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Can you remember the last ad that struck you because the people and stories represented in it were a welcome departure from what you usually see in marketing content? Maybe it was Proctor & Gamble’s Emmy-winning commercial, The Talk, which explored the difficult conversations about racism that Black American parents have with their children. Maybe this Campbell’s ad, which portrays a gay couple entertaining their child with a particularly corny Dad joke, comes to mind. Or perhaps this Maltesers commercial that features two friends communicating via sign language caught your eye.
On the other hand, maybe you can’t think of anything. Or, even worse, maybe what comes to mind are the kind of ads where models or actors with disabilities, or those who are people of color, LGBTQIA+, or neurodivergent, are portrayed less as believable human beings and more as symbols of a business’ attempt to come across as inclusive. Or, perhaps you recall advertisements where people with historically marginalized identities are portrayed according to stereotypes.
Yes, the advertising industry continues to struggle to represent people from, well, underrepresented communities. And even when advertisers nail inclusive casting, the content of their advertisements can inadvertently portray tokenism, stereotypes, or representations of life that simply don’t hold true for many communities.
This is a problem for a variety of reasons, not least of which being that advertisements have an impact on peoples’ sense of belonging in the world. As such, marketers have an ethical responsibility to ensure that everyone can see their lives reflected in marketing.
Though the advertising industry has many areas for improvement when it comes to diverse representation, they mainly fall into two categories: Representations of historically marginalized groups either lag behind those groups’ share of the general population, or are characterized by tokenism and stereotypes.
Let’s start by looking at those groups whose representation in advertising is disproportionate to their share of the US population. Latinx/Hispanic people make up 19% of the US population, yet they account for only 5% of those featured in advertisements. On the other hand, 61% of the US population is white, but they account for 73% of the people featured in ads.
The disproportionately low representation of historically marginalized groups is true beyond racial and ethnic identities as well:
On the other hand, some historically marginalized groups are represented more proportionately to their share of the population, but the quality of those representations is often poor due to tokenism and stereotyping. For instance, while the representation of Black Americans in advertising is proportionate to their share of the US population, over 35% of Black Americans feel that brands portray all Black people the same in their marketing, and 62% feel that many attempts at diverse representation in media and marketing are still stereotypical.
Similarly, while women have a less disproportionate presence in ads, those representations are often characterized by stereotype—for example, commercials portraying women as cooks and cleaners. And, while it’s easy to think that this kind of stereotyping must be improving over time, research indicates that it may actually be getting worse.
Also relevant to this discussion is the fact that the US is becoming more demographically diverse across multiple axes, particularly when it comes to younger generations. The last census found that the population is growing more racially and ethnically diverse at even faster rates than the US Census Bureau had previously predicted. Additionally, the percentage of people who identify as LGBTQIA+ more than doubled between 2013 and 2023. For advertisers, this means that the need to accurately represent diverse identities is growing more urgent by the year, as more and more consumers identify with historically underrepresented groups.
Which begs the question: How, exactly, can advertisers get diverse representation right?
Growing a marketing team’s inclusive marketing skill set is a marathon, not a sprint. Leaders can set themselves up for success by approaching this journey with openness, curiosity, and a dedication to continuous learning.
Advertisers should pay particular attention to ensuring their teams understand tokenism and stereotyping, establishing practices to acquire and retain diverse talent, and investing in ongoing professional development to equip their teams with the tools needed to produce high quality inclusive marketing content.
It’s easy enough to cast an ad with a diverse group of actors or models, but accurately representing diverse experiences is a more difficult task. As previously noted, this is one of the main pitfalls advertisers run into in the context of inclusive marketing—and tokenism and stereotyping are two of the most common ways advertisers can get those representations wrong. As such, it’s critical for any marketing team to understand tokenism and stereotyping so they can avoid them in their ads.
In advertising, tokenism occurs when actors or models from historically marginalized groups are cast without consideration for how people from those groups experience life—say, by portraying a Black woman engaging with hair products that Black women never actually use, or a deaf man living in a home without a visual alert system. These shallow portrayals use diverse actors and models as symbols or tokens, rather than authentic representations of the diverse experiences of these populations. Even more, many instances of tokenism coincide with stereotyping, which can happen in relation to gender, race, ethnicity, and culture.
Because of the prevalence of tokenism and stereotypes in advertising, marketing leaders must ensure their teams understand these concepts. This knowledge enables them to raise a red flag whenever tokenism or stereotyping arises during campaign creation.
Back in 2020, the advertising industry took steps towards progress and prioritizing authentic representation in marketing as many businesses committed to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in response to widespread protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. However, that momentum appears to be slowing of late, with many organizations curbing their diverse hiring efforts amidst economic pressures. The ethnic diversity of the advertising industry fell from 32.3% in 2022 to 30.8% in 2023, falling well short of the 42.2% of the US population that’s ethnically diverse.
There are innumerable ways that marketing organizations benefit from hiring and retaining a diverse employee base, not the least of which is that it invites new perspectives into the room while developing a campaign. Marketing organizations that prioritize the hiring of people who can craft authentic storylines that connect with consumers are more likely to be successful in their inclusive marketing efforts—and, critically, to avoid tokenism or stereotyping.
Notably, the goal here isn’t to put the onus of inclusive marketing solely on employees with historically marginalized identities, but rather to craft a diverse team to ensure that diverse ideas are brought to the table. At the same time, advertising leaders should prioritize training around inclusive marketing for all staff members to create a shared foundation of knowledge and vocabulary to support their diverse representation efforts.
Inclusive marketing is a skill set that can be as critical to a brand as effective communication or strategic thinking—but one in which marketers are often much less fluent. Many marketers name a lack of expertise, knowledge, and talent as obstacles to improvement when it comes to inclusive marketing, and 50% of brands are worried about getting inclusive marketing campaigns wrong.
To mitigate this, advertising leaders can invest in ongoing professional development to equip their teams with the tools they need to create media that authentically represents historically marginalized identities. This could include organizing annual workshops around diverse representation in advertising for employees, or bolstering any existing DEI programs with content specific to inclusive marketing.
In providing regular professional development opportunities for their employees, agency and brand leaders can ensure their teams are progressively upskilling in this area, and that their inclusive marketing efforts progressively improve in kind.
Amidst the many challenges facing marketers, it can be easy to put inclusive marketing on the backburner. But considering the state of diverse representation in advertising today, as well as the fact that the US is only growing more diverse, it’s clear that upskilling their teams’ ability to get inclusive marketing right is a clear and worthy priority for marketing and advertising leaders.
Two years out from the Great Resignation’s peak, finding and retaining top talent remains a significant challenge for leaders. And while C-suite executives across a range of industries are losing sleep over staffing difficulties, those in the marketing industry are likely feeling particularly restless: The number of professionals working in advertising decreased by 14% between 2019 and 2022, and over half of US marketers feel the industry is experiencing its worst-ever talent crisis.
As agency leaders know well, high turnover can be a significant expense. Estimates place the cost of replacing a lost employee around one-half to two times their annual salary, and it can take up to two years for a new hire to become fully productive in their role. As such, agencies should strive to create workplace cultures that better retain top talent, even amidst the many other challenges they face.
To implement effective systems and strategies for retaining talent, it’s important to understand the factors contributing to high rates of turnover in the advertising industry. While there are many, the general theme is that working in advertising is growing more and more difficult: Most agency professionals feel that digital advertising has gotten harder over the past two years, and 70% feel their job is harder now than it was two years ago. Among entry- to mid-level employees, that number jumps to 75%.
Considering this, agency leaders looking to retain talent must first understand why agency work has gotten more difficult of late, and then find ways to help their employees feel supported and fulfilled amidst this increased difficulty.
