Home Data-Driven Thinking How Marketers Can Safeguard Against Supply Chain Outages

How Marketers Can Safeguard Against Supply Chain Outages

SHARE:
Jürgen Galler, CEO and co-founder, 1plusX

Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by  Jürgen Galler, CEO and co-founder of 1plusX.

Meme sharing came to a grinding halt during the Facebook and Instagram outage in October, proving that even global social networking giants aren’t immune to service disruptions. But this is nothing new. In 2016, Twitter, Spotify and Shopify became inaccessible after denial of service (DoS) attacks on their DNS provider. Last year, Twitter suffered its own global outage. Even newcomer TikTok crashed earlier in 2021.

With half of the global population using social networks, and spending on social advertising worldwide expected to reach $137 billion, it’s clear why disruptions are concerning for advertisers striving to achieve mass reach and engagement.

Advertisers have a lot to lose when a social platform collapses. But there are ways to safeguard their investments.

Tougher audits

One obvious precaution is to apply robust checks of service-level capabilities. Running risk assessments across supply chains can help improve your understanding of which channels, platforms and tools are prone to glitches.

This strategy, however, has its limits.

For example, midsize players are likely willing to share details, such as historic uptime and service management processes – particularly if audits help secure higher trust and investment. But the success of this solution depends on all players, including smaller companies and tech heavyweights, being open to scrutiny.

Plus, despite placing advertisers in a stronger position, evaluation won’t stop downtime. Advertisers need more protection.

To truly be prepared for outages, they must diversify their media portfolios.

Subscribe

AdExchanger Daily

Get our editors’ roundup delivered to your inbox every weekday.

The right data

Diversification makes logical sense. By extending advertising across varied media networks, advertisers can spread risk and strengthen defenses, ensuring reach won’t suddenly plummet if a handful of channels go down.

But in practice, diversification has its challenges. There are reasons prominent platforms have maintained their pull. Not only are these walled gardens the gateway to vast audiences, but they also hold the keys to insights.

To effectively diversify spend across the open web, advertisers need to enhance their own understanding of target audiences. In short, they must strengthen their first-party data muscle.

Honing first-party data

Cultivating first-party assets has become increasingly important amid ongoing privacy regulation and limits on third-party cookies. But it’s also essential for diversification and reducing reliance on walled gardens that keep data locked down.

Achieving this won’t be easy. But advertisers have a fast-growing array of options to help organize and optimize data.

Put insight to work

Predictive technology now does more than streamline collection. These tools can also filter, package, enrich and prepare data for use.

For instance, machines can decide whether incoming data should fuel artificially intelligent predictions or become a deterministic signal. Meanwhile, instant linking to new and current identifiers can drive steady ID assignment. This allows advertisers to reach known users or bolster audiences through syndication with identity networks.

Maximize data scope

As Google’s contentious FLoC proposal has demonstrated, training algorithms with data about anonymized users can enable interest-based segmentation. Similarly, analyzing so-called ground truths about consenting users reveals patterns that can be applied to individuals with shared traits, even without user-supplied signals. With this data, advertisers can fill in gaps with logical and predicted – rather than declared – insight. It’s a step above walled garden black boxes that enables advertisers to  expand their targeting range. 

As they strive to prevent outage disasters, advertisers must keep in mind that supply chain vetting likely won’t be enough. Although risk assessment can be part of the toolkit, protecting your full operations requires more strategic safeguards.

Diversification will help ensure tech titan outages don’t cause total campaign knockouts by distributing spend across multiple media outlets. But only by broadening their horizons with first-party data and AI enhancement can advertisers engage target audiences while staying firmly in control.

Follow 1plusX (@1plusX) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

Must Read

CleanTap Says It Easily Fooled Programmatic Tech With Spoofed CTV Devices

A report released Wednesday by curation startup CleanTap claims CTV and programmatic ad tech platforms served ads to spoofed devices pretending to be connected TV sets.

HUMAN Expands Its IVT Detection Tool Kit With A New Product For Advertisers, Not Platforms

HUMAN has recently started complementing its bid request analysis by analyzing the time between when a bot clicks an ad and when the landing page loads. Now it’s offering the solution to individual advertisers.

Index Exchange Launches A Data Marketplace For Sell-Side Curation

Through Index Exchange’s data vendor marketplace, curators gain access to third-party data sets without needing their own integrations.

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters

Can Publishers Trust The Trade Desk’s New Wrapper?

TTD says OpenAds is not just a reaction to Prebid’s TID change, but a new model for fairer, more transparent ad auctions. So what does the DSP need to do to get publishers to adopt its new auction wrapper?

Scott Spencer’s New Startup Wants To Help Users Monetize Their Online Advertising Data

What happens when an ad tech developer partners with a cybersecurity expert to start a new company? You end up with a consumer product that is both a privacy software service and a programmatic advertising ID.

Former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya speaks to AdExchanger Managing Editor Allison Schiff at Programmatic IO NY 2025.

Advertisers Probably Shouldn’t Target Teens At All, Cautions Former FTC Commissioner

Alvaro Bedoya shared his qualms with digital advertising’s more controversial targeting tactics and how kids use gen AI and social media.