UID2 hits roadblocks in Europe

Whilst beta testing takes place in US & Canada, UID2 face roadblocks in Europe as GDPR and potential violations is reportedly scaring potential administrators off, though The Trade Desk notes that it’s working to comply with GDPR.  Joshua Lowcock – exec VP & chief digital officer at UM Worldwide – suggests email is not the sustainable alternative to cookies anyway with a lack of support from big tech & regulators, suggesting a more agnostic approach in the face of futureproofing:

…rather than betting the farm on email, being agnostic on identity solutions – and embracing a mix of deterministic, probabilistic and even contextual solutions – will be key.

Joshua Lowcock – CDO at UM Worldwide

From walled gardens to community gardens, and new Prebid board members

Buzzfeed adopts ConnectID, becoming the latest publisher to start using Yahoo’s third party cookie replacement, and enabling them to pair first party data with Yahoo’s to create an addressable audience of over 148m users.  They refer to this kind of partnership as a “community garden” – with ConnectID now integrated by over 3,000 publisher domains with nearly 1,000 buyers activating their first party data through the identifier.

Prebid welcomed two new board members this week with the addition of Linda Payson, Vice President of Product at MediaVine, and Stephanie Layser, Vice President of Data, Identity and Ad Tech Products & Platforms at News Corp.  The latter of the 2 will serve as publisher task force board representative.

Work ahead for Privacy & Trust

According to YouGove/TheDrum; half of US consumers accept cookies despite concerns about how their data is shared, yet few understand exactly what’s going on.  For instance, only 13% described their understanding of cookies as “very good”, half “somewhat good” and 34% “not very good” or “not good at all”.  Education and legislation will help those Investing in first party & zero party data strategies built atop of transparent value exchanges, but who should be educating users?

…the burden of this should rest on trade associations and solution providers to communicate and educate consumers. Additionally, brands must take it a step further to ultimately protect this data and their customer relationships, providing choice to how their data is used

JoAnne Monfradi Dunn, president and chief executive of Alliant

There’s debate about whether it should be tech or regulators that have the final say on privacy, and whilst regulation has been accelerating, the likes of Google and Apple have taken the mantle on the tech side despite the conflict of interest given they’re commercial objectives.

Ultimately, the net impact of these changes will be positive, serving as an opportunity and a catalyst for the industry to re-evaluate and recalibrate data collection and use it in a way that is more trustworthy and fair to people.

Arielle Garcia, chief privacy officer at UM Worldwide

Predictions season is upon us

As 2021 comes to a close, there will be a flood of predictions for what 2022 holds for publishing & the digital realm.  For instance; AdAge predicts the top 4 programmatic trends with 70 cents on the dollar of digital spend allocated to programmatic channels (rising to 90 cents by 2025) they expect display, CTV, omnichannel, and exploration of cookieless to be key.  Dentsu have released their top media trends which includes the continued rise of contextual, further ecommerce innovation (e.g. social and video), and widespread acceptance of VR.

IAS is predicting more investment in supply path optimisation for 2022 which will see buyers moving towards higher quality media investments:

Rather than simply focusing on low cost ad inventory within programmatic environments, marketers are carefully deploying SPO strategies to seek high quality media underpinned by efficient investments

Tony Marlow, CMO, IAS

IAS’ latest report alludes to video, CTV and audio as growing areas of programmatic; and whilst reach and scale are primary benefits for buyers, they also want more transparency to deal with ad fraud and brand safety.  This news of SPO investments comes off the back of rising media inflation particularly for areas such as TV (6% increase in costs) and video (4.6%) which is likely a result of growing advertiser demand for CTV formats.

Finally Triplelift reflected on 2021, and looked to 2022, with Sonja Kristiansen, VP Global Platform Partnerships suggesting that the ‘DMP’ acronym may be running out of time. We agree – Carbon moved beyond a standalone DMP offering over a year ago when we launched the concept of the Revenue Management Platform in conjunction with Digiday.

Other interesting reads

Subscription growth

Whilst the latest edition of the Press Gazette’s 100k Club revealed some impressive subscription stats with a reported 28m paying online subscribers worth more than $6bn a year across the top 30 publishers. Meanwhile, ad-free, private search engine Neeva is asking will people pay for search?

Sneaky Apple

It’s also been reported that Apple have been sneakily buying ads for subscription apps with the goal of securing iOS subscription fees, but without the consent of the apps themselves.  Whilst free media and downloads seems like a great thing, it also means publishers missing out on potential revenue from direct downloads or other channels where they wouldn’t pay Apple up to 30% of the subscription.

Local media boost

Local media enjoyed 18% surge in online audiences to 37.6m as more consumers turned to local media for coronavirus updates in the last year, according to Jicreg data, which also revealed 42m people in the UK access local journalism online or via print monthly.

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