Opinion

In a wildly exciting and inventive sector, YouTube is merely meeting the status quo – with scope for so much more.

Having time to prepare for major changes is generally regarded as a good thing, both in life and the digital advertising industry. But when it comes to preparations for a privacy-first, post-cookie world, there’s been far too much talk about preparation and far too little action. This is hurting advertisers’ results today, not just in some theoretical future.

A significant number of solutions that claim to be cookieless, including unified IDs and cohort-based targeting, still rely on IDs. These solutions will find it extremely difficult to achieve the scalability required to become a true successor to cookie-based advertising.

The Washington Post is looking to capitalize on a resurgence in advertiser interest in news content, and the AI trend, to create new opportunities for brand collaborations.

The more time the marketplace has to evaluate the Privacy Sandbox – and, particularly, the Topics platform – the worse those platforms will look.

When an ad tech company goes belly up – and its destiny is being decided by indifferent creditors – it becomes difficult for unfamiliar bankers to capture (or preserve) the value.

It’s only fitting that YouTube, which has long coveted TV’s ad dollars and advertisers, should find out what it feels like to be treated as if it were TV.

U.S. state privacy laws are multiplying at a dizzying rate. Here are the key points to know for the collection and processing of sensitive information for the rest of 2023.

Based on the growing flurry of lawsuits against creators, it’s clear that many of them are dangerously unaware of the legal risks involved in influencer marketing.

Publishers who have strong first-party relationships with loyal user bases are at an advantage – and the homepage is where that relationship thrives. 

The alleged independent third-party ad verification on YouTube and across its network does not actually meet the standards any rational being would have for “independent” or “verification.”

When you lose something important, you want to get it back. That’s the human instinct driving the conversation around signal loss. Marketers rightly feel an urgency to get back to a higher level of confidence targeting, attribution and measurement – particularly with broader economic pressures squeezing budgets.

Now that the new California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) has long been in effect, it’s time to clean up your pixel game.

The 70th annual Cannes Lions moved faster than ever to match the speed of the convergence of convergences happening in the industry. Here are five themes that stood out from the event.

Video and CTV bring challenges and opportunities for notice and choice. And doubts persist about whether the industry can self-regulate on the issue.

If you scan the ad tech headlines, you’d assume artificial intelligence (AI) offers the solution to every challenge facing today’s brands and agencies. Even if marketers understand how the hype machine works, many are still willing to buy into the smoke and mirrors, especially when it comes to the power of AI to cure what ails them (e.g., the deprecation of third-party cookies and the loss of other previously relied-upon industry identifiers).

AI went from quirky novelty to dominant disruptor in a matter of months, taking over the headlines, as consumer-friendly and business-centric AI applications continue emerging in every sector. AI’s role in digital advertising is much more established, but rapid advances increasingly deliver unexpected and transformative capabilities for digital marketers.

History proved that black-box algorithms aimed to optimize business metrics will have severe, harmful consequences that are often not predicted.

Here’s how you succeed in ad tech: Analyze more data in more complex ways and turn that into differentiated products.

Ad tech players know it’s not that simple. Until recently, this path required obscure detours through data summarization and sprawling tech specialization.

Following the broader digital ad world, the TV market is rapidly moving to the impression-based model. Managed services for impression-based (including addressable) remain alive and well, but this year’s Upfronts demonstrated the most dynamic growth centers on the programmatic marketplace.

In truth, it doesn’t matter when – or if – third-party cookies go away for good.

Despite the industry’s collective hand-wringing, we’re in a moment rife with possibility. The advertising industry has never been better positioned to think differently about how to delight consumers with useful and relevant advertising while continuing to prioritize their trust. Of course, this requires making use of different, sometimes new technologies and tactics and embracing an open mind.

More advertisers, especially marketers, who have been slow to embrace AVOD, will increasingly gravitate to primarily AVOD services, writes Greg Smith, Aniview’s GM for North America.

There’s no better way to improve customer trust – and boost brand reputation – than handling first-party data respectfully and effectively, writes Recurly CMO Theresa McEndree.

It’s possible to improve your efficiency as a publisher while also reducing your carbon footprint, with no cost to revenue.

The key to developing a marketing strategy that spans multiple products and stakeholders is to not only identify technical interdependencies of different product teams (or even subsidiaries), but also the conflicting interests of the stakeholders.

Although businesses think they are paying the correct affiliate partners, there is huge risk that they’re pumping money into misattributed sources.

Will ChatGPT take all of our jobs or just make them easier?

I’m optimistic. Even early use cases for AI and tools like ChatGPT have shown to improve our efficiency and quality of life — and the ad tech world holds several early AI success stories. AI is improving performance, enabling us to finally scale up hyper-segmentation, real-time experimentation and one-to-one feedback loops. But, more importantly, AI is freeing up sharp human minds to be more strategic, curious and explore new ideas.

Instead of keeping tabs on static data assets, organizations must adapt to a world in which data is embedded in ubiquitous and rapidly evolving AI tools. 

Likes and followers are not without merit, but engagement is not directly causal of sales rates. What should marketers consider instead?

Among streaming ad providers, there is a temptation to make streaming ad ROI look better than it really is (and definitely better than linear).