Weekly Roundup: Second-Party Data, Next Ad Tech Issue and More!

Second-Party Data Gets Revived

GDPR hasn’t wiped out the face of digital advertising as we feared. Instead, it has been reviving some of the moribund corners of the ad tech industry.

Contextual targeting got a second wind as the advertisers started to focus on contextual-targeting when the privacy law hit the shed. As per source, advertisers have requested publishers to run pure contextual-based targeting for certain campaigns.

Then, programmatic guaranteed got its turn. The demand for programmatic guaranteed was higher this year than that of the last two years. Responding to the increasing demand, several ad tech vendors have started developing support and platform to help the advertisers.

“Agencies that are a little bit nervous [about GDPR compliance] and clients that aren’t sure what their agencies are doing are asking for programmatic guaranteed buys. In general, the pressure is coming from clients rather than the agencies.”

– From a U.K Publisher.

What’s next?

It’s second-party data. Digiday noted that several major publishers including The Guardian, News UK, and Business Insider have experienced a rise in the usage of second-party data. Many advertisers are currently exploring the ways to co-mingle their own data with the publisher’s own to improve the targeting granularity.

Takeaway:

As the third-party data remains questionable, advertisers are diversifying the strategy. We all know the first-party data is invaluable to publishers. GDPR has accelerated the demand and it will continue to grow as we move towards ePrivacy regulations. In fact, a few publishers have already started to capitalize the market by devising their own datasets and supporting products. Be ready to face the questions from the buyers.

Breaking the Duopoly is Hard.

Amazon, the retail giant’s ad business is well on its way to cleave the duopoly. eMarketer says it can rake in $4.2 billion in ad revenue this year. Well, we all have to agree that Amazon Ads is showing no sign of slowing down.

However, breaking the duopoly is no joke. They’re duopoly for a reason. Amazon has been facing some headwind as small retailers and business owners are complaining about the non-user-friendliness of the platform.

What’s on the horizon?

Amazon usually doesn’t take the user feedbacks for granted. It simplified its ad tech offerings into a unified platform, offered more video ads, and has been closely working with a group of advertisers to test up-and-coming products.

That being said, we can expect it to streamline its self-serving platform to woo advertisers. In fact, it needs to retain the advertisers if it’s eying for a prodigious market share anytime soon.

Takeaway:

Google and Facebook captured and retained a large part of its advertisers by offering a user-friendly self-serving platform. From zero to ads, you can run, optimize, and generate reports without requiring the third-party assistance. As a publisher, you may not be prepping up to develop a platform. But it’s better to know the vendors you’ve partnered with don’t push the advertisers in any way.

Ad Tech Issues: DSPs or not

Ad fraud is a prevailing problem in the digital advertising industry and it is well-rooted in programmatic because of the obscure transacting nature.

Theoretically, ad exchanges are foolproof and can block all the redirects with the proprietary technologies. Besides, publishers partner with ad fraud detection companies to ensure readers are delivered only the ads. But they can’t detect and block malware 100% of the time. So, the bad actors continue to exploit the ad tech ecosystem.

Recently, Ad Exchanger reported that Ad fraudsters are impersonating as real DSPs to run malware and forced redirect ads.

Amobee Got Spoofed

Amobee Inc, which has been in the news lately for acquiring Videology got spoofed by the ad fraudsters. The company called ‘Amobi Inc’ pretended to be Amobee and ran malware ads until the Ad lightening caught the analogy.

“The fraudsters, whoever they are, were spoofing a respected DSP and using a well-known brand’s creative, neither of which had anything to do with this, to deliver malware.”

– Scott Moore, Ad Lightning’s CEO and founder

Amobi Inc has a website and bogus LinkedIn profiles to show off as the legit DSP (or in this case real Amobee Inc). Open X and Pubmatic have been exploited by the impersonator and they have blocked the creatives from the amobiinc.com as soon as they were made aware of the situation.

Takeaway:

Everyone know fraudsters are gonna boomerang back to the industry. SSPs alone couldn’t possibly handle the masqueraders at scale. We believe it takes more than ad fraud detection technologies to stop them. As a publisher, look out for the red flags (someone pretending to offer direct deals from trusted brands which aren’t even in your location) and proactively monitor for any spikes in GA and your ad server.

Long-term? Maybe an Ads.txt for buyers as suggested here.

eMarketer: Video Swells to Capture 25% of the US Digital Ad Spending

According to eMarketer’s latest forecast, video will attract a quarter of the total US digital ad spending.

“In 2018, video will grow nearly 30% to $27.82 billion. That means video ad spending will make up 25% of US digital ad spending”

– eMarketer

Who else is taking a cut on Video?

Obviously, social media plays a vital role in today’s digital advertising and so, they’re going to take a significant cut on the 25 percent of the spend.

Facebook (as expected) takes the lead. The largest social media network will take almost 25 percent of the US digital video ad spend. This means $6.81 billion will be diverted to Facebook and Instagram alone.

Next up, is Twitter. Twitter gets more than half of its US ad revenue from video ads. To be exact, 55%. The platform will attract 8.1% of total US digital video ad spending this year but is expected to drop slightly through 2020.

SnapChat, with its revamped monetizing strategy, aims at full-year profitability on 2019 and it means, the camera company has to start capitalizing on the ballooning video market. As per the estimate, Snapchat will attract just 1.4% of the total video ad spending this year and will improve slightly through 2020.

Takeaway:

Literally, everyone who’s relying on ad revenue has begun to focus on video. From the duopoly to premium publishers, no one wants to be the last on the list. If you wonder what you could do to grab the market, try running outstream video ads sparingly (Dotdash does a great job in running outstream video ads) and measure the results. If it doesn’t work out well, there’s third-party video distribution.