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B2B advertising has reached a digital tipping point.
In just five years, B2B has gone from spending just 29% of its media dollars on digital channels to a projected 49% in 2024. That’s an increase of nearly 70%!
Simply adapting to this digital transformation would have been a big task in and of itself. But B2B marketers have been navigating the digital shift while battling through a global pandemic, a prolonged economic downturn, supply chain challenges, layoffs in the tech industry, and a significant shift in who is making purchasing decisions in the B2B landscape. Even more, rapidly approaching on the horizon are the signal loss challenges that will change (and have already begun to change) how B2B marketers connect with target audiences.
Overall, it’s clear that B2B marketers will need to be flexible and adaptable as they navigate an increasingly complex landscape. With all this in mind, here are some key trends B2B marketers should consider in 2024:
In 2023, 60% of B2B marketers said that social media was their most effective revenue-driving channel. It’s no surprise, then, that social media will continue to dominate in 2024. This is likely to prove particularly true when it comes to partnering with influencers and subject matter experts across key platforms, such as Meta and LinkedIn, as B2B marketers continue to rely on these content creators to drive personalized connections with their audiences.
To make the most of the social media opportunity, B2B marketers should be deliberate about which creators or subject matter experts best align with their product(s) and/or services. They can then leverage many different types of content—from user-generated content (UGC), to testimonials, to case studies, and more—to build up credibility, trust, and connection with prospective audiences.
Speaking of building connection, digital video is another channel that will be crucial to helping B2B advertisers elicit emotion and foster relationships with target audiences in the year ahead. Video allows marketing teams to capture audience attention with the power of sight, sound, and motion. These qualities can be particularly impactful for B2B brands when leveraged for sharing education- and testimonial-driven content. Plus, with digital video, marketers can tailor that content specifically to target audiences.
Even more, by leveraging compatible creative across multiple video channels, B2B advertisers can create a curated and consistent customer experience. For instance, teams could use CTV for upper-funnel awareness tactic targeting for specified geographies, reinforce those ads with digital out-of-home (DOOH) displays in the same geographic areas, and further reach target audiences by placing pre-roll video ads within reading content that relates to their specific product or service offering. And, thanks to the benefits inherent to digital technology, video campaigns can now be measured and optimized to maximize a team's return on ad spend (ROAS).
It’s no secret that generative AI has been making quite the splash—both within the world of advertising and beyond—and B2B marketers can use this emerging technology in a variety of ways.
AI-powered chatbots on a website can help improve the user experience and automate lead generation by swiftly and efficiently gathering relevant information on a customer’s needs, making quick decisions to support those needs, and setting sales teams up for success. Generative AI tools can also assist in the content creation process, either for brainstorming or early creation phases. Just remember: Since authenticity and credibility are critical for fostering connection with audiences, a human team member should be reviewing anything generated by AI to ensure that everything is up to par with brand guidelines and to prevent outdated or inaccurate information from sneaking its way into the content.
Amidst the complexity of today’s B2B advertising landscape, it can be tough to know what marketing teams should focus on. But by using social media to connect meaningfully with target audiences, leveraging digital video to show how specific products or services can help solve audiences’ problems, and making the most of emerging AI technologies, savvy B2B marketers can find success in 2024—and beyond.
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Hungry for more 2024 trends? Check out our 2024 Trends Report for everything digital marketers need to know for next year.
Like students cramming for a final exam, the pressure’s on for marketers at colleges and universities.
Undergraduate enrollment has declined since 2010, driven by increased skepticism about the value of a college degree and hesitance around acquiring student loan debt—even though college grads tend to earn more and experience lower rates of unemployment. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated undergraduate enrollment declines, with rates dropping by a whopping 9% between spring 2019 and spring 2023. And though graduate enrollments saw a bump during the early days of the pandemic, those numbers also declined in 2023. Then there’s the looming college enrollment cliff, which promises a 15% decline in the number of college-aged students starting in 2025 due to lower birth rates during the Great Recession.
