Nick Welch was elected as the Chair of the Programmatic Trading Committee on 17th November at the most recent monthly meeting of 2021. Replacing David Goddard (Vice President of Business Development, DoubleVerify), Nick was elected to lead the committee’s work to increase understanding of the programmatic ecosystem and the impact it is having on digital advertising and influence industry initiatives to improve the ecosystem.
Commenting on his newly appointed role and vision for the committee, Nick said “Having worked in programmatic for over 11 years, I believe we are entering a really exciting time for the digital advertising industry. In our role as the IAB Europe Programmatic Trading committee, we have an integral part to play in scaling the industry’s programmatic knowledge, and ensuring it has a key place in the ecosystem in the future. By better supporting educational efforts we have a real opportunity to improve opinion on programmatic, drive results and make a huge difference. I look forward to working closely and collaboratively with the diverse members of this committee to ensure that our work and outputs provide a valuable source to many.”
Nick is an active member of the Programmatic Trading Committee, and now, as Chair, will follow on the great work of former chairs to create channels and connections that enable all committee members to contribute their knowledge and support all industry stakeholders.
The Programmatic Trading Committee is a multi-stakeholder group that aims to increase understanding of the programmatic ecosystem and the impact it is having on digital advertising and influence industry initiatives to improve the ecosystem.
For any IAB Europe Members who would like to get involved in the committee, please contact Lauren Wakefield – wakefield@iabeurope.eu.
About Nick Welch, Programmatic Director, Northern Europe, Integral Ad Science (IAS)
Nick Welch is the Programmatic Director for Northern Europe at Integral Ad Science, responsible for driving IAS’ programmatic business in the region. Nick supports clients’ media strategies such as the impending cookie deprecation and promotes robust cross-industry collaboration with the world’s biggest agencies, advertisers, publishers, and industry bodies.
Nick has been part of the advertising industry for more than 20 years and draws his experience from working across the advertising landscape. Beginning in traditional media like Radio, TV, press through to digital encompassing mobile, web, In-game with the last 10 years in the world of data and programmatic. He has held business development and sales roles on both the buy-side and sell-side of the ecosystem, with brands, agencies, and publishers, including Microsoft, Orange, SpotX, Bauer, and InMobi.
Nick has been a regular contributor of the IAB Europe Programmatic committee, widening industry discussions around sustainability, quality media, transparency, contextual and misinformation
Have your say in IAB Europe’s Annual Industry Polls - Brand Safety and Post Third-Party Cookie
IAB Europe has launched two of its annual polls to assess the status of Brand Safety in Digital Advertising and to understand how the industry is preparing for the depletion of Third-Party Cookies.
Brand Safety Poll
Whilst there are lots of studies which look at consumer views, we want to find out what is actually happening from advertising industry experts. We want your views on how Brand Safety has been tackled in 2021 and to determine what action needs to be taken in 2022.
Have your say in the Brand Safety Poll here.
Post Third-Party Cookie Poll
The depletion of third-party cookies will bring about fundamental changes to our industry, creating new opportunities and challenges. How prepared are you for these changes? And what impact do you think it will have on targeting, measurement, verification and overall investment?
Have your say in the Third-Party Cookie Poll here.
The polls will each take no more than 10 minutes, and by taking part you will be helping us to better understand the challenges that you are facing in these two critical areas. The results will be benchmarked against previous years' results and will be used to ensure our focus for 2022 addresses the key areas that need tackling.
The deadline for both polls is Friday 28th January.
Take the Brand Safety Poll here.
Take the Post Third-Party Cookie Poll here.
Despite a long break from physical events, E-commerce Germany is back and ready to go! They're not only bringing back the E-commerce Berlin Expo in February 2022 but also all the events associated with it. E-commerce Germany Awards is, of course, one of them. There are exciting times ahead, so let's find out what they will bring!
A fifth edition of the E-commerce Germany Awards is coming in 2022. With a special gala to summarise and award the winners, the prestigious contest has become a jewel in the German e-commerce events calendar, attracting increasingly more participants submissions each year.
The awards have gained acclaim across the continent. Does everyone qualify for the competition, however?
Businesses, service providers, and agencies active in e-commerce may enter any one of the twelve categories.
For the entry to be considered, the submitting company must meet a few requirements:
Does this sound like your company? Don't hesitate to submit your entry today. In the following paragraph, you will find the upcoming categories for the 2022 edition of the E-commerce Germany Awards.