The increasingly difficult nature of agency work stems largely from the many challenges facing advertising agencies today.
To start, there’s the growing complexity of the media landscape. “We’ve seen a resurgence of fragmentation in the industry—take streaming services and retail media networks, for example,” says Michael Olson, EVP of Client Development at Basis Technologies. “At the same time, agencies are scrambling to figure out how they can bring unique partnerships and inventory sources to the forefront to show that they’re still power players in the industry.”
On top of media fragmentation, agencies are grappling with increased rates from media partners, decreased client budgets, and the rising cost of talent, all of which have resulted in shrinking margins. To cope, agencies are increasingly offshoring and outsourcing work to drive down costs, and can even end up overselling and underbidding to keep their businesses afloat. Unfortunately, these financial pressures and the strategies agencies are using to protect their margins are also adding to the rising difficulty of work for agency professionals.
The many challenges agencies have grappled with in recent years have trickled down to their employees, making their daily tasks more difficult and less fulfilling, and reducing the quality of workplace culture at agencies.
A fragmented media landscape means that agency professionals are more likely to get bogged down juggling many different media channels and inventory sources. Over half of agency professionals’ tech stacks consist of six or more tools, with 17% of agency marketers using 10+ tools to manage campaigns. As a result, more than 25% of those same marketers name siloed and disconnected systems as a pressing challenge. Many teams wind up doing repetitive tasks to connect these disparate systems—for example, manually standardizing and unifying data sets from multiple sources. “They’re stuck working off of antiquated software, juggling spreadsheets, and doing data entry work that’s completely unfulfilling,” says Olson.
And even as outsourcing certain types of work can free up agency employees to focus on more strategic and fulfilling tasks, it can add additional complexity as well. “It's not as simple as reassigning tasks to external teams and completely removing them from the internal team’s plate” says Kelly Boyle, Group VP of Client Strategy and Insights at Basis Technologies. “The internal agency team still needs to oversee and QA the outsourced work. And when you have teams working in silos, and possibly vastly different time zones, there can be breakdowns in communication and context that create complexity.”
In an effort to land clients in a highly competitive landscape, some agencies can also end up overselling and underbidding. While it may lead to new business, the practice can leave employees overextended and stretched thin. One VP-level agency veteran shared that “High workloads have a huge impact on workers’ mental health—I’ve worked at agencies where I’d see at least one of my coworkers crying on a weekly basis.”
Finally, the rise of remote work—and subsequent return-to-office orders—has exacerbated many of these challenges, with agencies often struggling to establish strong workplace cultures in this new hybrid/remote-first environment. At the same time, many employees bristled at their agencies return-to-office mandates: In 2023, employees working at agencies with return-to-office mandates were 40% more likely to be looking for new jobs and 96% more likely to be at risk of burnout than their remote peers.
Luckily for agency leaders, there are strategies that can mitigate these challenges by fostering more fulfillment for employees. In meeting their teams’ desire for appreciation, efficiency, flexibility, and opportunities for growth, leaders can create workplace environments where employees want to stay for the long haul.
According to Gallup, appreciation and recognition “might be one of the greatest missed opportunities” for driving performance, engagement, and company loyalty amongst employees. Despite the impact of appreciation, Gallup’s survey found that it’s common for workers to feel that their best efforts are regularly ignored. Even more, workers who don’t get the appreciation and recognition they feel they deserve are twice as likely to say they’ll quit their jobs within the next year. Agencies that take the time to acknowledge their employees’ work and demonstrate their appreciation can have an easier time holding on to their top performers and keep morale high.
“People are willing to go above and beyond in their work, especially when they feel like that work is appreciated,” says Boyle. “It can be as simple as saying, ‘I know you’ve been putting in a lot of hours lately, and I really appreciate it.’”
Research indicates that the most effective way to recognize employees’ contributions is to provide positive honest, authentic, and individualized feedback, and for managers to show appreciation for their workers at least every seven days. Better still is when praise comes from “every direction”—i.e., from their manager, from their manager’s manager, from their peers, and from high-level leaders as well.
Perhaps the best thing about showing appreciation: It’s free of charge. In creating team cultures rich with appreciation and praise, agency leaders can ensure their teams feel seen and celebrated for the difficult work they’re doing.
Agencies must also ensure they’re providing work environments that are both efficient and conducive to their employees’ best efforts. For example, to bolster efficiency, leaders can set regular check-ins with clients to get clear on what deliverables are necessary.
“Agency leaders should take a step back and ensure employees are focusing their effort on things that deliver value for their clients,” says Boyle. “It’s easy to get caught in the cycle of providing the same reports and deliverables without truly understanding if they’re being utilized to their full extent.”
Leaders can also foster efficiency for their teams by building their tech stacks with employees in mind—for example, investing in CDPs that facilitate the collection, standardization, and usage of first-party data, or in automation technologies that streamline processes and reduce manual labor. These tools not only save time and create more efficiency for agency workers, but also free them up to focus on more strategic, creative, and fulfilling tasks.
Finally, agencies must find ways to meet employees’ desire for more conducive work policies—especially younger employees’. Take Gen Z workers, who now make up a significant portion of junior-level employees, and who many marketing organizations it particularly difficult to retain. With 78% of Gen Zers reporting that sustainable work-life balance is critical to their career success and 42% saying that they would quit a job if it caused burnout or lacked work-life balance, it makes sense that agencies are struggling to maintain workers of this generation, as agency work has historically lacked that balance. And it isn’t just Gen Z: Workers of all demographics are increasingly valuing work-life balance and flexible hours. To acquire and retain top talent, leaders must find ways to meet these needs—for example, by offering flexible work hours and remote work options.
Overall, in prioritizing efficiency and creating workplaces that work for their employees, agency leaders can meet the needs of the marketers of today.
Lastly, agencies must find creative ways to offer their employees opportunities for professional growth. Mentorship is particularly valued by Gen Z, so setting up programs to match junior-level employees with senior colleagues is one way agency leaders can foster growth. This can also give senior-level employees the opportunity to feel they’re having an impact in their work—which goes a long way, given that burnout isn’t always a result of employees having too much work, but can also occur when employees feel they aren’t having enough impact.
Giving people opportunities to become subject matter experts is another powerful way to offer both professional growth and professional impact, according to Molly Marshall, Client Strategy and Insights Partner at Basis Technologies. “Team members can become experts on specific types of clients, or specific types of audiences,” says Marshall. “Becoming a subject matter expert gives employees another way in which they can feel special and needed—it’s something they can take pride in and even talk about with their families and friends.”
Of course, agencies must offer career advancement through more traditional routes like promotions as well, but finding other unique ways to make team members feel that there are many opportunities for growth and advancement at their jobs can further counteract some of the difficulties agency workers face today.
Given the ongoing talent crunch and high costs of attrition, adopting strategies that serve to improve talent retention must be a top priority for agency leaders. In setting up systems that provide agency workers with regular praise and appreciation, adjusting their workplaces in service of efficiency and employee preferences, and developing a variety of ways for employees to grow, agency leaders can create the kinds of businesses where people want to stay for the long term.
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Want to learn more about how agency professionals feel about their jobs, their industry, and the trends shaping digital advertising today? Check out our 2024 Advertising Agency Report for all the top takeaways from our survey of agency professionals across the US.
The question of how to of build and maintain trust between agencies and their clients has been a topic of discussion for decades. Yet the strained alliance between agencies and brands seems to have grown even more tenuous of late, with nearly half of marketers saying their agency’s client relationships are more strained today than they were two years ago.
Considering the numerous challenges facing agencies today—from rising rates from media partners, reduced client budgets, and subsequently shrinking margins, to signal loss, to the talent crisis, to an increasingly fragmented media landscape—it’s not all that surprising to see these strains impacting relationships with clients.
