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ADVERTISING | Q1 2018

While this certainly presents an opportunity for
brands, they need to be wary. “Right now people
are relatively positive to the idea of advertising
being linked to their voice assistant, but to avoid
a negative reaction, marketers must allow users to
retain control over when and where they interact
with brands on smart devices,” says the report.
The question remains if voice will be the fac-
tor propelling IoT, but for now, the report suggests
not: “Unfortunately, widespread replacement of
existing home infrastructure is likely to remain
a dream for the future. For now, expect people to
add a few new smart gadgets and use Alexa and
the like to keep the kids entertained.”

4. WE WILL SEE ACCELERATED GROWTH OF WALLED
GARDENS.
Unfortunately. Despite a rough 2017 where Google
and Facebook both faced tremendous pressure pri-
marily around brand safety and viewability, “will
post strong growth in advertising dollars in 2017
and Amazon has posted 58 percent growth in the
third quarter of 2017 for its advertising business,” All this power will further increase demand for foreseeable ubiquity of AI in sales pitches as special-
the report states. greater accountability, and walled gardens will ist companies claiming to be experts start popping
2018 will see walled gardens grow their ad need to demonstrate their value (through third party up. Determining the quality of the technology will
dollars even faster as they play a stronger role in measurement) around the ROI that these platforms be a challenge, but the bigger question will be that
media plans due to the “restrictions on advertis- deliver and, most importantly, their contribution/ of privacy and control.
ing (primarily driven by actions such as that of synergies to the overall brand spend.
Apple’s Safari 11, but most importantly GDPR) 6. MEASUREMENT FOLLOWS MEDIA “OVER-THE-
will have the opposite effect to what regulators 5. MARKETING WILL EVOLVE FROM ALGORITHMS TOP” (OTT).
were expecting: more power to the walled gardens TO AI. Too little, too late? OTT streaming has taken over
rather than less.” About time. Up until now, algorithms have been media consumption with users flocking to digital
The report goes on to further add the causes: ruling advertising conference topics. It’s not time OTT solutions due to ease, convenience, accessibility
1. Free services that these companies offer are for the next frontier as marketing automation be- and better value for money. Naturally, some – not
attractive enough for consumers to happily share comes more common: AI. all – of this behavior is at the cost of more traditional
their personal data to retain access While the understanding and use of algorithms media or as the report calls it “legacy distribution
2. Increased demand from advertisers (and will continue to be of value, we will get a glimpse platforms and content production models”.
agencies) to target specific audiences – and to en- of smart software-based outcomes. “These machine In this fragmented media consumption state,
sure those audiences is validated. Walled gardens learning approaches don’t apply specific algorithms advertisers have an opportunity to utilize the scale
have another advantage here as they have more to all campaigns but custom tune campaigns by of mainstream media platforms and consumer be-
specific audience data (that they are allowed to taking in a myriad of unstructured data, making haviors to increase effectiveness of brand video
use) compared to other publishers. sense of it, and converting it into programmatic across all screens and platforms.
3. On the other hand, programmatic buys based media decisions,” explains the report. The report sets a fair picture of the current
on data points (cookie-based) are more likely to It further that explains that as machine learn- scenario: “stats abound of increased global Smart/
suffer, and thus smaller publishers/sites are likely ing dominates in the foreseeable future, we’ll start Connected TV penetration, Netflix/SVOD subscriber
to struggle unless they can guarantee a specific to see applications of all kinds of AI-driven tech growth, time spent viewing streaming/OTT pre-
audience or a premium quality context. such as natural language processing, computer vi- mium content, proliferation of connected devices,
Additionally, the reach argument and the com- sion and autonomous virtual agents and chatbots. and so on. New actors, such as Automated Content
plementarity of digital media to TV (incremental While marketing might not necessarily be the first Recognition embedded in devices, TVs, smartphone
reach among light TV users) means that it will be application of AI tech, it’ll be an easy opportunity apps and voice assistants/IoT devices are on the
easier for agencies and advertisers to work with many will seek to exploit. scene, and the same OTT paradigm-shift roiling
large publishers/players. And finally, the work that The real-life applications of such AI in advertis- the “old Hollywood’ model are poised to similarly
walled gardens have done in 2017 to give more ing and marketing will see marketers investing in impact measurement frameworks, as well.”
reassurance to advertisers and media agencies on creating, curating and acquiring the data to feed This gives rise to the question of measurement
the basic hygiene will help them to accelerate share. their AI solutions. The report does point out the across mainstream and OTT. “As evidenced by

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