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.
Every article I read about the “cookieless future” leaves me envisioning a desolate world where the dream of 1:1 marketing has died, and we’re all back to Wanamaker’s infamous cliché (Which half of my spend is wasted?).
But that dream is not dead. It’s just lost amid an increasingly fragmented landscape of first-party IDs – and clouded by the limited transparency and control offered by the Big Tech players.
The free and open internet as we know it is not free at all: Someone somewhere is footing the bill so publishers can fund the creation of that “free” content.
Imagine: You are a political trader, and it’s 7 p.m. on a Friday night in October 2022. A customer needs to launch 13 CTV-focused campaigns that target districts in four states – immediately. Do you have the tools to make it happen?
By Anders Pilgaard Andersen, senior vice president, general counsel, Adform Recent decisions by multiple EU data protection authorities signal the use of Google Analytics violates the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These decisions sound a warning not only to the many companies using Google Analytics but, more broadly, to any company using US-based ad […]
By Kristina Prokop, CEO and Co-founder, Eyeota Now that Google has scrapped its plans for Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) in favor of its proposed Topics API, the buzz around “cohorts” is fading. But cohorts remain a powerful path forward for advertisers in a cookieless world. That’s because the strength of cohorts extends well beyond […]
By Stephanie Himoff, VP of global publishers and platforms at Outbrain This article is sponsored by Outbrain. Already battered by years of marginalization from walled gardens, media owners on the open web are looking over a cliff. The deprecation of third-party cookies promises to hamper targeting on their sites, threatening to wipe out 52% of […]
The rising value of first-party data has created a bit of a “gold rush” mentality. Companies are hearing that first-party data represents unrealized marketing value, so they’re mistaking the goal as amassing as much first-party data as possible.
Apple’s ATT framework continues to make user acquisition and retention campaigns more difficult to deploy, track and measure. In light of this, app marketers must find new avenues for maintaining an engaged audience. The number of available advertising IDs on iOS (IDFAs) is decreasing, and Apple’s native tracking and attribution solution, the SKAdNetwork, has serious limitations for app marketing campaigns.
When first-party data became the center of every marketing conversation, every CMO I talk to started asking the same questions: How do I achieve return on marketing investment in a cookieless world? How do I navigate evolving data governance and privacy concerns and meet customer expectations for hyper-personalized experiences?
Most of the time, advertising is reacting to a changing world. Brands have precious few tools to balance reach and brand safety, and keyword blocklists are at the top of that short list.
Spurred by the rapid global changes of the last two years, the use of keyword blocklists is at an all-time high. But as brand safety tools reached ubiquity in response to changing global conditions, they lost much of their elegance and with it their ability to help brands lead the way on important, salient topics.
This year is forecasted to see healthy growth in ad spend thanks to the continued surge in digital advertising. Case in point: eMarketer projects that $239.89 billion will be spent on digital advertising in 2022, a 13.6% increase from 2021. Some of the largest ad-holding groups recently posted strong Q4 and overall 2021 earnings fueled by growth in digital ad spend.
Over the last year, evolving trends and policies aimed at increasing consumer privacy have caused marketers of all sizes to explore alternative approaches for connecting with consumers. The implications of these changes have opened the door for emerging channels to become mainstream.
