Opinion

Mid-core and hardcore gaming apps thrive when they have a core group of invested and engaged users with high lifetime value (LTV). App marketers can’t afford to wait for this engagement to happen organically. In fact, many marketers could benefit from focusing on retargeting three key audience groups: payers, lapsed payers and new installers.

The giants of linear TV are fully aware of the power of streaming. Yet it’s difficult for linear budgets to shift to streaming the way things currently stand, writes Anthony Katsur, CEO of the IAB Tech Lab. The industry has a simple goal to pursue: to establish interoperability between legacy linear and connected television, which will streamline ad spend across both channels.

The MRC is taking on the task of accrediting media mix modeling. But the industry needs to agree on definitions at the very least, then align on methodology. In the meantime, Marilois Snowman, CEO and founder of Mediastruction breaks down how to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of existing models.

Like it did for the web, programmatic is transforming linear TV ad buying. But TV calls for a more nuanced approach. The programmatic technology that automates ad serving on TV will have to be different from the rest of the digital ad ecosystem, said Pooja Midha, EVP of Effectv, the ad sales division of Comcast Cable.

In recent months, the IAB Tech Lab’s seller-defined audiences (SDA) have rapidly emerged as a strong contender for privacy-compliant audience classification. But many publishers still rely on time-consuming, manual processes to assign categories to their content, writes Oleksii Borysov, VP of product at MGID.

Publishers need to rethink their monetization strategies.

As the shift toward privacy takes away the low-hanging fruit of tracking users and selling user data, publishers need to play the long game – cultivating a dedicated audience by delivering authentic, high-quality experiences based on relevant content for their users.

Proctor & Gamble recently announced their support of The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0 identity framework. The partnership is significant for a couple of reasons. First, where P&G goes, other brands will follow. And second, approval hints at the rise of new walled gardens that could become even more powerful than Google and Facebook, writes Nancy Marzouk, CEO and founder of MediaWallah.

The growth of streaming has pushed TV into the realm of digital media, enabling data-driven, audience-based advertising and near-real-time impression-level decisioning. This new era of TV advertising requires a new era of measurement that delivers the granularity and speed advertisers need to maximize campaign performance.

Ad tech saw almost 1,500 M&As between 2020 and 2021. So is this consolidation trend here to stay? It looks like it’s a resounding yes, writes Matthew Papa, SVP of business and corporate development at Captify.

Scroll through the articles on any site about advertising and technology, and you’re bound to run across enough Mad Men and Don Draper references to put you at risk of secondhand smoke. That’s understandable. It’s a helpful shorthand for distinguishing between the creative side of advertising – catchy slogans, beautiful imagery, emotional storytelling, product heroes – and the dominating world of algorithms, data segments and attribution models.

Today, Latinos make up nearly 20% of the current U.S. population. They’re also the future of America. Almost 30% of all kids are Latino. But despite U.S. Latino consumer power coming in at around $1.7 trillion annually, only 6% of the overall industry investment goes toward this market. 

Publishers that don’t buy traffic don’t usually have a problem, but even what you might call “good” or scrupulous publishers do have some invalid traffic, says Steve Guenther, VP of digital auditing services at the Alliance for Audited Media.

In a saturated technology marketplace, it is becoming harder for vendors to differentiate themselves. A competitive environment means using all methods available to win over buyers. One time-tested way is via industry analysts, writes Marc Johnson, general manager and CMO at Bombora. 

Programmatic advertising can be notoriously complex. But in the streaming category in particular, there is ample opportunity to improve transparency, revenue and user experience — namely, supply-path optimization and better data technology, writes Troy Bubley, co-founder and president of diDNA.

Apple is disrupting old business models that refuse to evolve or die. And the entities affected are fighting back with what is left: weak narratives and conspiracy theories, writes audience and data strategy consultant Alessandro De Zanche.

The benefits of technology are seemingly endless. Yet despite the many doors that smart TVs will open in the years ahead, they won’t – by themselves – provide the media industry with an accurate view of who’s using them, writes Jonathan Wells, SVP of data science at Nielsen.

