Digital media’s value proposition is the ability to more finitely target audience segments, moving beyond traditional demographics, leveraging deterministic user data to paint rich, behavioral-based customer profiles, delivering a marketer’s message to those customers inexpensively, at scale.
This dynamic resulted in the rise of U.S. digital media spend from $26 billion in 2010 to $139 billion in 2020 (source: IAB/ PwC).
Yet recent developments, including increased regulatory activity surrounding consumer data privacy protection (GDPR, CCPA) and the resulting moves away from the use of third-party cookies to track website visits and collect consumer data to help marketers target their messages, have exposed some challenges related to digital media and customer targeting that the industry must now contend with.
The primary issue going forward is the fact that the major browsers have stated that they “will not use alternate identifiers” to track consumer web browsing activity. Further, consumers remain distrustful of sharing personal information, which has significantly thwarted marketers’ opt-in efforts, limiting their personalization and targeting strategies.
Secondly, data brokers and data management platform (DMP) providers may offer little credible support in this area. In a recent Forbes article entitled, “How Accurate is Programmatic Ad Targeting” Dr. Augustine Fou suggested that few AdTech providers “have users that voluntarily provide” demographic information. This means that the targeting “characteristics or parameters that a data broker or DMP has on users are derived.”
Thirdly, digital media fraud continues to limit marketing optimization efforts. In their 2021 “Marketing Fraud Benchmarking Report” Renegade and WhiteOps profiled some of the outcomes experienced by marketers whose databases have been corrupted by fraud. These include:
- Website traffic spikes, not connected to new content
- Steep increases in traffic associated with marketing campaigns
- Wide variances in time-on-site metrics, depending on traffic source
- Lower than expected conversion rates
- Diminishing quality of in-bound leads
The primary cause behind these occurrences is fraudulent bot activity. In addition to skewing digital media audience delivery and campaign performance indicators, this fraudulent activity has also corrupted consumer databases. Thus, marketers may experience difficulty in determining what percentage of their target profiles and contacts are real or fraudulent, leading to ineffective and expensive retargeting and profiling efforts.
The alternative being suggested by many is to fall back on contextual marketing. In short, placing a marketer’s advertisement in the most appropriate context (e.g. adjacent to the most relevant content). This means either working with publishers and websites directly accessing their first-party data to target advertising based upon user activity and content preferences to shape ad targeting decisions or, in the case of ad networks, serving up ads based upon page content, keywords and metadata.
Unfortunately, some browsers such as Google will not allow advertisers to access contextual content categories and or identifiers to inform their ad targeting efforts. Additionally, one important trade-off of contextual targeting is that data is not collected on the user for use in creating buyer profiles or in predicting future behavior and thus has little value in establishing targeting parameters or in remarketing.
With 54% of U.S. media spend being allocated to digital and 65% of that being programmatic (source: Zenith Media), marketers and their advisers have their work cut out for them as they navigate the new digital playing field.