Page 20 - AdNews Magazine Jul-Aug 2020
P. 20

  Agenda
Krish Raja, director of product and platform strategy at Amobee, says the industry lost its way when it came to cookies, using it as an easy option to get in front of con- sumers quickly. Now the “OG of targeting” is back in vogue.
“It’s always been there and it will never go away,” Raja says.
“It’s been there since day dot, since people have been putting paper up on lampposts. If you’re advertising something around the right context and you can associ- ate your brand with it, that can be pretty powerful.”
Not only a tried and trusted solution, contextual advertising provides a safer approach to pro- tecting consumer privacy. No longer will that pair of shoes a consumer looked at once, be able to stalk them across the internet. Relevance through context will prevail instead.
Like Raja, Tan from Xandr, agrees that third-party cookies to create hyper-targeted personal- ised advertising has been used as the “easy” solution to reach consumers.
As third-party cookies continue to phase out, the industry has entered what he calls “context 2.0” which comes inf luenced by increased control from consumers over how their data is used and the raft of data privacy laws being introduced around the world.
“As consumers take more con- trol over how their data gets used in the various parts of the ecosys- tem, that’s growing this need for understanding ‘Where are you? What are you consuming as a con- sumer?’ rather than who you are,” he says.
“Understanding the context allows for the same kind of rich advertising conversation without necessarily breaching privacy regulations.”
The opaque world of adtech
Transparency, or the industry’s perceived lack of, has long been a point of contention among ven- dors, brands, agencies and regulators.
The ACCC has begun its inquiry into digital advertising and taken submissions from across the industry. The focus is on whether
marketers get enough information to understand how effective ad dol- lars are when using ad agencies and other adtech services.
Speaking at the Programmatic Summit in March, Peter Leonard, pro- fessor of practice at UNSW Business School and principal at Data Synergies, warned the industry that the inquiry will get “ugly”.
He highlighted a quote in the report that he thought would particu- larly agitate the regulator: “Between 20% and 75% advertiser’s expend- iture is taken up by suppliers in the adtech supply chain.”
“If there’s one thing that regulators really hate, it’s not actually know- ing who’s making what money in a market,” Leonard said.
“That’s opacity from a regulated point of view and because you’re in busi- ness and they’re in government and they’re regulators, by definition you’re up to something that’s probably bad if the regulator doesn’t understand it.”
While Leonard’s breakdown of what the ACCC would be looking for was rather ominous, it’s hard to find anyone who will go on the record to say that the inquiry is a negative thing for the industry. Instead, most welcome it with open arms.
Opacity is one of the core focuses for the ACCC in its investigation. Raja says that there is a notion out there that when an industry becomes too complex, it then becomes opaque. Therefore, the only way to make it less complex is to consolidate but this shouldn’t be the case.
“Having complexity supports the economy,” he says.
“It supports a lot of people, small businesses. There’s lots of good things about having a big thriving economy with loads of different players in it, but that’s complex which creates a lack of transparency.”
Barry says adtech, just like other industries, needs to be held to account. In saying that though, he does believe most parties are working hard to do the right thing.
“We’re in a better place than we have been in the last 10 or 12 years since programmatic started,” he says.
“I’ve never seen a cleaner supply chain and more successful initiatives around cleaning it up.”
The Trade Desk has also welcomed the ACCC’s inquiry with Bayes calling it a “healthy” process.
                                                                                                                                                        









































































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