As a result of market feedback, E-commerce Germany has responded to the demand to recognise the industry's real innovators, who tackle new sectors each year.
As a result, they've revamped their Awards categories, adding a few new ones as well as modifying some.
In 2022, companies will be competing in as many as 12 categories:
Submissions from both the real revolutionaries in e-commerce solutions and those who help them thrive every day are welcome.
Among all the winners from last year, you can recognize Hubspot, Sendcloud, Infobip, and Fraugster.
Submissions to the E-commerce Germany Awards are accepted until 26 November 2021. Submit your company here
Who will evaluate the submissions?
You can be sure that the group of jurors will persuade you if the categories haven't yet. Could you imagine the feeling of having your submission reviewed by industry giants?
Imagine no longer - submit it straight away. contestants' submissions will be scrutinised by representatives from companies such as:
and many, many more. There is a separate page for Jurors with all the details.
Every year, e-Commerce Germany combine their ceremony of recognising the winners with a huge networking party before the actual E-commerce Berlin Expo. At the ceremony, the winners are announced. During the event, you will also get the chance to meet the Jury and other industry influencers and experts. A must-attend event. You can meet in person to celebrate, share joy, and talk about e-commerce!
Pencil the date - see you on the 8th of February in Berlin.
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For further questions or partnership requests, please reach out to E-Commerce Gemrany's PR Manager, John Cyprych at awards@ecommerceberlin.com.
Learn more about the E-Commerce Berlin Expo 2022 here.
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Since Google announced that third-party cookies were to become obsolete - extended now to 2023 - there have, and continue to be many questions about how digital marketing and advertising will work in a post third-party cookie world. Among them is the question of attribution. With current attribution and measurement techniques so heavily reliant on cookies, what will happen to attribution? And how will ad success measurement work in this new era?
To better understand the challenge of attribution and what we can expect for measuring success in the future, we caught up with members of IAB Europe’s Programmatic Trading Committee to share their thoughts and expertise.
Q&A with:
In this week's member-guest blog post, we hear from Anna Sikora, Client Services Partner at PubMatic, on all things In-App. She discusses the common misconceptions for in-app advertising and how brands have an opportunity to reach highly-engaged, valuable audiences.
Over the past 18 months, in-app advertising has become more sophisticated creating an opportunity for brands to tap into premium, brand-safe inventory at scale. However, due to a lack of understanding many brands are still either avoiding in-app advertising or simply transferring desktop and mobile web strategies, rather than approaching in-app in an up-to-date way. To put it simply, brands are missing out on an opportunity to reach highly-engaged, valuable audiences.
The App Revolution and Reset
Globally, app installs increased by 31% in 2021 as consumers increasingly look for highly accessible ways to access a variety of quality content and entertainment. This has caused a significant rise in the volume of quality in-app ad impressions available. Concurrently, header bidding has made in-app highly scalable and initiatives such as app ads.txt have removed early brand safety challenges. Yet somehow, misconceptions remain, ad budgets have not shifted and in-app remains a relatively untapped opportunity.
In order to reinvigorate brands’ interest in in-app, there needs to be a serious reset in the way publishers and tech platforms talk about in-app and there needs to be a concerted effort to help brands understand the new lay of the land and how to engage today’s app audiences.
The In-App Difference
There is often a misconception that in-app campaigns are broadly similar to desktop and can be retrofitted. However, this is not the case and in-app needs its own strategy in order to be effective. For brands, strategically bought in-app offers many benefits such as:
In order to realise these benefits there has to be a desire on the buy-side to connect with the sell-side and the sell-side must be willing to be flexible and start speaking the same language. Publishers and SSPs need to educate brands on the types of deals that are available and provide deep insights into app audiences to make in-app a worthwhile investment for brands. The challenge so far is that in-app has been an afterthought, and in extreme cases run as a blind buy with very little transparency or control for buyers, resulting in a black box experience and no repeat business for publishers as a result.
In-App Best Practices
For many brands, the first port of call to embark on, or restart in-app is to talk directly to publishers and understand their apps and advertising opportunities. Many SSPs have deep relationships with publishers and are leveraging these to benefit the buy-side. Reach out to SSPs that have in-app expertise. Many run roadshows that enable brands and publishers to speak directly and create a common understanding of the opportunity.
Ensure your campaigns run across a diverse portfolio of apps and formats in order to understand where you can best reach your audience and what makes them engage the most with your ads. Do not be afraid to experiment with innovative formats such as in-ads product rotation and customisation or in-app/in-play formats (ads that appear within the app or game content). These are the perfect places to run brand campaigns and the tracking that is possible in-app enables you to follow consumers into the purchase funnel and better understand consumer behaviour.
