DIGITAL ROUNDUP - JULY 2024

Welcome to this month’s edition of the roundup to some core updates in the digital advertising industry.

NB: the following represents my own opinion

Cannes adtech announcements review

DEEPDIVE

Cannes regularly is a means to showcase / celebrate the art of creative, as seen in the Cannes Lions awards swept up by a multitude of agencies / brands. But increasingly it is becoming dominated by big tech in conjunction with newer solutions to the adtech market. So it is not surprising to see that certain big releases are now held to show off at Cannes vs other events.

A couple of these that stood out to me:

Amazon had a big presence & doubled down on some of their offerings within the advertising space, with the official launch of AdRelevance, a form of ad targeting that has no dependence on legacy identifiers. On the publisher side, they also announced SignalIQ in a similar means.

POV: This is good to see from Amazon, they still have some way to catch up with the highest standard of adtech. I did like this more transparent whitepaper on how they model / work without 3p cookies. The proof will be in the pudding, but there is a slim chance that Amazon have truly solved this space, specifically on the DSP side on the open web, where they can’t really do the same thing as their O&O. It is definitely good to see them investing more in the publisher side, with SSPs & with their historical header bidding approach, but there is a long way to go.

Both DoubleVerify & IAS formally announced added capability with Google to measure Performance Max & Demand Gen campaign types on Google Ads.

POV: These campaign types in the Google ecosystem are critical to be thinking about from where exactly they are serving, given they have the potential to serve in pretty much all placements across Google’s footprint. It is positive to see this move but at the same time, it is important to understand technically how this works, in a similar manner to how YouTube is tracked / measured. It ultimately comes down to how Google gives data away, which can be controversial at times.

Some other callouts would include Omnicom making big plays with TikTok, Amazon & TheTradeDesk, making Omni an even more intriguing proposition as it moves into newer mediums. As well as European AdTech coming together to launch EPTVI to grow programmatic in the TV space in Europe.

Google to add ATT Prompt to iOS YouTube

DEEPDIVE

This is a big deal for 1) the implications of YouTube as a full-funnel marketing channel on iOS & 2) further proof that even Google have struggles to make their adtech work in Apple’s ecosystems, to the point there is this big u-turn.

At a topline, this update is aimed at bringing more personalised ads to iOS users who are browsing YouTube, which I’m sure most consumers would prefer. But if we go back to why Google did not introduce an ATT style prompt originally to any of its apps, this was because they claimed they did not use the IDFA, the advertising identifier of iOS for anything therefore did not need to gather consent.

In reality, whilst Google have some iOS measurement solutions in both GA4 & Google Ads, there is still a gap that the IDFA as a relative deterministic ID could give to aim modeling / attribution. And unlike Google in the Android Privacy Sandbox, Apple have never said that they will get rid of IDFA as an identifier.

But now the attention will turn to what would be the AAT opt in rate for an app like YouTube. Consumer apps depending on the vertical still barely get over the 50% mark, which implicates a whole lot of advertising use cases & needing to default to using SKAN / AdAttributionKit. The reality is that an opt out rate of any percentage will impact the effectiveness of YouTube as a paid advertising channel within the platform view, but doesn’t necessarily make it a bad place to be. The need for experimentation & econometrics to factor in YouTube will grow.

OtHeR KEY CALLOUTS

SOCIAL / SEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 📱

• TikTok announced their new AI Creative suite dubbed Symphony, to build video creative using GenAI at scale (TikTok)

• Pinterest have announced their attempt at AI optimisation in the form of Performance+ campaigns, which in namesake is the same as Amazon’s proposition (Adweek)

• X have somehow got TAG certified for Brand Safety again (X)

• Google have announced some fairly big updates to search queries / negative keywords approach in-line with AI advancements (Google)

PROGRAMMATIC HIGHLIGHTS 🌐

• Yahoo DSP roadmap includes a nod towards forms of AI & conversion modeling for measurement, putting it on par with other major DSPs (Roadmap)

• The WFA’s GARM initiative alongside Ad Net Zero have announced a global framework for measuring media carbon emissions in advertising, to bring consistency to sustainability in this space (WFA)

• Uber have made their Journey Ads proposition accessible through programmatic pipes for the first time on a PG basis, with the tier 1 DSPs being able to access this inventory (The Drum)

• More SSP consolidation with Equativ & Sharethrough creating a new indie SSP (Sharethrough)

• Magnite have been selected as the SSP for United in-flight advertising solution, leveraging the SpringServe adserver (Magnite)

IDENTITY HIGHLIGHTS 🆔

• NOYB have now turned their attention to the Privacy Sandbox in terms of lawsuits, with the callout of Google tricking consumers into how they opt into these sandbox APIs (NOYB)

• Mozilla have acquired a privacy startup in Anonym, founded by ex-Meta employees & likely to indicate a potential expansion on how Firefox attempts to run ads in a Brave browser like manner (AdExchanger)

• A nice video webinar from IAB Europe on the state of privacy sandox / programmatic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8AgZz56rWM)

• Criteo have released new insights into their Privacy Sandbox testing (Criteo)

• The IAB Tech Lab Privacy Sandbox taskforce has released a new POV on Privacy Sandbox proposals (IAB Tech Lab)

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