The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

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February 8, 2022 | 4 min read

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The online landscape is changing rapidly and it’s critical that marketers and advertisers stay ahead of shifts that may otherwise present challenges that inhibit success.

playground xyz, adtech

Adtech predictions for 2022

We’ve seen Apple’s iOS increasingly seek to better protect its users by making it easier to opt out of in-app tracking; both the Safari and Firefox web browsers have now blocked third party cookies, and Chrome is set to deprecate them in 2023. This leaves us with a major question: what do these changes mean for identifying – and marketing to – consumers on the internet?

As part of The Drum’s Predictions 2022 Festival, Rob Hall, the chief executive officer of Playground xyz – a tech firm specializing in capturing and retaining consumer attention – presented a session that took a closer look at these emerging challenges. You can watch the full session at the top of this page.

Looking to the year ahead, one of the major trends that Hall identified was a shift from ‘identification’ to ‘context’. He says: “Our big prediction is that identification will become a dirty word in advertising in the coming year. We're moving away from cookies and identifiers, [so] consumers clearly don't want to be tracked. This is giving rise to alternate solutions, one of which is ‘context’. In 2022, context and creative are going to be supercharged by attention signals, changing the paradigm in how we think about context and creative coming together.”

The turn towards context follows broader changes across the digital marketing and advertising landscape that have been driven by evolving consumer demands in the wake of the pandemic.

Consumers are not only spending more time browsing, shopping, and living in the digital realm but are demanding brands keep up with them too. With more eyes than ever to compete for, it’s vital that marketers embrace new identifiers of user behavior to ensure the efficacy of their efforts.

Hall agrees, adding: “This is all about going after the consumer’s mindset. Is this the right environment and the right context for the ad? Is this the right creative to put into that environment? Is it getting attention? If we can harmonize these factors, then we are going to maximize the consumer’s mindset, and ultimately, ad effectiveness.”

This opens the door to using new or different metrics as a measure of impact. Whereas you may have counted ad impressions as a measure of visibility previously, Hall advocates the use of ‘real time attention signals’ – literally the time a user spends looking at an ad – as a more tangible metric.

In the same way that ‘time of page’ data can indicate how engaging a webpage may be, it seems we are moving into an era in ad relevance in context will be measure in a similar manner. It’s a holistic approach that chimes with the need to serve consumers relevant content in relevant spaces in the wake of cookie-driven advertising that would follow users around online.

This may challenge marketers to rethink how not only the metrics they choose to measure campaign success by, but also push them to reassess and rethink how well they know their target consumer-base. In short, it’s time for contextual, creative and attention to come together and form the next generation of ad targeting and delivery.

For more information, you can watch Playground xyz's full presentation above.

Attention Span Brand Strategy Marketing

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Playground xyz

Playground XYZ is on a mission to master the art and science of maximizing consumer attention. The company has built the world’s first technology stack that integrates...

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