- CTV 27% growth will drive ad spend increase despite recession
- Programmatic transparency is improving
- IAB Europe wins Belgian DPA approval
- Data privacy ranking for ad tech companies
- Programmatic is Disney’s priority this year
- AVOD helped Netflix gain 7.7 million subscribers
We have compiled the most important news from the data, online advertising, and programmatic market from 17th January to 2nd February 2023. Check out what happened in the last weeks on the data & programmatic market.
CTV 27% growth will drive ad spend increase despite recession
According to Winterberry Group, advertisers will spend $509 M on ads globally, which constitutes a 6% growth YoY. Digital advertising will account for over 60% of total ad spend, with connected TV as a leading channel.
Data and programmatic are forecasted to be significant in the marketer’s budget. CTV ad spending will grow 27% YoY, and spending on data platforms and services is to increase 7% YoY. That will result from shifts within the ad budgets and ad spending growth.
According to a World Federation of Advertisers survey, most marketers plan to increase their spending on CTV ads (67%) and in-game ads (78%). Half of them plan to spend more on ads in retail media (51%) and social networks (51%). Interestingly, many marketers are not intimidated by the recession – 73% of those surveyed see it as an opportunity to gain market share.
Programmatic transparency is improving
ISBA and PWC repeated their study after 2020 when they discovered that 15% of ad spend couldn’t be attributed to anyone in the supply chain. According to the second survey conducted in 2022, the average “unknown delta” share in ad spending decreased to 3%.
The study examined buys across Google’s DV360 DSP, the Google Ad Manager SSP, The Trade Desk, Magnite, Xandr, Adform, MediaMath, and Index Exchange. Its discovery is a promising sign to the industry that will attract more marketers. The report shows that marketers spend about 65% of their approximate advertising budgets in programmatic, up from 51% in 2020.
Along with the optimistic data, the report provides a list of recommendations for the ad tech companies on their way to a more transparent industry.
IAB Europe wins Belgian DPA approval
Belgium’s data protection authority approved all points of the IAB Europe’s action plan meant to overhaul the IAB’s TCF (Transparency & Consent Framework) to ensure and prove its legality under the European privacy law.
It is progress in proving the TCF legality in the face of DPA’s decision from February 2022. However, the execution of the action plan is not the final step.
IAB Europe is waiting for the EU’s Court of Justice to decide on two more matters. First, whether IAB is a joint data controller for the TCF and, second, whether the TCF string, signaling whether the user has given consent for targeting and analysis, counts as personal information.
If the court decides that IAB neither is a joint data nor collects personal information, IAB Europe will protect the TCF. But if the decision is different – the current action plan will not suffice to prove the TCF’s legality against GDPR.
Data privacy ranking for ad tech companies
Neutronian, a verification startup, released a new score ranking companies’ approach to privacy. It has scored over 3,000 domains of publisher networks, ad tech platforms, retail media platforms, data providers and brands.
In the programmatic industry, highly reliant on audience data, companies need a standardized way of measuring the privacy approach of their partners. Nobody wants to be involved in their partner’s privacy crisis. With Neutronian’s score it is possible to compare the entities against not only data quality, but also respect for data privacy principles.
The score might also lead to improvements in the industry, as privacy compliance will be more transparent and will become a competition factor.
Programmatic is Disney’s priority this year
During Tech & Data Showcase, Disney committed to taking the necessary steps to create a mostly automated, insights-driven and performance-proven ad business. Disney’s main objective for 2023 is to develop their programmatic solutions built in-house to deliver the best results and experience to the advertisers.
Although Disney declared it wants to have its own data and programmatic solutions, the corporation’s tech is interoperable with measurement vendor EDO being a preferred partner for outcome-based measurement across its addressable inventory.
Disney houses all its ad tech in one place it calls Unified Ad Platform. Tech consolidation will allow all corporation’s channels to use the solutions to the fullest. Disney already announced that starting April, advertisers will have access to age, gender and geolocation targeting on Disney+. In July, Disney+ will provide all the ad targeting solutions offered by Hulu.
Releasing Disney Audience Graph to programmatic bidding is another step the brand will take toward ad business automation. For now, the corporation announced its ID graph is going to be integrated with The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 and beta tested by Unilever.
AVOD helped Netflix gain 7.7 million subscribers
After introducing the less costly ad-supported plan, Netflix announced it gained 7.7 million new subscribers in Q4. The result constitutes a 4% YoY increase in paid memberships and exceeds the expected 4.5 million.
Although the AVOD helped Netflix grow the subscriber base, the advertisers weren’t happy with the deal. Netflix failed to deliver the promised number of impressions and had to issue refunds in the first months. Targeting based on genre and location also performs poorly compared with the competition.
The ad-supported tier has been live for only three months, and company CEO announced Netflix plans to invest in better targeting tools in cooperation with its ad partner Xandr. It sounds promising, considering that Netflix is known for collecting and analyzing audience data while building the system of recommendations.
The Q4 results helped the company redeem the losses from previous quarters and bring the revenue that will help develop the more specific targeting solutions. The rising number of Basic with Ads subscribers and better ad tech are projected to attract more advertisers and prove successful in 2023.
