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“Buzzword: A keyword; a catchword or expression currently fashionable; a term used more to impress than to inform, esp. a technical or jargon term” – Oxford English Dictionary
All industries have their buzzwords, but the advertising space seems to invite a few more than its fair share. And, in many ways, it makes perfect sense: Advertisers are experts at selling brands, ideas, products, and services, and language is a key component of any pitch. Trendy words and phrases can help signal that the person or business using them is at the forefront of innovation.
Of course, as the OED notes in their definition of “buzzword,” these terms and phrases can be used more to impress than to inform. As a result, when words become buzzwords, their meanings and applications often become less clear.
That said, taking stock of the buzzwords of the moment can be instructive for advertisers looking to better understand their competitors and the industry. The marketing terms and phrases that are in vogue can tell us a lot about what’s top-of-mind for advertisers: their pain points, their needs, their anxieties, and more.
As the advertising industry transforms thanks to tectonic factors like AI, the shift towards privacy-first marketing, and media fragmentation and the increasing complexity of advertising work, the terms advertisers hear and use frequently can tell a meaningful story about the broader advertising landscape. To better explore this, we asked marketing experts at Basis to share their buzzword-related insights—specifically, which buzzwords they hear all the time, their level of value and meaning, why they’re currently so popular, and what their popularity says about the state of the industry.
Most-Heard Buzzwords: AI, Growth hacking
Colleen’s Take: Often, it feels like advertisers bring these words into conversation to demonstrate that they’re in touch with the latest trends. However, they aren’t always relevant or helpful.
‘Growth hacking,’ which refers to rapidly increasing a brand or client’s user base or revenue with minimal budget/resources, feels especially demonstrative of the industry today. I see this buzzword used frequently by brands (particularly start-ups) to describe an approach where every dollar spent is heavily scrutinized. If it’s not driving measurable growth, it's cut.
Reading Between the Lines: The underlying story is that brands and agencies have been battling economic turbulence and other financial pressures for several years now, and they’re doing everything they can to try and drive revenue and increase the efficiency of their spend.
Most-Heard Buzzwords: ID bridging, ID spoofing
Noor’s Take: 2024 has been marked by discussion about alternative addressability solutions, as third-party cookies were expected to be fully deprecated before year’s end. As the adtech industry sought out new methods for consumer tracking, ID bridging gained traction as a proposed option. This solution intends to link user IDs via matching across channels and platforms to create a cohesive profile.
ID bridging has received a fair amount of criticism, including concerns around privacy, the formulation of unreliable IDs, and the need for volumes of first-party data. The handling and linking of related data points for ID bridging makes room for another problematic buzzword: ID spoofing. ID spoofing occurs when bad actors manipulate IDs in a bidstream to masquerade as other user IDs which may be more attractive to advertisers.
While Google no longer intends to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, marketers must still grapple with signal loss and the shift towards privacy-first advertising, meaning that these terms will likely continue to make the rounds.
Reading Between the Lines: Both terms have brought new points of contention and confusion to the advertising space. We Are Raptive founder Paul Barrister summed up the issue by saying: “After a year+ of talking to dozens of companies about ID bridging, I can confidently say that all ID bridging conversations are a series of miscommunications and misunderstandings.”
Most-Heard Buzzwords: Halo effect, "Right message, right time, right place”
Molly’s Take: Neither of these phrases are necessarily easy to measure and achieve.
The popularity of the term “halo effect” reflects that brand awareness is growing as a known need as a response to the industry’s laser-focus on performance marketing in recent years. Meanwhile, “right message, right time, right place” speaks to the fragmentation of the media landscape and the importance of marketing strategies that are aligned with the customer journey. Advertisers are returning to this adage, which has been around since our industry began, to guide their strategies as they grapple with fragmentation and media complexity.
Reading Between the Lines: These terms reflect a wider trend of advertisers returning to the basics as a way to cope with the significant transformation and complexity that currently characterizes the industry.
Most-Heard Buzzword: AI
Andrew’s Take: People have seen the power of generative AI with ChatGPT and are trying to imagine all the applications for creating efficiency. The popularity of the term “AI” speaks to advertisers’ goal of leveraging technology to be more efficient and effective. The industry is looking to stretch budgets as much as possible and do more with less, and many believe that AI can be used to do that effectively at scale.
While there are many real applications for AI, there are also people who try to take advantage of the buzz around it and apply it to things that don’t quite fit (i.e., AI-washing). It seems like this happens every time something is capturing headlines—for example, when blockchain technology was all the rage a couple of years ago.
Reading Between the Lines: As AI develops, it’s critical for advertisers to weed out the PR plays from what's real. This applies to all buzzwords.
In reviewing the buzzwords that advertising leaders hear most frequently, two distinct themes emerge, each providing meaningful insights for advertisers looking to better understand the current landscape.
The first is financial pressures. Advertisers have been dealing with economic instability for years now, and agencies are under particularly acute financial stress. The popularity of terms like “growth hacking” signal the urgency marketers feel around making the most of their budgets. The same can be said of marketers’ infatuation with AI, as businesses increasingly look to the technology to drive revenue and increase efficiency.
The second is that, even with Google calling off its plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, advertisers are still scrambling to market their brands and clients effectively amidst signal loss and media fragmentation. In this context, new and uncertain tactics like ID bridging can seem like an attractive way to help advertisers connect with their target audiences—and that attractiveness is amplified by marketing teams’ urgent need for alternative addressability solutions—but their effectiveness isn’t proven, and they may open advertisers up to additional risk.
