our take on AdWeek
Didn’t make it to Adweek? Look no further. Our very own Rosa Hamadouche, Director, Digital, had the pleasure of attending the high-profile conference in NYC earlier this month. She walks us through the hot topics that were on everyone’s lips and what key takeaways she’s taking back to the office with her.
A few weeks ago, my colleagues, Thiago, Christy, Kareem, and I attended Advertising Week in New York City. We had the chance to attend several conferences and panels focusing on a variety of topics (Advances in Adtech, Creative Concepts, Data and Decision, Culture, Social Impact, The Employee Experience, Modern Marketing and Analytics, and the Future of Programmatic to name a few).
I had the chance to hear from speakers from our own IPG network, Axciom and MAGNA, for example, talking at length about High-Value Audiences (HVAs) and clean room solutions, as well as from other agency groups, programmatic partners, creative automation, and ad tech solution companies.
No surprise, hot topics included the deprecation of third-party cookies, clean rooms, audiences, addressability, and measurement in a world of walled gardens!
This post is a follow-up on the future-proofing solutions being developed for our clients and how our O&O tools can help us prepare for the ever-elusive yet reality of third-party cookie deprecation and impending privacy regulations.
Addressability (the processes and technologies that allow brands to deliver personalized digital ads and measure their business outcomes) is having a transformational moment. The loss of identifiers challenges advertisers to create personalized advertising experiences and meaningful consumer connections, and the continuous rise of walled gardens adds a layer of complexity. The digital advertising ecosystem is responding with determination toward innovation and collaboration. By embracing advanced technologies that build trust, and new industry initiatives such as privacy-based clean rooms and HVAs, a new path toward privacy-focused alternatives is being forged.
But what are clean rooms? Clean rooms are an environment or data and technology infrastructure for privacy-safe collaboration between two or more companies to produce a massive number of outputs based on the needed use case (such as retail sale data aggregation, audience building and segmentation, purchase habits, cross-channel attribution, customer lifetime value).
From finding audiences to understanding how to activate them in a cross-screen world, marketers need a holistic view of their efforts. Sometimes, that holistic view takes a village. The continuous efforts we see are about bringing together partnerships that accelerate the scale and accessibility to audiences.
Data collaboration is important because it can increase the value of your data, while also allowing for the enhancement of targeting and measurement. For publishers, it creates new opportunities in ad offerings, supporting revenue growth through the increased value of impressions (and yes, this can also mean increases in CPM, but this is a conversation for another time)
Collaboration between multiple data providers, tech companies, publishers, and advertisers fuels our ability to build addressability at scale, activating against the advertiser’s unique HVAs, leaning on cleanrooms to provide our clients with aggregate, actionable and measurable audience insights, or in a nutshell, supporting our clients in future-proofing their digital practice in a constantly shifting privacy ecosystem.
As the walled gardens continue to expand with no signs of slowing down, it is easy to become siloed and land on increased fragmentation of data, targeting, and measurement. But the emergence of data clean rooms enables advertisers to operate and grow in this new reality by improving upon the nearly outdated third party-based marketing. Cleans room should be part of every advertiser’s technology strategy to build an aggregated ecosystem inclusive of walled gardens, allowing us eventually to break the silos and look at aggregate measurability.
But why do advertisers need cleanrooms? Brands’ and marketers’ needs have not changed but the ability to access has changed. Cleanrooms are here to help provide that holistic measurement and audience insights.
A solution like MIE (Marketing Intelligence Engine), which our Ad Tech and Innovation team have been tirelessly working on to launch for MEX, will allow us to put together investments, audience, data and tech and break the silos to bring everyone to the same table.
Audience activation and its projected effectiveness will be the key to cost efficiency in an increasingly regulated and privacy-concerned world, where economic uncertainty adds a layer of complexity and measurement restrictions increase the fragmentation of result analysis.
Additionally, audience data should not be used solely for execution and activation, but throughout the campaign life cycle. Kinesso’s audience development tools and capabilities are here to support our teams and clients in planning and strategy, providing us with deep insights, essential for accurate audience evaluation. In execution, HVAs can be used to activate against clearly defined audiences (from both 1st and 3rd party audiences). For measurement, evaluating our reach and frequency against our core audiences, understanding potential scalability opportunities, and audience refinement.
HVAs are a solution to customizing and creating literally any audience we want instead of force-fitting advertisers with pre-defined audience segments, allowing the advertiser to activate cross-channel against a unique audience, moving away from platform and publisher audience limitations and allowing for further convergence in targeting strategy and audience definition.
Finally, and as we know advancement and changes will always fuel additional change, we should expect regulatory shifts and standardization across the industry. The IAB Tech Lab is planning to release its first draft of data clean room standards by December. We should also expect government regulatory bodies to continue elaborating privacy-focused legislation creating a need for adaptability and standardization of the data and audience practices.
N.B: The IAB Tech Lab’s standard site outlines the key areas of focus for 2022:
Creating a portfolio of technical standards to balance consumer privacy and addressability through our work related to identity
Developing technical standards that are needed to accelerate the ongoing growth of Connected TV (CTV) as a channel
Advancing and producing technical standards to combat ad fraud, supply chain transparency, and security
They can be accessed here: https://iabtechlab.com/standards/