Add it all up, and it’s clear that 2024 will be a critical year for colleges and universities. The good news is this pressure has seriously upped the value of higher ed marketers. Smart leaders will be prioritizing and investing in their marketing teams, which gives marketers the opportunity to shine by taking creative approaches to big challenges.
Looking for some ideas to give your 2024 planning a competitive edge? Check out the following trends set to shape the year ahead:
Interest in online classes and flexible learning hasn’t slowed, and according to a survey of Chief Online Learning Officers at higher ed institutions, that demand for online courses will continue to grow in the years ahead. Students want online, virtual, and hybrid options, and savvy advertisers will prioritize showcasing these offerings as colleges and universities continue to invest in them. Providing digital experiences like virtual events and campus tours is a great way to show students that you know how to tailor engaging digital experiences.
Creating hyper-personalized ads for students will also be crucial for higher ed marketers in 2024. If a college or university can make prospective students feel like an ad is speaking specifically to them—and that the institution in question is a great fit—that can be an effective strategy for winning over individuals who may be on the fence. At the same time, this approach ensures that marketing budgets are spent as efficiently as possible.
Investing in research and having the ability to slice and dice data like enrollment numbers is key to supporting these efforts. Consumer personas in higher ed have shifted significantly in recent years, and the “traditional college student” persona has morphed into multiple target audiences. There are a lot more nontraditional students, such as part-time students or students enrolled in shorter-term non-degree programs. Marketers need partners who can pull research on consumer and market trends for them and then dig into their enrollment numbers to get specific about where it makes the most sense to invest.
In terms of executing on those hyper-personalized ads, programmatic advertising can provide targeting opportunities so that institutions can reach particularly niche audiences. For example, an omnichannel programmatic strategy allows teams to remarket individuals on higher funnel platforms—which are starting to remove some of their targeting capabilities and the data segments marketers can tap into with the onset of signal loss and third-party cookie deprecation—using insights gained from other channels. Leaning heavily into first-party or DMP data to really figure out what prospective students are looking at on your site and what their priorities are is another great way to maintain that hyper-personalization as we move away from third-party identifiers.
The growing use of artificial intelligence in marketing is a trend across all industries. For higher ed marketers, it’s important to start testing and learning with AI tools now so as to develop a comfort and ease with that skill set, which will put marketers in the best position to quickly jump on any new AI-based opportunities that may emerge in the next few years.
For target audiences, no matter the vertical, attention spans are a lot shorter than they used to be. However, this is especially true for the younger prospective students higher ed marketers are looking to target. Having access to AI-powered features like VR campus tours or chatbots that can answer people’s questions right away are very effective for keeping an audience engaged.
Also, some social platforms, like Meta and TikTok, offer integrations to create augmented reality components. Basically, marketers provide creative assets like images and headlines, and the platforms will try out different variations of those assets until it identifies what is going to perform the most successfully for individual consumers. It’s a great way to leverage AI for creative optimization.
Overall, the focus for savvy higher education marketers in 2024 will be on digital—not only marketing universities’ online and virtual opportunities, but also taking advantage of and getting comfortable with digital advertising tools that empower hyper-personalized advertising, such as programmatic and AI. Education marketers who lean into these digital opportunities are sure to pass with flying colors.
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Hungry for more 2024 trends? Check out our 2024 Trends Report for everything digital marketers need to know for next year.
What’s new in the realms of paid search and social media? This month, Courtney Shaw, VP of Social Media Solutions, and Maggie Shelton, Director of Search Media Investment, compiled all the latest news, trends, and resources for easy access.
To comply with European Union regulations, Meta will begin offering people aged 18 and over who live in the EU, the European Economic Area, and Switzerland the option to pay a monthly subscription fee to use Facebook and Instagram without ads. Those who don’t subscribe can continue to use the platforms for free, while seeing ads deemed relevant to them. Advertisers do not need to take action as a result of this update, and campaigns targeting people ages 18 and up are expected to continue delivering as planned.