“An agency CEO summed up the gravity of the situation for me recently,” says Michael Olson, EVP of Client Development at Basis Technologies. “He said, ‘The business of agencies right now is staying in business.’”
In the face of these myriad factors contributing to the strained relations between agencies and their clients, agency leaders should adopt practices to build trust with their clients—a worthy priority, given the impact trust has on the quality of agency/client relationships and on generating new business, with more than three-quarters of marketers finding their agencies through word of mouth.
To foster more trusting, fruitful, and longstanding partnerships with their clients, agencies must invest in developing and nurturing their client relationships, providing transparency whenever possible, and working to reduce siloes amongst their team.
In 2023, a whopping 55% of brands said that they were likely to end their relationship with their primary marketing agency in the next six months. In this fraught and competitive landscape, agencies must earn their clients’ trust by finding ways to invest in those relationships beyond the scope of work itself.
“Clients need their agency partners to deeply care about their businesses and fully understand how they operate,” says Kelly Boyle, Group VP of Client Strategy and Insights at Basis Technologies. To do so, agencies should allocate time for staying up to date on what’s happening with their clients’ businesses—for instance, reading their earnings reports and press releases—as well as keeping tabs on their clients’ competitors, so they can bring a heightened level of fluency and insight to their interactions. “Even something as small as knowing and using your client’s internal lingo can serve as a meaningful signal that you understand and are invested in their business,” says Boyle.
Like any relationship, communication is key: When asked in a 2023 survey how agencies can become better partners, the most common answer from brands was “communicate effectively.” To improve communication, agencies leaders might opt to set up regular, high-level leadership check-ins with their clients to touch base on the overall partnership. This gives leaders a chance to ask their clients how the partnership is faring from their point of view and whether the agency is meeting the clients’ needs, allowing them to better address any misalignments or areas of growth. This kind of regular, open communication creates an opportunity for clients to share high-level feedback, and it gives the agency the chance to respond and adjust accordingly—before the client opts to end the partnership. It also creates a prime opportunity to realign on clients’ needs and goals. “When there’s a breakdown in communication on desired outcomes and needs between an agency and their client,” says Olson, “that relationship is likely going to break.”
Overall, a little goes a long way in terms of nurturing client relationships. By finding small ways to go the extra mile in terms of understanding their clients’ businesses and fostering intentional communication, agencies can make significant headway towards building long-lasting trust with their clients.
The many challenges facing agencies today have resulted in reduced transparency, which can weigh down agency-client relationships. A lack of fee transparency, for example, is a rising point of contention that (while often viewed as “necessary” by agencies facing intense financial pressures and shrinking profit margins) can erode trust with clients.
Boyle points to overselling and underbidding as another common practice by agencies looking to win new business. Unfortunately, overselling when trying to lock in new business leads to a host of other issues that work to undermine client satisfaction, as agency workers must try to deliver on what was promised at a reduced rate, which can lead to understaffed accounts and employee burnout. This is likely a contributing factor for brand marketers who rank “dissatisfaction with value” as the number one reason they end agency relationships. Overselling can also create a breakdown in trust, as clients feel that agencies weren’t transparent about their capacity during the pitching process.
While financial pressures may drive agencies to be less transparent than their clients would prefer, agency leaders must find ways to meet brands’ expectations. For example, to reduce the negative impacts of overselling, agency leaders may look to foster more alignment between their teams who pitch clients and those who eventually serve those clients, which can ensure that pitches are as clear, honest, and genuine as possible.
Being transparent about your team’s limits is another way to set realistic expectations and develop stronger relationships. While agency leaders might fear that saying “no” to a request undermines their value, being honest about limits can actually serve to build trust. “Agencies want to say yes all the time to please their clients,” says Olson. “But when an agency says yes to something and then fails, that’s another strike against them for the client. My recommendation is to own what you do well, and don’t shy away from saying no to things that your team can’t deliver on.”
By demonstrating that they understand their clients’ need for transparency and that they are taking measures to meet that need, agency leaders can get in front of this common point of contention and foster more trusting partnerships.
Media complexity and fragmentation in the marketing landscape have led to agencies working with an increasing number of siloed data sets. More than half of agency workers’ tech stacks consist of six or more tools, which is likely why about 20% of agency leaders plan to increase their investment in data management tools within the next year.
When data sources are siloed, agencies lack a single source of truth—a disconnection which can lead to clients hearing different things from different people in the same agency, which serves to undermine trust. Data siloes also reduce data accuracy and can result in faulty data analysis.
Even more, data siloes bog agencies down with manual data consolidation, standardization, and verification tasks, which limit their speed and agility. As such, the lack of data consolidation at agencies is a contributing factor to why only 31% of marketers on the client side are satisfied with the speed and agility their agency partners bring to the table, despite 92% of those same marketers feeling that speed and agility are important. “Once everyone from account services to billing to media operations can operate off a clean data set, everything moves incredibly fast,” says Olson.
Investing in systems and tools that automate data consolidation has a host of benefits that strengthen agency-client relationships, even beyond building trust and increasing speed and agility. For example, the ability to access a single source of truth via unified data sets supports better marketing personalization for consumers and better satisfaction for agency employees, as it reduces the laborious manual data consolidation in which many agency workers get bogged down. It also gives agency workers more time to focus on strategic and creative tasks, which improves the quality of their work (and which tend to be far more satisfying than hunkering down with some spreadsheets.) All in all, because of the many ways it allows agencies to better serve their clients, reducing data siloes is one of the most impactful actions agency leaders can take to strengthen their client relationships.
At their core, long-lasting and fulfilling agency-client relationships are built on a solid foundation of trust. As agency leaders navigate the many challenges facing their businesses today, focusing on improving client trust via nurturing client relationships, offering transparency, and reducing data siloes will be critical for not only staying in business, but gaining a competitive advantage.
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Want to find out how agency leaders across the US feel about the challenges and opportunities that are shaping their futures? Check out our 2024 Advertising Agency Report to get all the top takeaways from our survey of agency professionals.
As seismic shifts reshape the advertising industry, marketers are reinvesting in strategies that have stood the test of time.
What shifts, exactly, are pushing advertisers back towards these old-school approaches? To start, there’s the matter of signal loss, driven by factors such as Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, data privacy regulations, the consumer demand for data privacy, and Google’s plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome in 2025. And, of course, there’s the rapid development of generative AI, which is both presenting new challenges and introducing fresh possibilities for marketers.
To meet these challenges, advertisers are testing new technological solutions to help them adapt. But they’re also reaching back into their toolkits to rediscover legacy tactics and strategies like direct buying, contextual targeting, and brand lift studies. And, as it turns out, these legacy strategies haven’t just been sitting in the corner gathering dust: They’ve grown more sophisticated to meet the needs of today’s agencies and brands.
The advent of programmatic advertising brought advertisers a level of speed and scale that they couldn’t access via direct buying. In doing so, programmatic swiftly became the default digital buying method, accounting for a projected 91.3% of US digital display advertising in 2024 totaling $157.4 billion.
While programmatic isn’t going anywhere—online programmatic ad spend growth will slow this year, but is still expected to increase YoY—some advertisers are investing more of their budgets into direct buying methods as a way to prioritize consumer privacy and brand safety, and to protect themselves against fraud.
The factors driving signal loss and pushing the industry towards a privacy-first advertising model are rendering some of the main data sources that drive real-time bidding in the open exchange either unavailable or inadvisable due to privacy concerns—specifically, third-party cookies and mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs). As a result, in 2023, 53% of buy-side ad investment decision-makers said they plan to increase their focus on placing ads with publishers using first-party data.
