What happens when 1,300 people in the ad ecosystem get together?
They talk about transparency, signal loss and privacy.
During AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO event in New York City on Monday and Tuesday, it became apparent that these three issues are driving the conversation in ad tech today.
For The Big Story this week, we brought together the entire editorial team to debrief on the trends.
Transparency, for example, exists on a spectrum.
Open market programmatic was once considered a rather murky place to do business despite the … “value.” But open programmatic transactions have become increasingly transparent over the years – and now the bar is being raised even higher as DSPs like the Trade Desk expand their definition of invalid traffic to include visits that were acquired through arbitrage ad models.
And on the other end of the spectrum, connected TV lacks granular measurement that shows where ads are running, known as show-level data, a level of transparency that buyers take for granted on linear TV and with digital video.
Then we turn to signal loss. (And, yes, according to Google, third-party cookies really are going away.)
Replacing lost signals requires assembling a Swiss army knife of tools and knowing how and when to use each tool. There’s a lot the industry needs to get a handle on, from testing cookieless solutions, experimenting with contextual and collecting first-party data to learning about privacy-enhancing technologies and the Privacy Sandbox and leaning into retail media.
No wonder so many people are procrastinating.
But then there’s privacy, the raison d’être for signal loss. When the FTC’s Rashida Richardson took the stage at Prog IO, what stuck out most to our managing editor Allison Schiff was Richardson’s point that companies need to look in the mirror. As Richardson asked the crowd semi-rhetorically: “Are you comfortable with the data practices you’re currently employing?”
To get an honest answer, though, it might be best to pose that question to a company’s finance team – or, better yet, their customers – rather than people in the marketing department. Sometimes it’s hard to take off those blinders.