Google's new generative AI tools are designed to help marketers create, edit, and iterate on images with less reliance on professional tools or creative teams. The tools can perform basic tasks like altering the background color behind product images, as well as more advanced jobs such as adding products to specific scenes (for example, you could ask Google's AI tool to "place this item on the beach, surrounded by shells"). As Google continues to expand its range of ad formats, this will most immediately be useful to help version creative into multiple ad assets.
“Please put a hat on this horse and make the background red…no, blue…no, green…”
As early as consumers have begun their holiday shopping, 50% still have more to buy after Cyber Week, and they’re going heavy on digital for their research. Marketers looking to maintain momentum from the cyber holidays should consider an omnichannel approach to reach shoppers who are determined to find the right gift. Google has more supporting information and insights here.
Eggnog helps!
Snapchat’s creator community is thriving, with content creators growing highly engaged audiences by giving Snapchatters an authentic look at their lives. Creator Collab Campaigns is Snapchat's new suite of products designed to make it easier for advertisers to partner with the platform’s influential, audience-rich creator community.
Amazon's massive share of the e-commerce market provides them with robust audience targeting data. Advertisers can now leverage this targeting across Amazon and Amazon-owned properties (including Twitch and IMDb). While campaigns are currently display-only and limited to select verticals, they represent a huge opportunity for advertisers trying to reach more hard-to-find cohorts of consumers.
Now that’s Katniss-level targeting.
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Cannabis marketing regulations are multi-tiered and constantly in flux. While an array of cities and states have legalized and decriminalized various forms of cannabis, the substance is still illegal at the federal level. At the same time, social media platforms like Facebook, audio platforms like Spotify, and search platforms like Google each have different policies for how marketers can promote cannabis products. And on top of all that, cannabis marketers must comply with a growing matrix of consumer privacy regulations. The result? An ever-shifting regulatory landscape that requires a considerable amount of up-front research compared to other consumer packaged goods.
While navigating these various regulations might feel like reefer madness, marketers can minimize overwhelm by approaching them in four tiers: Federal, state, platform-specific, and from a general advertising compliance standpoint. Read on for an overview of each layer:
At the federal level, cannabis marketing is regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Advertising Division (NAD). There are two big rules that brands must follow here. First, to comply with the FTC’s Truth in Advertising laws, product descriptions must be backed by legitimate research and must not mislead consumers.
Second, brands may not make any claims that a cannabis product can cure, prevent, diagnose, or treat a serious disease. Brands may, however, make what the FDA calls a structure/function claim. A structure/ function claim:
For example, a brand could not legally state that a CBD product cures insomnia, but it could legally state that a CBD product promotes sleep.
On the state level, State Departments of Health set regulations for cannabis advertising. These regulations vary widely—for example, cannabis marketing is generally prohibited in Delaware, while cannabis marketers in Colorado can advertise across a variety of channels, granted those advertisements adhere to certain restrictions. While there are some general State-level cannabis marketing rules that hold true across the board, it’s critical to research marketing regulations in each state where you plan to advertise. While you’re at it, make sure to look into cannabis advertising restrictions based on city and county jurisdictions as well!
Marketers must also research cannabis marketing guidelines for each platform where they plan to place ads, as they all vary. For example:
With accessible and affordable advertising options like Facebook, Instagram, and Google largely off the table, marketers will need to tap into tools designed to clear this regulation barrier. Basis, for example, is integrated with Cannavu, which operates the largest ad marketplace for curated, compliant cannabis advertising opportunities. Cannavu accesses ad impressions on canna-compliant publishers, automating the publisher selection process for marketers.
Beyond ensuring that campaigns meet the requirements of federal, state, local, and platform-specific regulations, cannabis marketers must also be aware of the broader shift towards privacy-friendly advertising. This includes preparing for the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, updating marketing strategies to meet the growing consumer demand for data privacy, and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and CPRA.