Publishers are using the fact that device IDs are disappearing to get their data in order and to create and offer first-party data segments, as well as third-party. Use this data to seek out new audiences and attach value to in-app. If possible feed in your own first-party data to create highly addressable, app-specific, privacy-safe buys that deliver superior performance.
Use technology to access all levels of inventory, first-look, targeted PMP, open market, in order to understand what works best for you. Also work with partners who can offer you bespoke in-app PMPs that give you a clear understanding of who you are advertising to, where you are advertising to them, and what they do after seeing your ads in different environments and in different formats. Ask for total transparency into the buy and reporting that you can easily understand, not sprawling spreadsheets that need a data analyst to decipher and translate into actionable insights.
Hopes For the Next 12 Months
It’s hard to predict what the next year will look like for in-app as it’s a constantly evolving space, but there are some solid trends that have emerged that look set to create a solid foundation from which brands can realise the full potential of in-app.
A huge amount of effort is going into providing brands with easy-to-access, easy-to-understand sources of education which is resulting in strategic in-app planning and buying and campaigns that deliver superior performance compared to earlier campaigns, which is blistering brands’ confidence in in-app and driving repeat business.
Tech platforms are getting closer and closer to making sure that all audiences are addressable and that both performance and direct response advertisers are able to reach their whole addressable market. This will help prove the fact that in-app audiences are of equal value to other channels and could be a driving force behind increased investment and the success of in-app.
Brussels, 14 October 2021 - IAB Europe is dismayed by a new campaign and report, launched by the Greens/EFA in the European Parliament, that paint huge swathes of the internet economy as ‘manipulation’, and call for an outright ban on the use of personal data in advertising that would spell disaster for European media, start-ups and small businesses.
The campaign presents a misleading view that data-driven advertising, and personalised advertising in particular, is uniquely harmful and escapes user control.
It draws on a report that proposes to unequivocally outlaw the business practice, completely disregarding the full applicability of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to any business activity underpinned by personal data.
The paper blatantly ignores a universally accepted all-encompassing definition of ‘personal data’ under the GDPR, disingenuously putting forward a variation of ‘contextual advertising’ as a panacea to all challenges on the web, and as an alternative to data-driven advertising. But contextual ads still require the processing of ‘personal data’ to deliver and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns, and even the most informed account would admit they can only ever be one part of the mix for online publishers and advertisers.
The authors of the study claim that there exist ‘many opportunities for publishers and advertisers to survive, and even flourish, in a post personal data advertising world, despite having to navigate a complex transition’.
Yet those very same businesses – thousands of European digital media publishers, content creators, communications agencies, technology providers, eCommerce businesses, entrepreneurs, and software developers – have already firmly and collectively opposed a ban on targeted advertising, instead calling on the EU to simply recognise and enforce its already extensive legal framework for privacy and data protection.
At a time when EU legislators are negotiating in good faith to try to secure a compromise on the crucial Digital Services Act (DSA) package, this campaign can only be viewed as misleading and, indeed, manipulative. IAB Europe welcomes the prospect of the DSA boosting clarity and transparency around digital advertising, but we must remember just what it is that this legislation is scoped to do, and what impact assessments have been undertaken. At this late stage, introducing an untested and uncosted ban on one of the fundamental drivers of an open and innovative internet is a major distraction from the task at hand and would have simply immense unintended consequences for Europe’s free press, its small business ecosystem and its international reputation.
We call on all reasonable voices to reject this proposal and instead use the tools of enforcement already enshrined in the GDPR.
IAB Europe is inviting all advertisers and agencies to answer the 2021 In-Housing Survey! Take part here.
In-housing programmatic trading has gone from a nascent trend in recent years to a term that more and more brands and agencies are familiar with. But what is the current status of programmatic in-housing in Europe, and how will it evolve in the future?
If you're an advertiser or an agency, please help us to understand the current landscape by sharing your thoughts and experience of programmatic in-housing by completing this short survey.
The deadline to complete the survey has been extended to Friday 5th November, and it takes just 5 minutes to complete. Plus your response will be treated in the strictest confidence.
Help us uncover how programmatic in-housing is being adopted and what the future holds for this trend. Take the survey today!
On September 28, IAB Europe hosted the headline event of our Trust and Transparency series 'The Great Debate'.
The event was created to round up our exclusive September event series by discussing and debating all things trust and transparency in digital advertising.