Direct buying also boasts lower risks of fraud and fewer threats to brand safety than the open web—challenges that are growing more pressing as generative AI transforms the internet. In 2023, approximately 22% of all online ad spend was lost to ad fraud, and mitigating fraud ranked as one of the biggest concerns around media investment this year by US brands and agencies. AI-driven ad fraud is particularly problematic when it comes to ads served via the open exchange, due to the complexity between the purchase of a traditional programmatic ad and its delivery. At the same time, generative AI makes it easy to create low-quality websites, like made-for-advertising websites (MFAs)—where brands have squandered as much as 15% of their digital ad spend.
To protect their programmatic spend, advertisers can implement safeguards like allow lists and block lists (such as dynamic MFA block lists) and leverage third-party safety segments to exclude sensitive content and increase inventory quality. But adding direct buying gives marketers the ultimate control over their ad dollars—both in terms of audience and for minimizing risk.
“By contracting with publishers on their own inventory, media buyers know exactly what inventory they are running on and have the added benefit of leveraging the publisher’s first-party data—which is not only privacy-friendly, but empowers more accurate targeting and measurement,” says Lindsey Freed, SVP of Media Investment at Basis Technologies.
While direct cannot offer the same speed and scale of the open exchange, it has evolved considerably so that advertisers can benefit from the privacy-friendly and premium placements it offers in a more automated way. In addition to insertion orders (IOs), advertisers can turn to private marketplace deals (PMP)—ensuring exclusive, premium placements—or programmatic guaranteed, which combines the quality and assurance of direct with the efficiency and automation of programmatic, making it easier for media buyers to make data-driven decisions in real time. Advertisers can also leverage curated publisher lists for direct deals to mitigate some of the tactic’s scale-related drawbacks.
Programmatic advertising on the open exchange will, of course, remain a mainstay for marketers, especially as technologies advance to help them avoid AI-driven fraud and advertising on low-quality websites. However, making the most of all that direct buying offers will help marketing teams adapt to the cookieless world, and mitigate some of the brand safety and fraud risks that come with real-time bidding on the open exchange.
Signal loss is also driving a huge resurgence in contextual targeting. Contextual advertising spend is expected to double from 2023 to 2030, and as of late 2023, almost 94% of marketers were either already using the tactic or had plans to begin using it within the next 12 months.
And, like direct buying, contextual has advanced considerably in recent years.
“Advertisers can now tap into AI-powered contextual targeting, which analyzes and categorizes page content, allowing buyers to align creative messaging to the content their audience is consuming,” says Freed.
Contextual technology has also progressed to incorporate natural language processing, which ensures that ads are not only placed in environments relevant to their topics or keywords, but also where the overall sentiment and tone of the content match the ad being served.
Contextual targeting offers a variety of benefits beyond its cookieless nature—in fact, that only ranks fourth on the list of what US agency and brand marketers find most beneficial about the tactic, behind “aligns with audience interests”, “improved ROI/ROAS”, and “increased ad engagement.” When used for display ads, contextual also serves to protect brand safety by ensuring that ads are placed in premium digital environments. Plus, notes Freed, “with the integration of curated contextual segments within advertising platforms, media buyers can search and select contextual segments across various advertising mediums more seamlessly.”
Of course, contextual can’t be the only privacy-friendly targeting tactic advertisers use to address signal loss in a cookieless world. And contextual does have its drawbacks, such as the fact that it can be difficult to retarget people who have seen contextual ads, which in turn makes it difficult to measure their performance. As a result, contextual is best used as one part of a multi-tactic cookieless targeting approach.
In a world driven by third-party cookies, advertisers were granted a lot of transparency into the performance of their campaigns. They could easily get an idea of their consumers' purchasing journeys and generate precise reports on view-through conversions and ad frequency.
Once third-party cookies are fully deprecated in Google’s Chrome browser, one of the preeminent challenges for advertisers will be to find new ways to measure campaign performance and attribution. In this context, advertisers are leaning into legacy measurement tactics, like brand lift studies, to gauge the success of awareness-driven campaigns.
“Brand lift measurement and brand health tracking is becoming more important, and we’ve seen an uptick in investment in these studies to understand the holistic impact of advertising efforts on a brand,” says Kelly Boyle, Group VP of Client Strategy and Insights at Basis Technologies. “Marketing mix modeling is also making a comeback, and these tools are evolving. Newer offerings are more robust, more precise, and some are even more affordable than traditional models were years ago.”
Zach Moore, SVP of Digital Media Operations at Basis Technologies, agrees that brand lift studies have grown easier and more streamlined, and that they’ll have an important place in the campaign measurement process in a cookieless world. “Brand studies have gotten a little smarter over the last decade or so,” says Moore, “with many being built into the various buying platforms directly, integrating actual sales or transaction data into their metrics, and having the ability to encompass multiple channels to provide a much wider view.”
Brand lift studies aren’t without their challenges, the biggest one being the size of the control and exposed groups used in these studies (which can be relevant if an advertiser needs the results to reach statistical significance).
“The issue with brand studies is you must have strict control and exposed groups, typically running lots of impressions,” says Moore. “The guideline is that 10-20% of impressions for all a brand’s media should be set aside for brand lift studies. However, since many brands request those impressions as ‘added value’ from partners, that can be a hard sell, since they’re essentially asking for free impressions.”
In situations where brand lift studies aren’t viable, Moore recommends prioritizing a model-based approach, such as a diminishing returns analysis.
As with contextual targeting, brand lift studies aren’t a comprehensive solution. Advertisers will need to tap into a variety of alternative measurement and attribution tools in a cookieless world, from brand lift studies to model-based approaches, to cookieless conversion attribution, and more. In light of this, advertising leaders should prepare for the measurement process to be much more time- and resource-intensive once third-party cookies are fully deprecated in Chrome.
All in all, embracing approaches that have served advertisers since the industry’s beginnings will be a critical way for advertising teams to find success—and security—amidst major paradigm shifts. Advertising leaders should also keep an eye out for technological innovations and advances related to these strategies, as it’s likely that these older tactics will continue to grow “newer” (i.e., more automated and sophisticated) as the industry—and technology—evolves.
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Want to learn more about how your peers are preparing (or not preparing) for one of the industry’s biggest paradigm shifts? Check out our report, Identity vs. Privacy: Digital Advertising in a Cookieless World, to get all the top findings from our survey on how advertising teams are preparing for the cookieless future.
AI remains the pivotal topic of conversation across the world of business—from Wall Street, to board rooms, to sales pitches, to paid media.
In the advertising world, artificial intelligence has already been at work for over a decade, powering programmatic advertising and optimizing media buying across the open internet. Today, new developments from the realm of generative AI (GenAI) are set to revolutionize the landscape even further.
As agencies and CMOs navigate these new opportunities, their leaders must balance two directives: First, embracing AI tools to increase efficiencies, grow revenue, and stay at the cutting edge of innovation. And second, protecting their businesses from the threats that come along with these tools. It’s a fine line to tread, but leading organizations are finding ways to approach these new technologies so that they benefit their businesses and bottom lines while minimizing liabilities.
To do this, advertisers must thoroughly understand the risks posed by AI. The most significant ones fall into three main categories: brand safety concerns tied to GenAI-created misinformation, considerations around how AI-generated advertising will land with a consumer base that’s largely wary of AI, and potential legal risks to agencies and brands related to data privacy and deceptive advertising practices.
Industry leaders must grow increasingly knowledgeable on these topics and develop best practices, processes, and skillsets across their teams to ensure any forays into new AI-driven advertising tools are safeguarded against risk.
