It would be nice if we never had to hear the word “uncertainty” ever again … but too bad, because Q2 happened, and it wasn’t pretty for ad tech. The public ad tech and mar tech stocks tracked by LUMA Partners, which released its Q2 market report last week, fell more than 30% across the board year-to-date as of the end of the second quarter.
The parade of data-driven ad platform launches by companies that don’t traditionally monetize through advertising seemingly cannot be stopped. The latest example is Universal Music Group (UMG), a top music label which last week launched its data-driven ad-targeting platform called the UMusic Media Network.
The Trade Desk keeps adding new partners to the Unified ID 2.0 roster, but it’s still looking for someone to fill the administrator role after the IAB Tech Lab backed out earlier this year.
The investment bank Needham estimates that Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and Disney combined will grab around $650 billion of ad dollars in 2023. By comparison, The Trade Desk earned just $1.2 billion in 2021, its first time clearing the billion-dollar mark in a single year, and even the strongest programmatic companies earn in the hundreds of millions, which is peanuts by walled garden standards. But “what that means is that a tiny 1% or 2% shift in budgets from the big platforms could double or even triple.”
Even if third-party cookies weren’t on Chrome’s chopping block, brands would need a strategy to navigate signal loss, says Spiceology CEO Chip Overstreet. Spiceology is working with digital identity management company Parrable and MediaMath to retarget users in environments where third-party cookies aren’t available.
A rose by any name will smell as sweet, sure. But attribution by any name doesn’t work the same. Call it what you want, the problem of channel-based incremental testing is important. Measured raised $21 million last week, as it expands in the post-attribution attribution category, alongside other startups like Triple Whale, which raised $24 million a month ago, and Northbeam.
Jeff Green, Founder and CEO of The Trade Desk, has been spiking the football lately in earnings reports, as some of his long-held predictions have come to fruition. First, there was Google’s delay of third-party cookie deprecation, which seemed like a bold bet when he first predicted Google wouldn’t remove third-party cookies by the initial deadline. This quarter, it was Netflix who delivered.
Criteo is still using third-party cookies while it can. Why not? But “if tomorrow we don’t have access to them, then we’ll have to use something else,” said CEO Megan Clarken. What sort of “something else?” Criteo has been testing what it refers to as “more privacy-enabled, controllable and reliable signals.”
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the ad tech industry took steps to freeze Russian-owned media companies out of the advertising ecosystem. But programmatic technology continues to be used by parties on both sides of the conflict as a platform to conduct psychological warfare.
TikTok has become accustomed to Facebook and Instagram stealing its cool new features and video formats. So, it’s a refreshing change to see TikTok pilfer one of Meta’s innovations. Starting Thursday, advertisers can add first-party cookies to the TikTok site conversion pixel. TikTok also instituted a straight-up requirement that advertisers collect and pass along third-party cookies.