The movement towards privacy-first marketing means that marketing teams must be particularly diligent about compliance when acquiring and activating cannabis customer data, and that they must vet all their partners and vendors to ensure that they display the same level of attention to privacy. At the same time, as more and more privacy-focused regulations pop up across the country, cannabis brands must continually monitor these regulatory developments to in order to avoid costly fines.
There you have it: By approaching cannabis marketing regulations at the federal, state, local, and platform levels, and by meeting the requirements of the overall advertising industry’s regulations, marketers are sure to cover all their regulatory bases.
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Interested in learning more about the cannabis marketing landscape? Check out Cannabis Marketing in the Roaring 2020’s to learn about who is buying cannabis, how to market to them, and what sets a cannabis campaign up for success.
You’ve just landed your dream job as an SEM professional, and your boss is asking you to deliver your “PPC campaign strategy”—you know, that brilliant, air-tight plan you put together to help your brand or client not only meet, but exceed their business objectives?
There's just one small problem: You don't have a strategy. In fact, while you may know a lot about PPC, you’ve never actually sat down and documented how you make PPC magic happen. Where do you start? There’s so much to cover and so little time, especially given the fact that developing a competitive PPC campaign strategy isn’t as easy as it used to be. Advertisers now have a number of ways to target their audiences, which makes distributing ad spend a challenge.
Don’t worry—we’ve not only organized the process of developing a PPC strategy into an easy framework, but we’ve also created a quick PPC strategy checklist to ensure the strategy you do eventually develop is an effective one.
In short, our five-step framework for an effective PPC strategy involves selecting the right platforms, targeting features, and ad types to deliver your message, and balancing your investment in each. If you’re ready to develop a more advanced PPC campaign strategy for your business, these 5 steps can help you get a head start. Let’s dig in!
Defining what you want to achieve with PPC is the most important part of building an effective campaign strategy. Getting clear on your goals will help you choose the platforms and ad types that are best suited for your marketing needs.
Consider these common PPC goals:
If your main goal is brand awareness, then social media and display ads are ideal for your strategy. If your priority is to generate leads, then you can explore Facebook’s lead capture ads. If your main goal is to drive sales, then most of your PPC investment should be in search or product listing ads (PLA).
Sophisticated PPC strategies use a combination of ad types and platforms to target their audience. First, determine your main goals and prioritize them. Then, use this information to decide which platforms and ad types you should invest in.
Next, let’s review how to target your audience with Google Ads PPC. The kind of audience you target and their point in the sales funnel will also tell you which advertising options you should invest in.
The key to success with Google Ads audience targeting is not targeting the most relevant keywords related to your business, but targeting based on intent. The keywords you bid for, the ads you display, and the landing pages you send people to all need to match the position individuals are at in your sales funnel.
There are three main categories of search intent keywords:
Now, most businesses can’t and shouldn’t target all these categories of keywords for PPC. The ones you focus on should depend on your business type and other marketing strategies. For example:
Of course, search isn’t the only PPC channel you can optimize for. There are several other types of audiences you can target on the Display Network, YouTube, and Gmail, such as:
When targeting large amounts of keywords, creating unique optimized landing pages for your ads can be a challenge. However, directing visitors to generic product pages or landing pages equates to wasted ad spend. Not only are site visitors less likely to convert, but their on-site behavior can also lead to lower Quality Scores, making reaching them through PPC even more challenging.
The most effective PPC managers draw a strong link between audience targeting and landing page optimization. The more relevant a landing page is to the initial search intent or audience demographic interest, the more likely it is that site visitors will click through, sign up, make a purchase, or otherwise take action.
Here’s an example of thoughtfully optimizing landing pages based on initial search intent: You searched for “freelance accounting software” and found an ad for Xero:
You click through and their landing page copy focuses on their value proposition for on-the-move freelancers, not business owners as a whole:
That level of message match—from the intent of the search query, to the carefully crafted ad copy, to the optimized landing page verbiage—provides a valuable user experience with high relevance that’s more likely to result in the user taking your desired action.
