Opinion

Here’s an idea: Forget years of appeals. Google should spin out its entire network unit as a public benefit “B Corp” with capped margins. writes Arete Research’s Richard Kramer.

Seven years ago, some people believed targeting on connected TV (CTV) wouldn’t be possible without cookies. Fast-forward to today, and cookieless CTV targeting is not only possible but commonplace. We’ve entered an era where precision targeting is the norm, even as the traditional methods of tracking have evolved.

The holiday season is here, and understanding how different generations plan to shop can help you tailor your messaging, media planning and creative based on the generation you’re targeting.

Google isn’t perfect. But it offers convenient, cost-effective advertising tools that millions of small businesses use to find customers, grow and succeed. If the DOJ breaks up the company, it will also break those tools.

Competing agendas are limiting the tools publishers have at their disposal in ways that aren’t always primarily motivated by user privacy. Here are five things about privacy in digital media that should keep publishers up at night.

Could Google’s antitrust cases change how we use the internet? The short answer: possibly.

Marketers are on edge, as the remedies for this case could disrupt the bedrock of marketing. Search marketing, for example, is a linchpin of acquisition strategies that commands nearly 40% of US ad spend. Google’s ad tech commands a massive share of the online display market. If the cornerstone that is Google marketing crumbles, the ripple effects would be massive. Traditional search and acquisition strategies could falter.

The streaming landscape is rapidly expanding, with over 2,000 streaming services vying for US consumers’ attention. This surge has not only increased content availability but also heightened competition and subscriber churn. Samsung Ads’ data shows that, for every active user on a streaming app, eight users churned last year. This poses a significant concern, complicating media planning and monetization.

Identity chaos – that’s what a customer recently called the current state of identity management (or lack thereof). It became clear that the customer’s plethora of options, methodologies and use cases – all with their own trade-offs and a lack of interoperability – resulted in significant confusion and limitations.

As we lean heavily on AI tools to enhance content efficiency, we may have reached a tipping point where we are creating more content in service of media algorithms, rather than for the benefit of consumers and brands.

At the risk of sounding like “the year of mobile,” we’re at the beginning of a new phase in ad tech with the rise of AI. Advertisers and ad tech partners alike are overwhelmed with AI opportunities, eager to implement it in meaningful ways. But when seemingly everything is powered by AI, how can you make sure you’re using it successfully?

Randomized controlled trials are the best source of evidence of cause-and-effect relationships, including advertising’s impact on sales. Imagine the potential for conducting geo experiments using ZIP codes instead of DMAs.

The controls and measurement for performance advertising keeps getting more granular, more precise and more sophisticated. Yet brand advertising – even on digital channels – may feel like it’s stuck in the 1950s. Advertisers blanket broad audiences with high-level brand messages, accepting that the value and impact of these efforts may be largely intangible or […]

The TV industry has come a long way from the early days of cord-cutting skepticism. Today, consuming entertainment on the living-room screen over the internet is the norm.

While CTV has emerged as a powerful and unique advertising medium, venue-based DOOH streaming is distinct and requires its own marketplace to fully realize its potential.

Despite Google’s recent decision to continue support for third-party cookies on Chrome, the ongoing degradation of legacy identifiers and data signals within the digital marketing ecosystem continues at an impressive pace.

Adopting standards and interoperable IDs can benefit the entire ecosystem, enabling solutions that can help solve for omnichannel ROI and more effective tracking of ads across platforms.

If your marketing strategy isn’t data-driven, you’re not alone. Data has played a role in advertising for decades, going back to market research focus-grouping to understand feedback on branding. In the health care space, however, data is often underutilized due to fragmented systems and a lack of integration between marketing and clinical data. With over 97% of health care data still untapped, vast opportunities for creative, targeted solutions remain undiscovered.

In typical data analysis, you need to know what you’re looking for before starting. But deep learning models can reveal links between cause and effect regardless of whether anyone would think to look for them.

If attention is treated like viewability 2.0, high or low attention could become a blanket requirement for a campaign and hinder performance.

As AI eases one process, it creates new concerns around data privacy. And with more regulations like California’s AI safety bill surely coming soon, marketers need to stay on top of their ethics game.

While you may have been making strides in diversity, equity and inclusion, your AI journey has the power to derail and undermine your actions.

The distribution of live sports on CTV is driving one the biggest disruptions to traditional linear TV advertising. For the first time, NBCUniversal Olympics inventory was made biddable on Peacock. With over 4.5 billion minutes of coverage streamed during opening weekend – and the second-best day of engagement ever for Peacock – advertisers reaped the rewards of digital viewership.

With political ads flooding every channel, how can brands remain relevant and connect with their audience without adding to the noise?

ID bridging isn’t the problem. Buyers are objecting to unexpected, undisclosed manipulation of critical data in bid requests by sellers.

An ex-Googler asks: Has the commitment to perfection over progress led to the current state of play for the Privacy Sandbox and harmed the industry’s opportunity to provide better consumer privacy?

The only way forward for the industry is to put consumer choice first. That means putting the cookie behind us and rebuilding our relationship with consumers.

Publishers are in the business of selling their readers’ attention to advertisers. But in response to consumer preferences and regulatory pressure, publishers should reposition themselves as champions of data dignity.

Instead of erasing the idea of brand safety, we should be developing smarter, more nuanced solutions that protect both news publishers and advertisers.

Social commerce is already huge in the Asia-Pacific market, and it’s poised to blow up worldwide. Here’s how the success of TikTok Shop forecasts the future development trends of ecommerce and social commerce in the US.

Attention metrics can end the false dichotomy between “performance vs. branding” by ensuring that ad campaigns satisfy performance and branding goals in ways that are mutually reinforcing.