AI offers many promising benefits for advertisers, from cost efficiency to speed to ease of launch. However, those advantages also come with some significant brand safety concerns. It’s important for advertisers to understand these threats, implement safeguards around their use of AI, and stay up to date on this quickly developing landscape in order to make the most of these tools and solutions without opening themselves up to consumer backlash and wasted spend.
Generative AI is one of the biggest drivers of brand safety concerns, with 99.5% of industry professionals believing that GenAI poses a brand safety and misinformation risk to marketers and advertisers. GenAI technology is not perfect, and these tools have regularly demonstrated a tendency to produce content that’s, at one end of the spectrum, low-quality and likely ineffective for advertising, and, on the other end of the spectrum, inaccurate or offensive.
Two particular areas of concern include generative AI’s tendency to make up false information (also known as “hallucination” in the AI world) and indications of biases in AI-generated content (due to large language models relying on human inputs and human-generated content, which often contain biases).
These concerns were on full display earlier this year when Google had to suspend the image-generating capabilities of its Gemini chatbot, which is integrated into Google’s advertising tools, after it produced historically inaccurate images—specifically, Gemini created images of “multi-ethnic Nazis and non-white U.S. Founding Fathers”. The controversy demonstrates how developers are still learning how to program these technologies to effectively avoid bias: Gemini was programmed to avoid racial and ethnic bias, which, ironically, backfired when the images in question ended up being inaccurate.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that advertisers should forego the efficiencies offered by GenAI. However, it’s critical that teams understand the risks and put proper safeguards in place to minimize their likelihood.
“If teams are thoughtful in reviewing the outputs, then using AI to repurpose existing creative or develop elements of media assets should be fine,” says Molly Marshall, Client Strategy and Insights Partner at Basis Technologies. “But AI can’t currently replicate the creative process in terms of identifying a strong insight and developing creative that meaningfully relates to a target consumer, so AI-generated creative should complement and iterate upon an existing strategy, not wholly develop it.”
Generative AI has also prompted some additional headaches for brands that have started using AI-powered chatbots to streamline and personalize customer service on their websites. The technology promises to transform the customer service industry; however, upon testing chatbots offered by TurboTax and H&R Block, reports found that the chatbots offered inaccurate information “at least half of the time.”
“Chatbots offer brands a big opportunity to streamline communication with customers, especially as brick-and-mortar stores close and more customer service is going virtual,” says Marshall. “But the potential damage from chatbots that share inaccurate information may outweigh those benefits for some brands.”
Advertisers will also need to prepare for the ways generative AI is infiltrating content across the internet. One report estimates that by 2026, a whopping 90% of online content will be generated by AI.
Generative AI is already making it easier for bad actors to create MFA sites filled with low-quality content, misinformation-filled pages strategically developed around key search terms, and other content that could pose significant risks to brands that run ads alongside it. As a result, advertisers will need to be more deliberate around their ad spend and put new guardrails in place to avoid waste.
Programmatic advertisers, in particular, will need to seek out solutions that help steer their dollars away from MFA sites and other brand unsafe environments. Brands are already spending a reported 15% of their programmatic budgets on made-for-advertising websites (MFAs). Advertisers will need to “react in real-time to block misleading sites and keywords,” says Marshall, and should embrace technological solutions like MFA block lists to help minimize the risk. Agencies and brands may also eventually need to develop teams who work specifically to deal with fake content like misinformation and disinformation, in order to protect their spend: Gartner predicts that by 2027, 80% of marketers will have developed “content authenticity teams” to serve this purpose.
Advertisers will also need to balance their own enthusiasm around AI with a consumer base that isn’t quite so excited. While 77% of advertisers have a positive view of AI, the majority of consumers don’t trust the technology: A 2024 report from the Edelman Trust Institute found that US consumer trust in artificial intelligence has fallen by 15% in the last five years, from 50% to 35%. On a global scale, respondents were nearly two times more likely to say that innovations like AI are “poorly managed” by businesses, NGOs, and governments than they were to say that those innovations were well managed—a sentiment shared across income, generation, and age.
These opinions don’t necessarily mean that advertisers should stop embracing those AI-led tools that work for them—especially considering that AI has effectively driven behind-the-scenes advertising features such as machine learning, algorithmic optimization, bid multipliers, and group budget optimization for some time now.
What it does mean is that leaders need to be cognizant of consumer sentiment toward AI, and to act accordingly. This could include informing consumers about how AI is used in a client or stakeholder’s marketing efforts, via a social media post or a dedicated page on their website. Brands may also opt to disclose when an ad or content is generated by AI. While only about half of ads generated by AI are currently identified as such, adding disclosures can lead to a 47% increase in the appeal of those ads, a 73% increase in the trustworthiness of those ads, and a 96% jump in trust for the brands behind them.
Data privacy is also top of mind for consumers, with 68% of global consumers feeling either somewhat or very concerned about their digital privacy, and 57% agreeing that artificial intelligence is a significant threat to their privacy. Organizations can gain consumers’ trust by offering transparency around how they safeguard their customers’ data, and by prioritizing partnerships with privacy-focused organizations or gaining voluntary certifications like SOC 2 compliance that indicate a commitment to data security and ethical data practices.
Leaders who prioritize this type of transparency can develop stronger, more trust-based relationships with their consumer base—which may provide a key competitive edge in a competitive environment.
Finally, there are a variety of legal concerns advertising leaders must account for as they adopt new AI tools. Artificial intelligence has advanced more quickly than legislators can keep up with it, but there are a variety of regulations that have been introduced in the US and beyond that aim to mitigate the threats posed by AI. At the same time, advertisers must ensure compliance with existing legislation to avoid hefty fines and other legal consequences.
As advertisers grapple with the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome and wider issues surrounding signal loss, AI has emerged as a powerful tool for enabling privacy-friendly personalized marketing.
AI can enable lookalike and predictive audiences based on first-party data, and generate a variety of data-based insights to help advertisers better understand their audience and their consumers’ path to purchase. Advertisers are already starting to embrace these tools as a way of making up for the loss of cookies and other factors impacting signal loss.
At the same time, AI technologies can pose some data privacy-related risks. Many AI-powered advertising solutions use personal data to fuel their machine learning algorithms, and depending on the tool itself, there’s some ambiguity around where exactly all that data comes from, where it’s stored, and who can access it. What’s more, some artificial intelligence tools leverage the data they collect to deduce sensitive personal data such as location, health information, and political or religious views.
To ensure the ethical use of consumer data and to protect their businesses from legal consequences, advertising organizations must thoroughly vet any data-focused vendors or tools to ensure their data gathering, processing, analyzing, and storage systems comply with digital advertising regulations—and, of course, ensure their own data systems comply as well. Leaders must also stay on top of new AI- and data privacy-related regulations as they take hold, as this is an area that will likely see a lot of regulatory activity in coming years.
Another area of legal concern for advertisers relates to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is responsible for safeguarding US consumers from unfair or deceptive advertising practices. Last year, Chairwoman Lina Kahn wrote that the commission is paying special attention to AI’s potential to advance unfair and deceptive advertising practices, stating that “Although these tools are novel, they are not exempt from existing rules, and the F.T.C. will vigorously enforce the laws we are charged with administering, even in this new market.” This sentiment goes along with the FTC’s prior commitment to protecting US consumers from dark patterns, or design techniques that can manipulate consumers into purchasing an item or service or providing personal data (and which can be created and enhanced via AI). On the state level, the Colorado Privacy Act and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) have also outlined regulations around dark patterns in advertising.
Lastly, advertisers need to pay close attention to any ownership- and copyright-related legal concerns around AI-generated content.