Once your audience targeting is set up and you’ve created your relevant landing pages, you’re ready to create and optimize your ads.
Your ads serve as the link between search intent/audience interest and the landing pages you’ve already optimized. The goal is to briefly illustrate your unique selling proposition and offer value. You’ll want to experiment using different copy, visual media, extensions, and other elements to optimize your ads.
For search campaigns, Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) make it easy to include a variety of headlines and description lines that Google will mix and match to create an ad that’s targeted toward what it knows about the user. The key is to include variety, so your headlines and description lines should have varied calls to action and value propositions. You can’t just rewrite the same headline and make it slightly different. Try to include as many keywords in your ad as possible and match it to your landing page content. You want the user to have a seamless experience from keyword to ad to landing page. Google will automatically show the top-performing ad creative the most often.
Beyond ad copy, elements like sitelinks, callouts, phone numbers, reviews, and location extensions are great ways to include more information in your ad and take up more room on the top of the page. At the same time, this will push your competitors further down in the results.
When you have enough data to make decisions, swap out the lower-performing ad assets (the headlines, description lines, and extensions) for new variants. Over time, you’ll improve your ad quality and your account performance.
As we discussed above, ad content optimization integrates better into the ad creation process when you use the right tools. The real focus of your analysis is identifying what keywords and targeting features help drive your campaign goals.
Here are some important metrics to consider for search, display, and/or social ads (depending on your campaign goals):
If your goal is lead nurturing, you may also want to take on-site engagement metrics, such as number of page views or new or returning visitors, into consideration.
Keeping track of key metrics can help you evaluate the relevance and effectiveness of your advertising elements (ad copy, targeting, landing pages, etc.). It can also help you understand which keywords and audience targeting strategies are most valuable for your unique business.
There are a lot of ways to optimize your PPC ads for conversions using data science. Once you have a good understanding of the best keywords and audience targeting, you can use those insights to implement advanced targeting strategies to improve your ROAS even more. Using query segmentation to prioritize revenue-driving keywords is one example of an advanced bid optimization strategy you can implement manually.
PPC strategy optimization is an ongoing process. Here’s a quick checklist to recap the steps you need to take to optimize your strategy.
These five steps are foundational to developing a competitive PPC strategy. The key is to identify at what points in the sales funnel you want to target your audience, choose the right platforms and ads to accomplish that, and then optimize your PPC advertising material. Over time, you’ll identify what elements of your strategy deserve the most investment to improve your ROAS.
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Want to level up your PPC strategy even further? Our team of experts can help. Connect with us to learn more!
Have you heard the news? The future is cookieless, and it’s coming up fast—in the second half of 2024, to be precise!
To prepare for a world without third-party cookies, it’s important that members of the advertising industry understand what’s changing and embrace new ideas and collaboration. The success of any identity solution is heavily dependent on scale, and so partnering with an independent owner of a solution with the most scale—or, better yet, partnering with multiple—is likely to be the best option when the dust settles. Working as a group, evaluating options, and sharing principles is the best course we can take to minimize the impact on customers.
With that in mind, here’s a look at the current and future state of third-party cookie deprecation and how groups are working toward innovative identity solutions.
Yes, third-party cookies are on their way out. That said, it's not an all-at-once farewell: Firefox and Safari have already eliminated cookies, while Google, over the past few years, has announced, then delayed, then again delayed Chrome’s third-party cookie deprecation. Despite these postponements, the day will eventually come when third-party cookies are no longer supported in Chrome. However, the transition will be an incremental one, starting in Q1 2024 with about 1% of Chrome users, and progressing gradually from there.
