2022: Contextual, CTV, open market, walled gardens, and more

Digiday’s Programmatic Marketing Summit Recap highlighted a number of key themes going into 2022 including the continuing test & learn approach for post-cookie solutions.  One solution discussed at the summit was contextual which goes beyond just underpinning much of how we collect & categorise content-based data.  New research from Lumen Research/Seedtag showed that contextual ads drove 3.3x higher attention than IAB standard units and 37% more compared to social media ads.

As well as retaining the value of ad inventory by serving relevant ads to first time page visits and enriching 1st party data insights to uncover further opportunities, Carbon’s contextual offering can also leverage Carbon’s custom audience pixel.  Our custom audience pixel identifies contextually relevant events such as time-on-page, number of pages visited in-session, and custom taxonomy terms in order to take contextual targeting further.

Whilst ‘walled gardens’ was a key theme at the programmatic summit – with publishers’ and media’ own first party data-led platforms – Criteo suggests matching first party data with publishers’ offers an additional channel via a more effective open market.

Advertising on the open internet is not only beneficial for marketers and media owners, but also end consumers. The greater the funding available to niche publishers, the more choice people have to benefit from the wealth of information and innovation that the open internet provides.

Joshua Koran is EVP, data and policy at Criteo

Tesco joins the retail media rise

Tesco has become the latest retailer to launch its own media platform with plans to leverage data from its Clubcard loyalty scheme – which includes 20m+ UK households – with Dunnhumby’s data science capabilities to offer both reach and measurement to see whether ad spend has led to instore or online spend.

Our new platform will bring together the wealth of customer knowledge we have, with the insights from dunnhumby, and use it in a way that helps our brands to be more efficient and targeted and ultimately to serve our customers better

Alessandra Bellini, Tesco Chief Customer Officer

With its media reach of approximately 58% of the UK population, Tesco’s move adds to the growing trend of retail media and further emphasises the value of first party data.  As demand from brands to advertise on ecommerce platforms increases retail media costs rise too with retail media ad spend growing 45% in Q3 2021 and CPCs growing 21%.

Whilst ecommerce growth for Cyber Week slowed this year in the US – falling by 1.4% to $33.9bn according to Adobe – it appears that the holiday season overall will reap a 10% growth in sales to $207bn.  This kind of ecommerce growth is fuelling Future plc with plans for US expansion in the pipeline with ecommerce/affiliate revenue growing 36% for the publisher this year versus 27% growth for ad revenue.

UK’s BARB starts measuring video & SVOD

In the face of privacy concerns, media fragmentation and longstanding strength of TV as an effective brand channel, Campaign posed the question to an array of experts – Could addressable TV allow broadcasters to win ad share from the tech giants?

As the TV market becomes more proficient in their use of addressable technology, they can naturally attract more advertisers to the medium.  The cost of entry reduces as a barrier and the ability to deliver relevant engagement…is an attractive proposition for advertisers

Enyi Nwosu, CSO at UM

Combined with rising costs of auction-based marketplaces associated with Facebook and Google, addressable TV offers another option; though only time – and more innovation in spaces such as targeting & measurement – will tell if they can really take budgets away from big tech.  In terms of measurement, UK TV audience organisation Barb has begun measuring video & SVOD platforms such as Netflix, YouTube and Twitch, among others, which will also enable the creation of dynamic audiences specific to these channels.

Pressure on big tech won’t dampen ad revenues

Last week Google committed to more oversight from the CMA in relation to it’s Privacy Sandbox in the UK, whilst also suggesting it would apply the CMA’s recommendations globally.  Meanwhile; the CMA ordered Facebook to sell Giphy after it suggested that this acquisition reduced competition in the display market whilst also giving Facebook too much power over other social media’s access to GIFs.  

Despite the continuing rise of pressure on big tech, it’s estimated that Alphabet, Meta and Amazon will take half of $1 trillion ad market in 2025.  As well as highlighting big tech’s ad power, it also reinforces the growth of the ad market overall which grew 23.8% this year to $771bn, with ecommerce platforms leading growth going forward.  Worldwide digital ad spend will grow 29.1% this year to $491.7bn.

Other interesting reads

Smaller Australian publishers band together

After the initial News Media Bargaining Code seemingly failed smaller publishers, 18 small Australian publishers have formed the Public Interest Publishers Alliance in order to level the playing field with tech giants and larger publishers making confidential deals.

Why zero party data?

Jun Group CEO, Corey Weiner, gives an overview of zero party data and compares it with first party data, both of which hold massive value but zero party data has added levels of transparency due to its voluntary given nature that could drive more authentic exchanges.

Unesco’s Cookie Factory

In an effort to highlight privacy and ethical AI, UNESCO developed the Cookie Factory – a browser extension that allows users to browse the internet under an assumed identity, using fake cookies showing exactly how data is harvested in real-time.

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