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.
With so much interest around the delayed deprecation of third-party cookies, it’s easy to forget that the TV industry is building a scaled and addressable advertising ecosystem – without third-party cookies.
Data-driven marketing is about more than just addressability. It’s about using data to inform media planning, storytelling, creative execution, media-buying tactics and the full spectrum of the advertising process – not just individual targeting.
This summer marks the 50th anniversary of Title IX. It’s a celebratory time for women’s athletics, but also a broader celebration of women in sports: not just as athletes but as passionate fans, loyal supporters, successful leaders and more.
“Wait and see” is not the motto most of us aspire to.
Yet, with Google’s cookie deprecation timeline getting pushed back and the current landscape of competing first-party identifiers offering insufficient reach on their own, “wait and see” is the approach I see most marketers and advertisers taking today.
Location-based businesses – including retailers and restaurants – have undergone more change in the last two years than in the previous 10. Now, as pandemic restrictions lift, these location-based businesses are looking at a hybrid future that will require them to embrace digital strategies that support their brick-and-mortar stores.
When it comes to targeting, the ad industry is in the process of effectively turning back the clock 20 years.
And that’s not a bad thing.
The simple fact is that the ad industry, on its first run-up to personalized marketing, made a number of missteps. The time has come for a course correction. And while the transition may be rocky at times, we now have the opportunity – and means – of laying a sustainable, data-driven foundation for the future.
With additional browser- and device-based identifier restrictions dropping almost every other month, publishers are getting pitched a dozen addressability solutions every week – and we’re already seeing cases of buyer’s remorse: publishers not getting the value they expected from proposed solutions.
We’re a year into Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework, and it’s time for app marketers to reconsider their iOS budget and dust off their iOS retargeting campaigns. With opt-in rates and overall IDFA availability far above what most expected, data shows iOS users continuing to generate significant revenue and higher ROAS – adding up to an impossible-to-ignore opportunity.
As audiences across all demographics continue to shift from linear viewing toward long- and short-form digital video, the continued growth of streaming was front and center during this year’s upfront presentations. And major subscription-based platforms announced their plans to add an AVOD version to their offering.
The apocalyptic headlines about cookie deprecation and the shift toward privacy have slowed somewhat ¬– but don’t get too comfortable. Regulators around the world remain emphatic about privacy, big ad tech still plans big deprecation and a cookieless future for ad tech will be here before you know it. But this is no apocalypse. It’s a new dawn for digital marketing – defined by the possibilities that a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies create.
If you are Gen X or (gasp!) a boomer, you remember a time when listening to the new hit song at home meant buying the whole album. Getting what you wanted required paying for a bunch of stuff you didn’t: the other ten songs on the record.