Featuring a series of panel discussions, IAB Europe and IAB Europe member companies shared best practices and current initiatives and did a deep dive into the latest policy and legal regulations to drive trust and transparency in our industry. They shared their views on what’s being done and what else needs to be done.
In this post, you will find an overview of each of the sessions covered, as well as video recordings for you to view in your own time.
Watch the full event recording here.
Panel 1: Tackling Disinformation in the Industry
IAB Europe’s Chief Economist, Daniel Knapp, lead the conversation on what disinformation is, how it is grown, and what can be done by the industry to curb the spread. He was joined by:
Watch the session recording here.
Panel 2: Tackling Brand Safety and Suitability for Emerging Channels – Gaming, CTV, and Audio
Following on from IAB Europe’s work around educating stakeholders on best practices for brand safety and suitability in emerging channels, this panel delved deeper with practical case studies and examples of what can be done to keep brands relevant and safe.
This panel was moderated by Tina Lakhani, Head of AdTech, IAB UK, who was joined by:
Watch the session recording here.
Panel 3: Understanding the Digital Services Act (DSA)
A panel of industry association leaders from advertising and beyond discussed the latest status of the DSA, detailing what it means to them and the stakeholders they represent, including start-ups, SMEs, and Entrepreneurs.
This panel was moderated by Townsend Feehan, CEO, IAB Europe, who was joined by:
Watch the session recording here.
Panel 4: Supply Chain Transparency
If the digital advertising industry is to increase investment from the buy-side and to continue to benefit consumers through personal, timely, and relevant content, then maintaining transparency is critical. This panel discussed the latest initiatives to help maintain such transparency.
This panel was moderated by Daniel Knapp, Cheif Economist, IAB Europe who was joined by:
Watch the session recording here.
Keynote: New Standards
Presentation by IAB Europe’s Technical Director, Alexandre Nderagakura, and Pierre Gauthier (IAB France Executive Committee member and Commercial Director at Channel Factory) on new standards to drive trust and transparency in our industry including the SCID initiative.
Watch the session recording here.
As part of our Trust and Transparency event series, we are hosting a range of Industry Insider sessions with some of our members. In the series so far, we have heard best practices and advice from PubMatic, OneTrust, Sourcepoint, and Criteo.
If you missed these sessions, don’t worry as you can access them all on-demand here.
Next week we will be joined by leaders from Facebook, Google Integral Ad Science, and Xandr as they dive deeper into key areas of and best practices for trust and transparency.
Join the following events to hear the latest views from leading industry experts. All sessions are free and include an audience Q&A.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Industry Insider With Xandr: How PREX, Delta Pronatura, BurdaForward And Xandr Partnered To Find More Transparency Within The Programmatic Ecosystem!
27th September at 12.00 CET
In August 2021 Xandr partnered with PREX, Delta Pronatura, and BurdaForward to help them gain full transparency over their media investment along the supply chain. Xandr and its partners expanded the SCID (Shared Campaign Identifier) project out of France and showed that it can serve as an industry standard for transparent operations in the ecosystem.
During this session Mediaplus and Xandr will discuss the SCID solution, the opportunities it provides, and why advertisers should care about transparency.
Industry Insider with Google: Building Trust with Privacy by Design - with Google Ads & Chrome
28th September at 16:00 CET
Join this session to hear Google Ads share new research with Ipsos that asked 7,000 people about ads and privacy, and what marketers can do to adapt. Google Chrome will discuss the latest developments on Privacy Sandbox and APIs such as First Party Sets. Join to learn about steps you can take today to prepare your business for what’s to come.
Please note: This is a live event and will not be available on-demand, so be sure to secure your space today!
Industry Insider With Integral Ad Science: Mind The Gap: Addressing Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency
29th September at 12.00 CET
The meteoric growth of programmatic has captured the attention of digital power players. While supply chain optimisation can add complexity, advertisers still need to access the most relevant inventory to reach consumers. In a fragmented landscape where efficiency matters more than ever, how can partnerships make transparency a reality for programmatic buyers?
During this practical session, IAS and a panel of experts will open up an in-depth discussion about Supply Path Optimisation adoption and moving the market towards more transparency.
Industry Insider With Facebook: Driving Change Through Transparency by Facebook
30th September at 12.00 CET
During this Industry Insider webinar, Facebook leaders and subject matter experts will be discussing the company’s commitment to transparency, and why it matters for the future of the industry.
To catch up on any of the Industry Insider Trust and Transparency webinars you have missed, watch them on-demand here.
