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.
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.
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.
There is no shortchanging the complexity of today’s media industry or the impact that the ever-expanding range of choice has on effective cross-media measurement. That complexity, however, doesn’t grant marketers any leeway when it comes to delivering on business objectives. In reality, increased complexity amplifies accountability.
The last few years saw the app giants take over the mobile app ecosystem, wielding brute strength to overwhelm the smaller publishers whose innovation and risk-taking historically drove things forward. But generative AI is leveling the playing field, giving small and midsize app developers the ability to create new apps and innovate on existing platforms dramatically faster with substantially fewer resources.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This isn’t another article about the death of third-party cookies.
Cookies are false precision and they always have been. Conversations about cookies and what advertisers are going to do when they’re gone are missing the point. It’s a distraction.
The media industry has a junk food problem.
Marketers and their agency and DSP partners have grown so focused on vanity media metrics, such as clickthrough rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC) and video watches, that roughly half of all ad supply is made-for-advertising (MFA) inventory – sites and pages that use clickbait headlines and filler content to generate traffic and cluttered layouts with awful user experiences to cram more display and video ads onto the page.
With screens omnipresent in modern life, the digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising channel continues to see growth.
One reason for this: We’ve modernized workflows such as conventional insertion order (IO)-based transactions and streamlined much of the manual process through the advent of advertising technology. Today, there are programmatic capabilities, real-time bidding (RTB) and streamlined automation of ad serving and delivery of campaigns.
Advertisers have been chasing cord cutters for the last 10 years. But the story in 2023 is viewers cutting streaming subscriptions – and most advertisers aren’t keeping up with this behavior change.
The growth of ad-supported CTV is completely upending our thinking on what an open marketplace or open ad exchange can deliver. Combined with new programmatic protocols and ad serving technology that’s finally delivering the transparency, control and security digital advertisers have come to expect, the open CTV ad exchange is about to democratize TV advertising in an exciting way.
As the digital advertising industry upgrades its privacy protections for consumers, some ad tech providers have wondered what the business impact for improving privacy will be. But how often do ad tech providers consider the cost of staying on legacy technologies such as third-party cookies?
5G can provide significantly greater speeds and accommodate more devices than dated 4G networks. For consumers, it’s revolutionizing communications and content.
But from a marketer perspective, the impact will be no less transformative. So, what do today’s brands need to know about this revolution?
As our industry seeks better ways to understand the size of audiences across platforms, audience reach continues to dominate the conversation. But what gets lost in these debates is the need to measure ad effectiveness beyond eyeballs.
Gamers’ affinity for ad-supported content presents a golden opportunity for brands
For app marketers, success comes down to answering one question: Which users are most likely to churn?
Just as it has democratized more data-driven approaches to so much other business decision-making, machine learning is fundamentally changing churn prediction from an inexact art into a precise science.
Every marketer knows the old adage: It costs much more to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. How much more may vary, but the principle holds true, and it’s the basic idea behind retargeting.
So why is retargeting still overlooked and underfunded by almost every app marketer?
The media landscape is changing thanks to the looming phaseout of third-party cookies and changes being made by smartphone manufacturers. The largest demand-side platforms, meanwhile, are each tackling addressability differently. This makes it more difficult for decision-makers to plan their road maps, which they are working on as we speak.
Right now, I’m shopping online for a very important purchase: I’m trying to find the right remedy for my allergies. Your best chance of getting my click isn’t serving me an ad for the socks I bought earlier today or the car my demographics suggest I might buy. The smart move is to serve me an ad that helps me choose something that will take care of my allergies.
How well do you know your audience?
I’m not just talking about their age, location, gender or purchase history. I’m talking about the subtle details that really tell you who they are as people. Details that provide a clear understanding of how to communicate with them beyond superficial insights.
OOH advertising spend is nearly back to prepandemic highs as of Q2 2022. This rapid rebound and growth are creating an inflection point for the category – one that’s driving a renaissance for OOH and digital OOH ad experiences going into 2023.
We’re going back to the basics in 2023. After a few years of big spending on brand campaigns and doing test drives of emerging channels, inflation and recessionary pressures mean pumping the brakes on superfluous spending and the nice-to-haves. Here are the key trends I see driving digital marketing in 2023.
The golden era of digital streaming is upon us. YouTube is the largest connected TV platform, surpassing even Silicon Valley powerhouse Netflix. For creators, this is a shortcut to advertising opportunities, since ad-based streaming and commerce opportunities allow creators to increase their impressions and decrease costs.
