Commerce media has been stirring up a ton of buzz as the next big disruptor in digital marketing. What lies behind this buzz? Cutting through the hype is as simple as following the numbers.
Why are publishers accepting this reality – in which The Trade Desk is now bidding below floors and, in many cases, bypassing the sell-side vendor ecosystem altogether with OpenPath – without batting an eyelash?
By understanding the metrics that really matter to them, brands can ensure they’re getting the most out of their advertising investments and fostering genuine, transparent relationships with their agency partners.
As supply-path optimization (SPO) becomes the rallying cry of our entire industry, the complexity of the CTV landscape is in the spotlight. Calls are growing louder for publishers to dramatically slash the number of SSPs included in their unified auctions. A more centralized approach with fewer SSPs, these folks argue, will bring clarity and efficiency that will draw buyers. But this view oversimplifies the situation.
There’s a misguided desire to find a third-party cookie replacement with as little disruption as possible, and confusion reigns about data collaboration alternatives, their capabilities and the differences between them.
GA4 is a true ground-up rebuild, with the focus now on customer experience across both websites and apps. But although GA4 has a lot of potential, it also brings some challenges that marketers haven’t been shy about voicing.
We’re less than 6,500 hours from the single most significant third-party signal loss our industry has faced: the end of the Chrome third-party cookie. And it’s time for us all to stop hopping from lily pad to lily pad looking for Band-Aids. There are proven solutions to this signal loss – ones that offer the advertising performance and measurability we collectively need. In particular, authenticated inventory offers publishers and advertisers the ability to reach premium, authenticated audiences, driving better results and building stronger relationships with consumers.
No one in the C-suite except the CMO cares about reach, impressions, likes, shares, followers or anything else that isn’t directly tied to performance. Instead, they care about clear measures that show progress against specific, measurable problems and ROI.
As streaming platforms navigate a seismic shift – pivoting to profitability after a decade of all-out growth mode – they’re racing to develop their subscriber-retention muscles. But they also need to step back to ensure they’re flexing those muscles in the right way (specifically, getting a better and broader understanding of the full subscriber journey) to make sure they’re targeting retention spend where it counts.
For both premium publishers and MFA, monetization boils down to an endless quest for scale and shallow insights into their audiences that can be turned into ad revenue.
In the coming weeks, you will see stories from us about the ongoing war, and we’ll do our best to treat the subject with respect. This is no time to shy away from reality.
Most performance marketers’ experience with connected TV starts with sticker shock and ends with broken promises.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When CTV burst onto the scene as the holy grail of reach and targeting, eyes popped at the rates quoted by the big CTV players. Marketers held out hope that the promise of hyper-targeting would make the high costs worth it.
Market pressures are forcing retailers and online marketplaces to bolster their profitability with added services.
After attending the Federal Trade Commission’s virtual roundtable about the impact of generative AI on creative fields last Wednesday, all I can wonder when I see an AI-generated creation is whose work it’s based on.
CTV is poised to become the third “big scale” performance advertising channel, but is effective CTV attribution actually possible?
The number of online 5G devices doubled between 2021 and 2022, reaching nearly 162 million active 5G devices in the US alone, according to CTIA data. And based on data from Omdia and 5G Americas, 5G wireless connections will reach 5.9 billion devices globally by the end of 2027.
Like their cookie cousins, IP addresses face an uncertain future. Yet the industry seems stumped for an alternative to its chosen CTV default.
Marketing analytics and ad ops teams are overwhelmed with data, which is compounded by the accelerated pace of generative AI-produced content.
The B2B marketing space has never been as dynamic and powerful as it is today. Much of that power comes from the evolution of the data and tools available to drive precision targeting and messaging at scale. At the center of these evolving capabilities sits audience data, an essential component of today’s successful B2B campaigns.
CTV is entirely its own thing. Doggedly following display practices can cost you time and money.
Advertisers are laser-focused on the seismic shift happening next year with the deprecation of third-party cookies on Google Chrome. But it’s not just cookies on Chrome – Google’s Sandbox initiative is also targeting mobile signals on Android.
The industry is too focused on quantity over quality. Unfortunately, it seems there are many people still chasing scale due to a lack of understanding.
After 12 years of working in – or adjacent to – the ad tech industry, I am coming to terms with the simple answer to many depressing questions.
Digital media and television have been playing by different sets of rules due to the nature of ad delivery and tracking. But these worlds are slowly colliding.
While clean rooms do offer significant value in today’s privacy-first world of data, they are not the be-all and end-all for brands seeking controlled and reliable means of data collaboration.
Arielle Garcia, UM’s former chief privacy and responsibility officer, explains why she decided to leave the large agency holding company model – a model that is rife with competing interests and conflicting loyalties, shackled to the industry status quo by “dysfunctional interdependencies.”
To enable startups to seamlessly integrate with DSPs, ad servers, ad exchanges, measurement platforms and SSPs, a centralized ecosystem and industrywide support are urgently needed.
YouTube is now a rival to TV networks. Yet many networks still post their content to the platform via friendly licensing agreements. In the current war for viewer attention, this is a potentially crippling move.
The proposal to transition ads.txt into ads.json comes with some major problems, and its benefits can be largely achieved in a far simpler way – by reformatting existing ads.txt files.
Of course, the misappropriation of a publisher’s audience data would be unethical. But this is not what contextual providers do.
The two longest-standing names in the affiliate and partnership marketing category, Rakuten and Impact.com, have decided to stop fighting each other and will instead fight together.
The Trade Desk announced that it will begin allowing mutual clients to use its DSP within the Pacvue or Skai platforms.
As AI chat starts to double as a shopping channel, the race is on to build an ad model that doesn’t undermine user trust.
If you thought programmatic didn’t have room for yet another advertising ID graph, then you’d be wrong. On Monday, PayPal launched the PayPal Ads ID, a new identity product tied to PayPal and Venmo’s customer base.
Congress is taking another swing at a federal privacy framework. Wonder what the odds are on Kalshi.
Good news for advertisers, many of whom have found it difficult to meet minimum spend budgets on ChatGPT: Logged-out users can now see ads.