As part of our September Trust and Transparency event series, we hosted a range of Industry Insider sessions with some of our members. This is where leaders from Criteo, Facebook, Google, Integral Ad Science, OneTrust, PubMatic, Sourcepoint, and Xandr took us through a deep dive into key areas of and best practices for trust and transparency.
All of our events have been recorded and are available to access on-demand, so why not check out the sessions in your own time below:
Industry Insider with PubMatic - Rebuilding the Value Chain with Transparency at the Core
In this webinar, PubMatic examined the wider issue of transparency across the supply chain and discussed how we can continue to work together as an industry to generate progress towards achieving a better ecosystem.
Helen Mussard, Chief Marketing Officer, IAB Europe moderated the session and was joined by:
Watch the session recording here.
Industry Insider with OneTrust - Web, Mobile, OTT & CTV: How to Make Consent an Asset, Not a Hurdle
In this session, Casey Hill, Product Management Organisation at OneTrust shares an understanding of how to incorporate consent and privacy strategies across web, mobile, OTT, and CTV applications, and best practices to help maximise consent rates.
Watch the session recording here.
Industry Insider with Sourcepoint - Responsible Media Through the Lens of Privacy
In this session, Sourcepoint led a roundtable with leaders in responsible media from throughout the ecosystem for a discussion of privacy. They discuss questions such as – How are companies reacting to new regulatory requirements? How can the industry make these changes sustainable? How do we shift the culture to go beyond the notion of binary compliance?
This session was moderated by Justin Pearse, Editor, New Digital Age who was joined by:
Watch the session recording here.
Industry Insider with Criteo: The Responsible Use Of Addressable Media – Rethinking User Consent For The Open Web
In this session, together with their partners, Criteo discussed how to win users’ trust in the future of addressable media and shared some active initiatives that can make this a reality in 2022.
Speakers:
Watch the session recording here.
Industry Insider With Xandr: How PREX, Delta Pronatura, BurdaForward And Xandr Partnered To Find More Transparency Within The Programmatic Ecosystem!
During this session Mattis Koch from PREX (Mediaplus), Jan-Henrik Scharlach and Christoph Platt from Xandr discussed the SCID solution, the opportunities it provides, and why advertisers should care about transparency.
Watch the session recording here.
Industry Insider With IAS: Mind The Gap: Addressing Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency
The meteoric growth of programmatic has captured the attention of digital power players. While supply chain optimisation can add complexity, advertisers still need to access the most relevant inventory to reach consumers. In a fragmented landscape where efficiency matters more than ever, how can partnerships make transparency a reality for programmatic buyers?
During this practical session, IAS and a panel of experts had an in-depth discussion about Supply Path Optimisation adoption and moving the market towards more transparency.
Speakers:
Watch the session recording here.
Industry Insider with Facebook: Driving Change Through Transparency with Facebook
Facebook leaders and subject matter experts discuss the company’s commitment to transparency, and why it matters for the future of the industry.
The session opened with a keynote presentation from Facebook’s VP Northern Europe, Steve Hatch, who shared Facebook’s view for Trust & Transparency.
Helen Mussard, Chief Marketing Officer, IAB Europe then moderated a panel session with:
Watch the session recording here.
This week we kicked off our brand new Trust and Transparency series and what a week it has been so far!
From a 101 deep dive into data transparency that focused on how it works and who benefits from it to an exploration of the socio-economic and cultural value of targeted advertising in Europe. It's been a fantastic start to the series with lots more exciting things to come, as we discuss all things trust and transparency across the month of September.
We hope you've been able to join us but if not, fear not, as below you can find an overview of each of the sessions we've covered so far and the links to the on-demand recordings.
Data Transparency: How it Works and Who Really Benefits
To kick off IAB Europe’s series of events on Trust and Transparency, this session provided a 101 overview on how personal data should be obtained and stored in relation to European data and protection regulation. To truly understand how personalised advertising works and the benefits it brings to people and publishers, it's one not to be missed.
This session was led by Andrew Hayward-Wright, Partnerships Director, SeenThis and Programmatic Advisor for IAB Europe who was joined by:
Watch the session recording here
The Wider Socio-Economic and Culutal Value of Targeted Advertising in Europe
In this session, IAB Europe's Chief Economist, Daniel Knapp presented the key findings from our hot off the press study that systematically explores the wider socio-cultural value of targeted advertising, and how it contributes to the specific make-up of Europe’s economy. He then moderated a stimulating debate about how targeted advertising can be used for good to continue delivering value with the following experts:
Watch the session recording here
In this week's member-guest blog post, Fiona Ellis-Smith, Associate Director, Advertiser Solutions at PubMatic shares her thoughts on the future of audience addressability for buyers.