Back in 2016, Apple introduced search ads for the first time. Since then, it has transformed this new source of revenue into a growth strategy. As a result, today, the ad tech industry is no longer a titans’ dual between Google and Meta. Apple is also taking a prominent position.

Supply-path optimization remains a hot industry topic. Increasingly, advertisers and publishers see the value in SPO to get closer to one another’s audiences. But identity is stoking the fire on the convergence of programmatic supply and demand, writes Lauren Fisher, GM of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions.

You can read hundreds of think pieces on new approaches to targeting in a cookieless world. I’m here to tell you they’re all wrong.

The most viable, sustainable and effective alternative isn’t new: Contextual targeting is the only proven approach to targeting that fundamentally embraces the privacy-centric paradigm.

For digital media, Scope 3 includes agencies, tech companies and publishers. Everyone in the digital advertising supply chain is equally responsible for its sustainability. That’s why, to successfully sustain it, marketers must connect their efforts to wider corporate goals, use standard certifications and measurements, and prioritize innovations that create a winning, sustainable scenario for everyone, writes Ben Riley, general manager at SeenThis. 

Retail media networks (RMNs) and the ad industry are in the honeymoon phase. RMNs are currently cresting the peak of inflated expectations, according to Gartner’s most recent hype cycle report focused on digital advertising, which was released over the summer. And you know what comes next: a slip down into the trough of disillusionment. It’s […]

On the mobile web, outstream is in, and instream is out. With its latest guidelines, the IAB Tech Lab has effectively ended instream, declaring outstream the primary path for web video inventory. This shift will mean incredible things for the advertising ecosystem, writes Eric Hochberger, CEO of Mediavine – namely, a transparent buying and selling experience for video inventory that should help supply and demand.

Google Topics is Google’s proposed replacement, which takes us back in time to broad, interest-based segmented targeting. This means brands are about to return to the “bad old days” of marketing, when many audiences all saw the same message. And this one-message-fits-most approach doesn’t fix what’s fundamentally broken in MADTech: the consumer experience, writes Tara DeZao, director of product marketing, MarTech and AdTech, at Pega.

It’s no secret the holiday season is a key sales period for retail, travel and many other industries. This season can make or break a business, large or small. But with high inflation and fears of consumers pulling back, there are a lot of unknowns this year.

To help brands prepare, Commerce Signals has produced a Holiday Spending Forecast that predicts consumer behaviors between Thanksgiving and the week of Christmas.

Connected TV marries a century-old piece of technology (television) with the capabilities of the internet. This presents an interesting challenge when we think about where CTV belongs in a marketing funnel, writes Andrew Mullins, director of programmatic at Realtime Agency.

In Q2 of 2022, ad tech witnessed a slowdown in scaled deal activity (almost 60%). The reason? Global inflation, the Russia-Ukraine war, rising interest rates and the prospect of a recession are just a few factors. But what does this mean for publishers in particular, and how can they prepare? Kean Graham, CEO and founder, MonetizeMore, offers his perspective.

Social media, especially Facebook, has been the backbone of many brands’ advertising strategies for the past decade. However, new trends indicate it might fall off the favorites list soon. A recent report from the tech giant shows an unprecedented decline in its daily active users, writes Pedro Campos, founder of Advertongue.

Transparency is the keystone that will bring together the best of linear advertising with the best of programmatic. Brands should be able to get more transparency on programmatic CTV, but, just as importantly, publishers should get something in return for sharing this information, writes Nicole Scaglione, global VP of OTT and CTV at PubMatic.

With so much upheaval in our industry, agencies are the ones bearing the brunt of the greatest changes. If you’re an agency that wants to last beyond this chaotic inflection point, you will need to make three core changes across your business: evaluate what your core competencies truly are, take proactive steps to retain your top talent and accept that brands want more ownership in your relationship, writes Rob Beeler, founder of Beeler.Tech.

To plan, target and measure media buys on TV, advertisers need to resolve identity at the household level, which calls for full media transparency, said Kelly Metz, managing director of linear and advanced TV activation at Omnicom Media Group. Kelly Metz will be speaking about the future of TV measurement at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference on October 17-18 in New York City. Click here to register.