While AI-created content currently cannot be copyrighted, the US Copyright Office has initiated an agency-wide investigation to “delve into a wide range of (copyright-related) issues” created by the popularization of GenAI tools. Leaders will need to stay on top of any developments in this area to ensure compliance as more legislators and regulators refine rules around the ownership of AI-generated works.
Overall, advertising leaders must make it a priority to understand how current regulations apply to AI, and to stay on top of new regulations as they take hold. Enlisting a solid legal counsel or team will be key to navigating the complexity of this arena.
By investing the time in advancing their teams’ AI-adjacent knowledge and skillsets now, leaders will set their organizations up for success as the technology becomes increasingly prevalent throughout digital advertising. The sooner advertisers learn how to implement and take advantage of these tools in a discerning and ethical way, the greater their competitive edge will be over those who procrastinate.
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Want to learn more about how advertisers are approaching GenAI? We surveyed over 200 marketing professionals from top agencies, brands, non-profits, and publishers to better understand advertiser sentiments around GenAI, as well as how they’re leveraging GenAI tools in their work. Check out the top takeaways in our report, Generative AI and the Future of Marketing.
In 2020, many leaders committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at their organizations in response to the movement for racial justice set in motion by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Four years later, some those commitments appear to be wavering, with forecasts estimating that organizational DEI investments will fall by 13% in 2024 compared to 2022. In the advertising sector specifically, recent layoffs at Google and Meta resulted in downsized DEI programs, and investment in diverse-owned media companies has slowed.
It seems that for many companies, amidst continuing economic uncertainty and in the lack of acute public pressure such as that felt in the wake of Floyd’s murder, DEI has been relegated to a “non-mission critical” investment.
Despite these trends, much of the advertising industry remains committed to advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, and there is ample opportunity for continued prioritization and growth of DEI efforts.
To further explore how leaders can make meaningful strides toward DEI at their organizations, we sat down with Lois Castillo, Head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Basis Technologies. Lois, a veteran of both DEI and advertising work, recently wrapped up Basis Technologies’ first virtual IDEA (inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility) summit, an event aimed at integrating IDEA principles more deeply into Basis’ organizational culture. Below, she shares what companies can be doing better in their DEI work, how DEI leaders can anchor themselves amidst the complexity of that work, and how the IDEA summit served to advance Basis’ DEI-focused goals.
Lois Castillo: First, the obvious answer: Not doing it.
By this point, leaders should understand that DEI is not just an ethical imperative, or good for business, but something organizations can’t survive without. The world is a diverse place that’s only getting more diverse, and if companies don’t reflect that increased diversity, they’re just not going to make it. When businesses don’t change with the times, they perish—for example, look at what happened to Blockbuster’s once streaming TV became the norm. The same thing goes for leaders: If you’re not doing your own work and development around DEI and bringing that into your organization, you’re not going to be leading for much longer.
When it comes to companies taking action, a common mistake I notice is treating DEI as solely the responsibility of HR. While fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion among employees is crucial, that’s just one aspect of the work. Companies that fail to make a real impact are likely fixating solely on this aspect instead of adopting a holistic approach that extends beyond their own workforce.
My team takes a three-pronged approach, addressing DEI in the following areas:
Additionally, I think it’s worth noting that companies that don’t include accessibility in their DEI work are missing the mark. To be truly inclusive of diverse team members, we need to work towards an accessible workplace—one that considers the spectrum of ability and neurodiversity and works to ensure that everyone on those spectrums can succeed.
LC: Well, I start with transparency and honesty—I don’t pretend I know everything. But I love people, and I’m curious about people, and I’m committed to constantly learning about the issues that people experience so that I can better address them in my work.
It’s true that all the axes of diversity among us can get overwhelming if you start to think about it, and that there’s a lot of work that must be done to address those axes individually. At the same time, there are ways we can address all of them at once, like creating shared language and behaviors for interacting with each other in the workplace that are rooted in respect and accountability—for example, calling someone in instead of calling them out when they make a mistake.
This isn’t easy work, that’s for sure. It’s not for the faint of heart. But that doesn’t mean you give up!
LC: First, let me break down what the summit looked like. We organized a variety of sessions, each with an expert speaker who shared stories and insights based on a specific aspect of inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA). We had sessions on topics including how ageism shows up the workplace, how to foster inclusive environments for neurodivergent folks, and what great allyship looks like in practice. In addition to presentations from our experts, the sessions provided space for dialogue, where our employees could share personal experiences, ask questions, and engage with each other.
One of my main goals behind the event was to help move our culture forward by grounding everyone in the same language and knowledge. There are so many people with so many different life experiences at our company, and I wanted us to get grounded around the complexity and the multifaceted nature of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I think when people hear the word “diversity,” they’re often thinking of gender and race. But we’re diverse in so many ways, and they all intersect. So, advancing our people’s knowledge and vocabulary of those differences was a big part of the event.
LC: I hope people walked away with curiosity about all the different ways people exist in the world, and with actionable tools that can help them in their own learning journeys around inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility. Many of the topics at this specific event were geared around self, encouraging people to investigate their own experiences. I hope the sessions inspired people to get curious about their own experiences of difference in the world, as well as their triggers, blind spots, and biases. It’s important to get curious about yourself, because that will more than likely translate into curiosity about others’ experiences.
I think my favorite part of the summit was just watching the chats in these sessions and seeing all the engagement and the different questions and contributions people had. I loved seeing how participants felt free and safe enough to share their vulnerability. It’s really meaningful to see presentations and conversations resonating with people, and to see them feel secure enough to bring their personal lives and experiences into conversations with their colleagues.
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Learn more about Basis Technologies’ commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility here.
When you’re online looking for crowdsourced recommendations from passionate people, where and how do you look? With so much product recommendation content out there these days, we can’t be the only ones adding “Reddit” at the end of our searches (à la “best vacuum cleaner reddit”) in search of honest recommendations and reviews.
In fact, this is likely one of the most common ways Reddit shows up in the lives of people who don’t participate regularly in one of the social media network’s 100,000+ interest-based communities. Add it all up, and Reddit is the third-most visited website in the US and the seventh-most visited site in the world.
Amongst advertisers, the platform isn’t as widely leveraged as YouTube or TikTok. But with a variety of factors bringing new challenges to historically dominant social media networks—not to mention the strides Reddit has made in recent years to up its advertising value—some advertisers are newly considering whether the platform makes sense for their brands.
If you want to learn more about what Reddit is, what it offers advertisers, and how to make the most of its advertising opportunity, you’ve come to the right place. Read on for everything you need to know about advertising on this one-of-a-kind social platform.
Unfamiliar with Reddit? You’re not the only one! Before we get into how and when advertisers might want to use the platform, let’s get clear on how it works.
Reddit is home to thousands of interest-based communities, or subreddits, where users connect and converse with each other. The site has over 51 million active monthly users across the US and more than 430 million around the globe.
One of the main ways Redditors engage is via posts, which can be marked as public to the entire internet or as viewable only to other Redditors in a certain subreddit. Users engage with posts by commenting and either upvoting (clicking a button to indicate that they found the post valuable or relevant) or downvoting (clicking a button to indicate that they did not find the post valuable or relevant) the post. The more upvotes a post gets, the more visibly it is displayed on Reddit. Check out the front page of Reddit to see the most popular (i.e., the most upvoted) posts of today—they range from breaking news, to funny videos, to celebrity gossip, to interviews with interesting people.
It’s a great question, as Redditors are a unique bunch!
One of the most unique benefits of the Reddit audience is that it’s a highly engaged one: As Reddit itself says, “Redditors don’t doom-scroll—they engage with intent.” Reddit is also a great way to reach millennials, as they represent about 40% of the platform’s users. At the same time, Redditors trust the content on the platform: 85% of them agree that their peers post things that are “honest and truthful”, which explains why so many turn to the site when searching for reviews and recommendations.