This year has been the year that we’ve seen the digital advertising industry really take stock of the challenges that need to be addressed to create a fair value exchange and chart a way forward. Advertisers and publishers are forging deeper relationships than ever before and defining new ways to make consumers’ digital content and advertising experiences great again.
What are the biggest changes?
There is now a wide acceptance that as an industry we need to reset and rethink the consumer value exchange and remove the ‘big brother is watching you’ fear factor. Publishers are focusing on diversifying their revenue streams beyond the black and white of paywall or advertising. Through communication and collaboration, advertisers and agencies are able to leverage the opportunities that publishers having more control over their data presents for them from an audience addressability perspective.
Another big change is the realisation that in order to provide a truly valuable experience for consumers and a fair value exchange for publishers, tech companies, and advertisers, we need local data and local solutions. There’s a real opportunity for local, independent publishers, tech, and data companies to harness their expertise and compete on a level playing field with the big players. By offering advertisers with custom solutions that are built to solve for the unique characteristics, regulations, and consumers in each market, we’re taking a big step towards building an ecosystem that can leverage both the power of scale - powered by alliances - and local expertise.
Consumers have, for a long time, been vocal about what they dislike about digital advertising; however, the interpretation of this has been fragmented, extrapolated, and ultimately consumers’ concerns have not been sufficiently addressed. Today, we’re seeing the voice of the consumer being taken more seriously and solutions emerging that give consumers more choice than ever before.
Premium publishers are offering consumers multiple ways to access content, such as 100% ad funded, part ad funded, free, but only in exchange for data. We’ll see more flexible models emerge as publishers learn from these early offerings. Content that is built on consumer data works - e.g. Netflix. When advertising is involved, we need to tread more carefully as the user experience is very different compared to receiving content recommendations. By educating consumers about how the decisions to show certain ads are made and giving them the choice to change the way they access content if they’re not happy, addressable audiences will continue to grow.
What is driving the current changes?
When GDPR came into effect there was a sense in the industry that the ecosystem would change at the flick of a switch on May 25th, 2018. Today, regulations, standards, frameworks, and targeting options are evolving in a fluid manner, resulting in different strategies emerging. All of these strategies are designed to meet the same goal - make the digital advertising industry better.
There’s also a greater sense of collaboration rather than a battle for control. There is an understanding that publishers need to maintain a certain level of control to preserve their user experience and that when publishers have this control, advertisers are better able to engage consumers. This has put publishers in a position to choose who they work with and partner with tech companies that share their values and vision for the future, and support them in building the right solutions for them.
For example, platforms that enable publishers to test multiple ID solutions are in a great position to grow and shape the industry because they enable publishers to gather insights into the benefits that each solution brings. By facilitating this test and learn approach, these platforms are feeding vital, data-based knowledge into the industry, which is something that has been lacking in the past when there has been a tendency to keep learnings in siloes.
What will digital advertising look like in 2025?
2021 is the moment of change that we’ve needed for several years, and there’s no doubt that current endeavours to build post-cookie addressable audiences will cause digital advertising to look very different in 2025. Of course, no one has a crystal ball, but our predictions for the future are as follows.
Publishers and advertisers will be working together in ways that we’ve not even begun to see. There will be joint initiatives designed to inform consumers in non-tech speak about their options - not simply an opt-in to having hundreds of companies tracking them or none at all. In tandem, customer data platforms (CDPs) will evolve to provide more flexibility and be easier to interact with on an ongoing basis rather than a one off.
There will be more logged in users, and as a result, there will be more tailored content and advertising that exists in harmony with that content in a non-creepy but personalised way. This will increase consumer trust and engagement with digital advertising, and the voice of the consumer will have shifted to focus on what they like about advertising, not what they don’t like.
In the TV world, connected TV (CTV) will continue to grow, and as with digital, consumers will have the flexibility to choose how they want to pay for content - financially or with data, which will safeguard content providers’ revenue.
The digital advertising industry is closer than ever before to making advertising that works for everyone, and it’s clear for all to see that we’re on the cusp of great change. Collectively, we’re responsible for driving this change and keeping ourselves accountable. The next five years will continue to be uncertain times, but the post-cookie, consumer-friendly, addressable opportunity is closer than ever.
