in July that it would push back its deadline to remove cookies from Chrome to 2024, marketers continue planning for the cookieless future now. It makes sense, as cookies are fast becoming irrelevant. Brands that only use cookie-based solutions are missing out on about 70% of the open web, because cookies are not present on a rapidly expanding number of browsers, devices and platforms.

Ad tech and media companies know the importance of differentiating themselves in a highly competitive market. Partnerships across networks help them stand out.