The demise of third-party cookies stems from concerns over consumer privacy and data protection. 86% of people in the US say data privacy is a growing concern for them, and with consumers demanding more control over their online footprint, legislators have stepped in, enacting privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and CPRA. At the same time, tech giants and browsers are taking proactive steps to rebuild trust by putting an end to the cross-site tracking that third-party cookies enabled.
Cookieless tracking monitors user activity on websites without relying on browser cookies. These tracking tools allow marketers to measure cookieless click-through conversions, granting them the ability to track performance, report on campaigns, and maximize ROAS without compromising consumer privacy.
Unfortunately, there’s no “silver bullet” replacement for third-party cookies (yet). Savvy marketers are leaning into a mix of privacy-friendly solutions to minimize the impact of third-party cookie loss on their campaigns, including (but not limited to) cookieless tracking, first-party data, contextual targeting, anonymized data sources, premium inventory, and audience profiling.
New identity solutions have also emerged, offering ways to glean insights from and target messaging to audiences while adhering to privacy-first principles. What do these burgeoning identity solutions look like? Let’s dig in:
In February 2020, the International Advertising Bureau (IAB) introduced Project Rearc, a global initiative designed to get stakeholders across the digital advertising and media supply chain together to re-architect digital marketing in a consolidated effort to harmonize personalization and consumer privacy. And in June 2022, as part of this initiative, IAB Tech Lab released its Global Privacy Platform, a mechanism for transmitting consumer choice signals from websites and mobile apps to advertising technology companies.
Along with other industry leaders, Basis has been an active participant in Project Rearc—reviewing the proposals, evaluating specs, and providing feedback. It proposes rigorous technical standards and guidelines that inform how companies collect and use such an identifier so that:
LiveRamp introduced IdentityLink in 2016. The technology, now known as RampID, allows resolving hundreds of different identifiers for consumers used on devices and marketing platforms in a privacy-compliant manner. It doesn’t matter if data is offline or online, first-party CRM or third-party behavioral, online exposure data or mobile app download data—all of it can be tied back to a unique, privacy-safe identifier at the consumer level.
The digital media ecosystem is a dynamic one, with new methodologies, tools, and opportunities emerging every day. The third-party cookie has been a protagonist for the last 20 years, but it’s not the only character in this story. And with the third-party cookie going the way of MySpace, we are at the dawn of a new era for adtech—one filled with opportunity and room for innovation in the way we connect with our audiences.
Advertisers who focus on making the most of their first-party data and cookieless media alternatives, optimizing campaigns based on real-time learnings, and embracing identity solutions that are high-performing and privacy compliant, are sure to be well-positioned for the cookieless future.
As we go through these changes together, it’s important that industry players stay committed to working together, listening to the market, collaborating with regulatory bodies, adapting and developing new products, and keeping customers/users abreast of changes as they develop. If we can do that, we’ll all emerge from a place of strength and primed for success in our new, cookieless world.
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Want to learn more about how to embrace the cookieless future? Check out Beyond Third-Party Cookies: Your Guide to Overcoming the Identity Crisis.
Digital video is everywhere: from the TikToks and Reels we scroll through when we first wake up, to the news we digest during our lunch break, to the videos that pop up as we browse dinner recipes, to the YouTube videos we watch on the treadmill, to the TV we stream as we’re winding down for the evening. Thanks to this omnipresence, digital video provides advertisers a distinct opportunity to connect with people when and where they’re consuming media—and in a highly engaging and captivating way.
In this guide, we explore how savvy marketing teams can leverage digital video channels effectively and cohesively to create a customer journey that engages audiences and inspires action. We dig into the latest trends, insights, and research to help advertisers integrate digital video successfully into their paid media campaigns.
Ready to level up your digital video advertising expertise? Download your copy of the guide today!
What’s new in the realms of paid search and social media? This month, Nick Tuttle, Director of Search Media Investment, and Lauren Brown, Director of Social Media Investment, compiled all the latest news, trends, and resources for easy access.