That being said, the fact that Redditors are so highly engaged and passionate about the topics they engage in comes with some caveats for marketers. Redditors are protective about their communities—a quality which has led to the perception that there’s an anti-advertising sentiment on the platform. According to Reddit, however, Redditors don’t dislike ads in and of themselves—they dislike “sneaky” ads.
Despite the platform’s large, engaged user base and its clear staying power, there’s a sentiment in the advertising community that Reddit has often been the platform playing catch-up when it comes to developing innovative features for users and advertisers alike.
Still, despite its relatively simple interface (to put it kindly…), Reddit has made some serious strides in just the past year to make itself more attractive to marketers—and, in particular, performance marketers. In 2023 alone, the platform announced Reddit Brand Lift and Reddit Conversion Lift for enhanced measurement, as well as Product Ads and Contextual Keyword Targeting. The platform has also invested heavily in delivering a personalized and localized user experience to international audiences. Its untapped search advertising potential (which it will no doubt try to harness amidst hints that an IPO could be around the corner) makes Reddit a worthy channel for advertisers to, at the very least, keep an eye on.
Overall, while Reddit has thus far struggled to establish itself as a cornerstone in the social advertising landscape, the platform is in an exciting place to capture more of marketers’ social ad spend—if it plays its cards right.
While Reddit can work for brands in most industries, marketers working in sectors that have particularly active audiences on the platforms, such as consumer, gaming, and tech, are especially well-situated to tap in. However, Reddit’s big marketing appeal—its ability to direct ad spending towards very specific target audiences in a privacy-friendly way—is relevant for businesses of all kinds.
Because Reddit is home to so many niche communities—from birders, to board gamers, skincare addicts, sound system afficionados, and everyone in between—there’s a big opportunity to serve ads specifically to people who are already engaging in an interest relevant to your product or service. Marketers using Reddit can target by community (to serve ads to a specific subreddit), interest (to reach a larger audience across multiple subreddits), location (to target Redditors in specific geographies), and custom audiences (to re-engage with consumers who have already engaged with their business in some way).
Even more, as the advertising world prepares for the loss of third-party cookies in Chrome and adjusts to the uptick in privacy-focused digital advertising regulation—not to mention the clear consumer demand for privacy-first marketing—contextual targeting will become a critical piece of any brand’s marketing investment. That makes Reddit’s community- and interest-based targeting options all the more valuable. These contextual capabilities will be a big differentiator for Reddit and may drive more marketing dollars towards the platform as social ad spend continues to fragment and marketers prioritize privacy-friendly targeting opportunities.
The golden question! Let’s dig into what you should consider when investing in Reddit to ensure your dollars are used strategically.
First and foremost, make sure to read up on Reddit’s Advertising Policy and ensure that all your campaigns comply.
Next, when it comes to crafting creative for Reddit, here are some key tips:
Once you’ve crafted your creative, make sure to set a clear objective or KPI to analyze the performance of your campaign against. This will help you keep track of what’s working and what isn’t once the campaign is up and running.
From there, make sure to set a long enough flight for your test to ensure that the platform can optimize based on initial learnings. Your test should last for at least four weeks, and preferably for eight weeks. As part of the testing process, incorporate A/B tests—of ad formats, ad creatives, headlines, post text, and CTAs—into your campaign to see what resonates the most with your target audiences.
Next, while Reddit can be a standalone platform for advertising efforts, it works best as part of a full funnel, omnichannel approach. While the platform has come a long way in improving its performance marketing offerings, it has a lot of value as an upper-funnel channel, as many users visit the site to research and discover new ideas and products. As such, it can work well for building brand awareness with highly engaged target audiences. To move prospect audiences further down the funnel, marketers can pair Reddit campaigns with channels like Meta and Google Search to round out their omnichannel efforts.
Despite its effectiveness, adding a new channel to any digital campaign can be daunting for marketers, if only due to the sheer number of different platforms they must navigate. To ease this burden, some teams may seek out platforms that automatically pull in campaign performance data from multiple platforms—including social platforms such as Reddit, Snapchat, and TikTok—and centralizing them within a single interface. This provides advertisers with a single source of truth, allowing them to view their campaigns holistically, while saving time and reducing manual labor by eliminating the need to toggle back and forth between platforms.
Phew! That was a lot. Let’s wrap it up with a brief summary of what was discussed—or, as Redditors like to tag summaries under particularly long posts, TL;DR (too long; didn’t read).
Overall, Reddit is chasing some of the more established social media marketing channels. That said, the platform is in a particularly interesting position as social ad spend fragments and the industry quickens its pace towards a privacy-friendly norm. For advertisers who want to tap into engaged, niche communities, Reddit presents a great opportunity to test, learn, and grow.
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Social fragmentation and privacy-friendly marketing are just two of the trends shaping the marketing landscape today. Want a better understanding of all the trends that will impact advertisers in 2024? Check out our 2024 Trends Report.
As advertisers continue to grapple with signal loss, the pressure is on for organizations to up their first-party data game.
Factors like Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, privacy-minded digital advertising regulation, and Google’s plan to fully deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome by the end of 2024 have led to new interest in first-party data, with advertisers eager to substitute their reliance on third-party cookies with privacy-first forms of targeting and attribution. And first-party data is perhaps the heaviest hitter on that list.
Because first-party data is provided directly by consumers, it allows advertisers to learn about their audience, craft personalized messages, and understand what tactics are most impactful in their path to purchase—all with a high degree of precision. Unfortunately, because of the advertising industry’s historic reliance on third-party cookies, many businesses haven’t prioritized first-party data to the extent they’ll need to in a privacy-first world.
Looking for some guidance on where to begin this process? You’ve come to the right place. Read on to learn everything advertisers need to know about collecting and storing first-party data for cookieless targeting and attribution.
To maximize their first-party data, advertisers must collect, store, and leverage it in ways that honor consumer privacy and comply with digital advertising regulations.
To do this effectively means not just compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA/CPRA, but also prioritizing the larger demand behand these regulations: Namely, that consumers want more control over whether or not businesses have access to their data, and more transparency into how their data is used and stored.
Studies have found that 68% of global consumers feel either somewhat or very concerned about their online data privacy, and nearly half of consumers say that websites and apps don’t provide enough information about how their data is used. However, 78% of consumers say they are more likely to share their data with a company they trust, indicating that companies can bolster their first-party data collection efforts by demonstrating they are committed to handling that data with integrity and care.
To do this, marketers should start by conducting a holistic analysis to account for the business goals that consumer data empowers, getting specific about what data is needed to reach those goals. Tapping legal counsel will help ensure data processing practices are airtight from the start—a close collaboration between legal and marketing teams will ensure that businesses are able to collect the most impactful first-party data available to them while honoring consumer privacy and adhering to regulations.
Additionally, marketers should seek out technology partners that share their commitment to honoring consumer privacy—for example, those that have achieved SOC 2 compliance. Failing to vet partners’ data protection practices can open companies up to both legal consequences and consumer backlash.
Once a business has set up the appropriate systems to ensure privacy compliance, they’ll want to maximize their collection of first-party data. There are a variety of ways to go about this, including:
These approaches will vary by industry, as different sectors present different opportunities for data collection. For example, a B2B software company might prioritize collecting first-party data by offering whitepapers relevant to their target audience and requiring them to fill out a form to access them. A financial services brand could take a similar approach with gated site-based tools, such as loan calculators, that provide value to their target audiences. A retail business, on the other hand, is well-positioned to collect data through its point-of-sale system or a loyalty program.
