Opinion

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.

With 43% of Roblox’s users under 13 and about 70% 18 and under, Roblox must pay attention to legislation and policy around advertising to children. But it would be a total head-scratcher for Roblox to pivot its ad business to focus on over-18 audiences.

While our ultimate and urgent goal is to reduce emissions, getting companies used to reporting even when they have higher emissions is a critical step in the process.

Here are some key challenges preventing retail media from reaching its full potential, with some ideas for how to overcome them. 

The rapid growth, nearly ubiquitous use, and public interest around generative AI – alongside a shifting social media landscape and divisive political issues – will present new challenges for voters, platforms, media and marketers.

There are over one billion connected TVs globally, with US advertisers expected to spend nearly $27 billion on Connected TV (CTV) in 2023 alone. And as the rise of CTV disrupts the industry, it’s generating new marketing opportunities for advertisers.

If ad tech were a medical patient, a doctor would diagnose it with, among its other ailments, a bloat problem – specifically, bidstream bloat.

Third-party cookies, once widely used by marketers to track consumers online and target and measure digital ad campaigns, have fallen out of favor with international regulators keen to protect consumer privacy. Since Google originally announced its intention to phase out the use of third-party cookies on its market-leading Chrome browser, the ad tech industry has been developing ways to ensure that marketers and publishers can continue to deliver effective and measurable advertising, while respecting user choice and rights through consent.

The second round of ad fraud (and worse) alleged by Adalytics on the part of Google/YouTube provides yet another definitive example of the problem with mega walled gardens.

Brands need to start preparing for a contentious election season, crafting strategies for how they’ll deal with hot-button issues.