Future of Media: Google's last click, cautious ad spend hope, can programmatic be greener?

There’s huge implication for how marketers benchmark their campaigns. I asked experts from across the adtech industry about the shift to the machine learning model.

With Google cooking up supposedly user-friendly ad products (like its anonymized Floc segments), this new tech ought to accommodate the modern demands of marketers who acknowledge that a last-click maketh not a conversion. There’s about a month before this tool hits the market so read up here.

Ad spend prediction

Both GroupM and IAB UK released their ad spend predictions.

There’s optimism, record growth and HUGE caveats ahead.

As per IAB over the first six months of the year, new figures show an eye-opening 49% year-on-year rise to £10.5bn. The market is significantly outperforming its pre-pandemic baseline.

But, as per GroupM (it thinks UK adspend will be up 30% on 2020), there’s caution for advertisers and ‘speed bumps’ ahead – it lists staff shortages, supply chain issues and rising infection rates as causes for concern. [Check The Drum on Friday for more on those supply chain issues…]

The world’s been rocked by a pandemic and tech giants are upending the digital foundations we’ve all built upon – but so far so good. Growth’s returning and ensuring those livelihoods and the services/content it supports.

Can programmatic cause less environmental damage?

It’s the question I posed to Ryan Cochrane, chief operating officer of global adtech platform Good-Loop. He penned an op-ed you should read. But I respect your time. So here’s some facts/tips.

• The internet represents almost 4% of emissions today (that’s more than the pre-Covid-19 airline industry) and is set to double in five years.
• NYSE processes 3-6bn transactions a day. A single day in

  programmatic, meanwhile, is around 8tn according to best estimates. That’s 2,000x the volume of bid requests and auctions.

• Surfacing large quantities of inventory through open auctions increases the computing requirements to process. Advertisers should seize this opportunity to migrate from the open exchange and focus on curated private marketplace lists and programmatic guarantee deals.

With Cop26 ahead, I expect all media agencies to be sizing up their impact on the environment and plan to minimize and offset that.

TikTok commerce

I spoke to Goal’s James Lamon this morning. Just as you receive this email, it’ll have run its first TikTok livestream sale, punting Fifa 22 and the PS5 to its 1.8 million fans (and more). It’s an early push into social commerce for the former BuzzFeed man and I looked at how he planned the deal and how he will build upon it going forward.

What I know – if Goal can’t sell Fifa 22 to football fans on TikTok, no publisher has ANY business trying to sell anything. We’ll check back in with that once the dust has settled.

Other stuff

• Will Roald Dahl’s IP prove to be a golden ticket for Netflix? [Where Millarverse flopped, can this universe succeed?)

• IAB escalates attack on CTV ad fraud with ads.cert 2.0 [‘Authenticated connections’ is its idea to cut out the shady middlemen]

• Ryan Reynolds’s soul ‘shattered’ by A/B tested CTV ad [This silly B2B ad might be our most-viewed story this week]

• Snap names WPP as first agency augmented reality partner [Do these social partnerships prove the network groups are still relevant?]

• IPG calls out Facebook & YouTube for brand-damaging and ‘inconsistent’ misinformation policies [It does direct an eye-watering amount of money to both]

• TikTok and DoubleVerify team to improve ad measurement and combat ad fraud [Much later to market than rivals, TikTok’s needing to rush its ad product – Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it wasn’t built in a year either]

• Twitch gives GroupM insights into its audiences with new partnership

• Facebook denies Instagram is ‘toxic’ for teens [The research in question came from Facebook – that’s a smokin’ gun hun]

Read the last briefing.

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