Ultimately, while buzzwords can often be frustratingly vague or overhyped, they also offer valuable insights into what’s currently top of mind for advertisers. The critical task for marketers is to discern meaningful information and thought leadership from mere buzz designed solely to impress. By critically engaging with these terms and understanding their real-world applications, advertisers can set themselves ahead of many of their peers and position themselves favorably in context to the industry’s greatest hopes and fears.
As AI revolutionizes how advertisers work, media agencies are adopting the technology to drive revenue amidst slashed client budgets and shrinking margins.
Agency leaders overwhelmingly feel that AI will have a significant and positive impact on the advertising industry, with 82.4% believing that AI will be the most influential trend to shape digital advertising in the next ten years. At the same time, media agencies have a bit of a leg up when it comes to familiarity with AI, given that they’ve relied on the technology for longer than many other players in the industry via programmatic advertising (and programmatic optimization tactics like bid shading and machine learning optimization.)
As AI develops at a rapid pace, there are an ever-expanding number of ways agencies can employ the technology to save time and increase efficiency. To make the most of AI for driving revenue and staying competitive, media agencies may want to pay particular attention to AI-powered opportunities supporting campaign planning and optimization.
One of AI’s most meaningful impacts on marketing is its ability to organize and analyze huge amounts of data in a fraction of the time it would take for a human to do so. This AI-powered capability has already revolutionized the media buying space, most notably through the advent of programmatic advertising. Today, AI is growing increasingly effective at pulling insights from audience and historical campaign data to help marketing teams craft more impactful campaign strategies.
For instance, AI-driven social listening is becoming table stakes for marketers. Manually sifting through social media to gain insights on the top concerns of consumers looking for a certain type of product takes hours—but AI-powered social listening tools can get it done in a matter of minutes. Using these tools, advertisers can easily track their competitors online as well as quickly generate clear insights into consumer sentiments, preferences, and trends. They can then use those insights in the planning process to ensure their campaigns are attuned to both competitor activity and consumer sentiment and behavior. For example, Fulham Football Club uses social listening to gain a more segmented and nuanced understanding of their fanbase according to their online activity, which opens up opportunities to target those segments with personalized messaging. This heightened attunement to their audience helps Fulham spend more efficiently, which in turn drives revenue.
Moreover, these types of tools aren’t exclusive to social—AI listening tools can pull data from search touchpoints and synthesize data from consumer reviews as well.
Beyond customer listening, media agencies and their technology partners are finding more and more ways to refine campaign planning processes using AI’s data synthesis capabilities. For example, some advertising platforms can employ AI to synthesize data from all the campaigns that run within them, and provide advertisers with insights into performance benchmarks and budget distribution trends amongst marketing teams working in the same vertical. AI can also accelerate the forecasting process, enabling advertisers to predict available inventory based on specific criteria and implement new strategies using the precise targeting parameters from their forecasts.
Media agencies are also mitigating signal loss by using technologies like CDPs equipped with AI to quickly gather, standardize, and leverage consumer data to pull audience insights and track the customer journey to plan their campaigns more strategically as well.
Overall, leveraging AI to implement audience and competitor insights in the planning process can help media agencies save time and craft data-driven strategies that are finely attuned to their target audiences’ needs and preferences as well as market trends, helping them better drive ROAS and deliver revenue for their clients.
AI-powered campaign optimization has been around for a while, but new innovations in this area offer media agencies a variety of ways to allocate campaign assets and budgets more effectively. In fact, AI is moving the advertising industry closer to a world where teams will spend very little time on manual campaign optimization, freeing them up for more strategic and fulfilling tasks.
Tools like bid shading and group budget optimization, which automatically make campaign adjustments to improve win rates and drive increased ROAS, have begun this process and are growing more widely adopted. As AI continues to progress, more tools such as these are expected to emerge and help advertisers drive revenue by allocating their dollars towards the tactics, channels, and properties where they’re most impactful.
Major adtech partners are also rolling out offerings that include AI-driven campaign optimization features, such as Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+. However, these walled-garden offerings don’t come without trade-offs—the most significant one being the transparency media buyers are used to. While it’s important for advertisers to test and learn on these tools, media teams must assess whether they are actually accomplishing their goals, rather than setting and forgetting their campaigns.
Dynamic creative optimization (DCO) is another developing area that’s helping media teams save time and spend more effectively, allowing media teams to serve high volumes of diverse creative that’s personalized to specific audience segments, which makes it more likely for ads to resonate with more consumers. One Jack in the Box campaign, for example, used DCO to generate 135 different ad variations and saw a whopping 85% increase in CTR compared to the campaign’s benchmark.
DCO not only reduces time spent on manual creative optimizations, but also provides media teams with extensive insights on how all those creative variations perform, allowing them to tweak their strategies based on those learnings.
These are just a few of the many ways in which AI is helping advertisers to automate and speed up the campaign optimization process, and there are plenty more coming down the line as the technology advances. When used effectively (and carefully monitored by human teams), these tools hold tremendous promise for increasing efficiency and personalization—and thus for driving revenue for media agencies and their clients.
Media agencies have a unique opportunity to leverage AI to drive revenue and enhance efficiency, at a time when such results are critically needed across the agency landscape. AI-powered planning and optimization tools are two areas that offer particularly strong benefits.
Additionally, the AI-driven campaign planning and optimization functionality detailed above can pair with workflow automation technology to help drive wider agency efficiency, reducing manual workloads for teams across the organization.
In exploring and integrating these types of AI into their operations, media agencies can open new avenues for growth and innovation, and position themselves at the forefront of an increasingly AI-driven industry.
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.