With any approach to asking consumers for their data, marketers should be clear about what they’re offering in return—whether it’s a resource their target audience will find valuable, an exclusive coupon, or simply personalized marketing designed to meet their needs. This ensures that consumers are informed about how their data is being used, and serves to build brand trust as well.
Beyond collecting first-party data and using it for targeting and attribution, it’s important to store this data in an organized, privacy-compliant, and easily accessible way. Currently, many organizations store first-party data across a variety of third-party vendors who collect and activate that data for a variety of functions. This means marketers only have access to very fragmented views of their consumers and their paths to purchase and, as a result, can’t leverage that data’s full potential. These data silos also make it difficult to track when and how consumers gave consent for the collection and use of their data.
To more effectively store and activate this information, business typically turn to two main technologies: customer relationship management systems (CRMs) and customer data platforms (CDPs).
CRMs were originally created to help salespeople track their interactions with current and prospective customers and optimize how they approach forming and maintaining those relationships. These tools have since grown to support marketing teams as well, pulling in data through integrations with touchpoints like a brand’s website, landing pages, and social media accounts and subsequently allowing marketers to create and segment audiences using that data. Some CRMs can also assist with other functions, such as workflow automation and consent management.
CDPs cover many of the same functions as CRMs, but they offer the added benefit of being built specifically for the collection, storage, and activation of first-party data. They can gather data from even more sources than CRMs can, process and standardize that data, and segment it in real-time, allowing advertisers to activate it more quickly. The depth of first-party data CDPs can capture gives advertisers a more holistic view of the customer journey across many touchpoints and a single source of truth when it comes to consumer data. Lastly, some CDPs can assist with data compliance by setting data governance standards.
While CRMs are widely adopted among digital advertisers, CDPs are a newer offering. For brands that really want to prioritize first-party data for privacy-first marketing amidst signal loss, CDPs can offer enhanced functionality for that specific purpose.
CRMs and CDPs can organize large amounts of first-party data, which advertisers can use to create consumer personas and targetable audiences. Some advertising platforms allow marketers to create these targetable audiences via the direct upload of their CRM data, while others require the use of external partners to first process that data. CDPs, on the other hand, can automate the segmentation of audiences in real-time for use in targeting and measurement.
With the right platforms and partners, advertisers can also extend their first-party data via strategies such as lookalike modeling and layering first-party data with contextual targeting.
Once a campaign is live, there are a variety of ways advertisers can use first-party data for measurement and attribution. For example, they can integrate their first-party data sources with a single-touch attribution tool like Google Analytics. Some advertising platforms provide analytics dashboards that measure the impact of campaigns on users identified via uploaded CRM data. CDPs, meanwhile, can be used in the same way, and by offering a holistic view of the customer journey, they help advertisers understand how different interactions and touchpoints contribute to conversions.
By baking in privacy compliance from the outset, optimizing their methods for first-party data collection, and storing that data in a way that allows them to get the most out of it, advertisers will be well positioned to use first-party data for targeting and attribution in their campaigns. As the industry pivots towards practices that honor consumer privacy, organizations that invest in and refine their first-party data systems early will have a competitive advantage over teams that drag their feet on adopting privacy-first solutions.
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Curious as to how your peers are approaching privacy-first advertising? Basis surveyed over 200 marketing and advertising professionals across agencies, brands, non-profits, and publishers to find out how they are grappling with signal loss. Check out the findings in our report, Identity vs. Privacy: Digital Advertising in a Cookieless World.
The next few years are set to be, shall we say, an educational time for marketers at colleges and universities. Over the course of 2024, Google plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, removing cookies for 1% of users in Q1 and the rest later in the year. When compounded with the signal loss advertisers are already dealing with as a result of things like consumer demand for data privacy, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, and the many privacy-related regulations that have cropped up in recent years, higher ed advertisers will need to shift towards digital advertising tactics that prioritize data privacy. On top of that, institutions will soon have to grapple with the college enrollment cliff, which promises to significantly reduce undergraduate enrollment starting in 2025, making it all the more urgent for colleges and universities to market themselves effectively and efficiently.
The good news? These massive upheavals provide a significant opportunity for advertisers to get creative and take a leading role in helping their organizations weather the storm.
To better understand what higher ed advertisers need to know about the privacy-first future, we spoke with education marketing expert Sydney Warden, Director of Integrated Client Solutions at Basis Technologies. Read on for her insights on how to adapt to signal loss and the cookieless future.
Sydney Warden: Once third-party cookies go away, first-party data will need to be a higher priority for all marketing teams. As such, my biggest advice for advertisers in higher ed is to help their brand or clients get their first-party data in order.
I often see colleges and universities where their first-party data is spliced in so many ways: satellite campuses versus the main campus, online versus brick and mortar, and undergraduate versus graduate, to give a few examples. This can lead to data silos, where because of how first-party data is collected and stored at these organizations, advertisers can’t access it efficiently—or, in some cases, access it at all. Because of this, a lot of higher ed organizations are very reliant on third-party data, and that could present a big problem as cookies go away.
I also often see universities using third party providers to house customer data gathered from website touchpoints such as registrations or newsletter sign ups. In those situations, advertisers aren’t even able to pixel those touchpoints, let alone access that data.
As a result, it’s going to be key for colleges and universities to start unifying all their data. Investing in a customer data platform (CDP) will be a good call for many institutions, as this can ensure that the collection and organization of first-party data is unified and organized moving forward. CDPs can also empower advertisers to maximize their first-party data for targeting and help with attribution by giving marketers a clearer view of the touchpoints in a consumer journey and how they contribute to enrollments or other kinds of conversions.
SW: Beyond first-party data, I think a data management platform (DMP) solution and contextual targeting will be really key for colleges and universities.
DMPs allow advertisers to place pixels across a website or on specific actions in the consumer journey, gathering insight into visitor attributes such as household income, gender, age range, and location, and curating anonymized customer profiles. This not only helps advertisers learn more about the segments they’re targeting, but also allows them to build lookalike models to extend that targeting to new audiences. This is all pixel-based, not cookie-based, so it doesn’t collect personal data and is privacy-friendly. In addition to targeting, DMPs can empower attribution in a similar way to CDPs, by allowing marketers to get a view of the customer journey and which touchpoints are most impactful on conversions.
In regard to contextual targeting, advertisers can align with relevant content on websites or apps to serve ads in a privacy-friendly way. It pays to invest some time and money into figuring out what a target audience typically consumes and where they consume it, and then placing ads in that relevant content and on those relevant platforms to ensure the right audience sees it.
SW: Sure! For our first example, let’s take a mid-size or community college that has a more limited marketing budget. To make the most of their ad spend, I’d recommend leaning into hyper-personalization via first-party data, and focusing a bit further down the funnel via things like contextual advertising. For advertisers working for these organizations, it’s a good idea to have a curated list of local sites and contextual segments relevant to specific target audiences that they can build or tap into for their clients. As for the institutions themselves, they’ll want to work with partners who can offer those lists and segments.
Bigger and better-known universities that already have some brand recognition, as well as more funds for marketing, should focus more on upper funnel platforms such as CTV and social media (especially TikTok!) to maintain their brand recognition. This is beneficial not only for brand awareness, but also for filling retargeting pools. Also, these organizations will likely find it easier to tap into their first-party data and use it to reach out to former students who may be interested in returning, or to build some relevant lookalike audiences for targeting.
Higher education advertisers can lead their colleges and universities to privacy-first advertising success by setting the right strategies in place. Investing in the collection, organization, and extension of first-party data should be top priority for marketing teams, while a DMP solution and contextual targeting will also be key strategies. By leaning into these recommendations, higher ed marketers can rise to the top of their class in 2024.
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