Ad market recovery

Following on from last week’s top media trends, Warc has forecast that Global ad investment will grow 8.2% in 2022 to push the total market value past $700bn, 60% of which will be on digital media.  In terms of sectors; transport & tourism will see the biggest growth at 29.4% – more than double the average across all categories – after the steep cuts of 2020.  Recovery this year will return to pre-pandemic levels by 2022 for most sectors, including travel.  Dentsu’s forecast offers similar levels of growth with digital ad spend expected to grow 15.6% to hit $311bn after growing by just 4% in 2020.

French regulators turn heat up on Google

Regulators globally are continuing their push against big tech, with the latest move seeing French regulators fine Google €500m for failing to negotiate “in good faith” with news organisations.  Last year, the French competition authority ordered Google to negotiate deals with news organisations for using snippets of content in search, news and other services. After a number of complaints that Google was abusing its market power for better terms – not showing publishers’ content unless they agreed to let Google use it for free – the regulator has acted.

Google now has 2 months to come up with proposals explaining how it will recompense companies for the use of their news, or they could face additional fines of €900,000 per day.

Open always wins

It’s really positive to see publishers, advertisers and agencies commit to exploring a multitude of different identity solutions, despite Google’s delay of 3rd party cookie deprecation.  For instance, Agency giant Omnicom endorsed UID2.0 whilst exploring other options such as LiveRamp’s Portrait and Google’s Privacy Sandbox.  Similarly; Carbon client Maven has announced support for both UID2 and Verizon’s ConnectID in recent weeks.

Whilst some players may choose to focus solely on 1st party – such as New York Times – pushing forward with solutions that don’t rely on third party cookies is a key part of future proofing our industry, which is why Carbon is taking a fairly agnostic approach. Checkout Carbon’s approach to future proofing identity.  Through agnostic interoperability, adoption of key standards, and data science-driven innovation Carbon is working to ensure publishers can work flexibly with 1st party data, 3rd party data and identity solutions, alongside modelled and contextual solutions that will provide further scale.

Interesting reads & listens

An episode of eMarketer’s Ad Platform podcast this week had an interesting  discussion around SSPs and identity resolution.  In the SSP segment they spoke about Google’s dominance with Amazon and the others vying for the rest, with key differentials being the support & capabilities they can offer publishers – such as the support & unique features Carbon and SmartRTB offer together.  In the identity resolution segment, they speak about Google’s announcement in late June and the importance of planning for the knowns, whilst testing solutions that can future proof against changes.

• According to DMPG, 82% of the top 100 sites in the UK, US and Australia rely on third party cookies still with use cases spanning from measurement, and site personalisation to functionality such as surveys, live chat and sharing.
• An interesting column from Brand Metrics CRO – Tom Jensen – offers some advice on what publishers should do now following Google’s stay of execution of third party cookies.  To summarise; use the time and additional funding from third party cookies to execute a future proofing plan that includes 1st party and contextual cohorts as cookies will go eventually..
• Rob Armstrong – VP of Product at Eyeota – talks about the expanded role of cohort based audiences as a key part of identity’s future.  Specifically he talks about how improving first party data provides a basis for building scalable cohorts to find & acquire new audiences, further growing their first party assets.

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