TikTok and Google are exploring a new partnership that would integrate Google’s search prompts and web-based search results into TikTok’s own search stream. Clicking or tapping a result would open a web browser within TikTok rather than opening Chrome or another app. This initiative arose from studies that, according to Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan, show “almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.”
All of X’s interaction counts and action buttons—except the views counter, added back in December—may soon only be visible within the post details (viewable once users click into or expand the post). When Instagram tested something similar in 2019, post engagement declined, so this will likely cause a drop in X’s reposts and quotes. However, analysts suggest this could also slow the spread of misinformation and may lessen competition for vanity metrics.
X appears to be close to launching new pricing tiers for X Premium, including an ad-free subscription option. Recently surfaced back-end code suggests there may be three tiers: X Premium Basic, X Premium Standard, and X Premium Plus. X owner Elon Musk claims that encouraging users to pay for the app is a way to combat the rise of bots and AI-generated spam.
The Wall Street Journal detailed pricing for Meta’s proposed ad-free Facebook and Instagram subscriptions, based on Meta’s submission to European Union officials. The impetus for these ad-free options is the EU’s evolving data privacy regulations, which put more strain on Meta’s capacity to personalize ads and content based on user activity. According to WSJ, Meta’s plans would cost around $14 per month for an ad-free Facebook or $17 per month for both Facebook and Instagram.
Microsoft kicked off the fall with a series of new product updates for Audience Ads. The tech giant said these updates will help advertisers achieve better results with less effort and create more engaging ads that are served to a higher-value audience. Expect to see ads in new markets, within more games, on additional video platforms, and in the free consumer version of Microsoft 365. Predictive targeting and new AI bid strategies are also part of the rollout.
Despite investing $100 billion in Bing, the search engine says it simply can't compete with Google due to its monopoly position, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The ongoing US vs. Google anti-trust trial has already uncovered behavior from Google like raising ad prices to meet revenue targets. The trial’s outcome could potentially reshape the company and the search landscape.
As the world's largest video sharing platform, YouTube is ripe for data analysis on its users, content, and performance metrics. A look at the current state of AI-generated content, user and creator demographics, and expectations for multiple languages for accessibility has uncovered trends that could soon impact YouTube creative development and audience targeting.
Meta is rolling out its first generative AI-powered features in Ads Manager for ad creative—Text Variations, Image Expansion, and Background Generation—to enable the creation of ad variations quickly and automatically, with the system optimizing to the best-performing ads.
Amazon is set to roll out upgraded generative AI capabilities that offer a more conversational, detailed, and personalized user experience. Shoppers will be able to compare products in real time and seek additional details, reviews, and recommendations tailored to their search context. Advertisers may need to reassess campaign strategies to maintain visibility among AI-powered results.
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For much of its history, the digital advertising world has been something of an iceberg: its surface shiny and bright, lighting up internet users’ screens while supporting organizational growth and powering the digital economy. Adtech largely ran out of the public’s site—back before the average Joe understood the connection between a morning Google search for lampshades and an afternoon ad for a home goods store.
But further down, below the surface, cookies and third-party data and a web of interconnected platforms and ad networks and publishers and advertisers intertwined to serve targeted ads to customers who had little idea as to why they were seeing them—and even less of an idea of how much of their personal data was being used in the process.
For better or worse, it sure seems like those days are behind us for good.
While the mechanics of digital advertisers long stayed out of the spotlight, most modern consumers now have at least a baseline understanding of how cookies work, how apps try to track them on their mobile devices, and how their social media and search activities are the fuel that powers the data economy. And, with that knowledge in hand, the majority of those consumers are increasingly invested in the privacy and ethical use of their data: Between March 2022 and March 2023, 85% of consumers reported deleting a mobile app, 82% opted not to share their personal data, 78% avoided a certain website, and 67% didn’t make an online purchase as a result of privacy concerns. Regulators, in tandem, have passed and enacted (and enforced) a variety of privacy-minded digital advertising laws in states across the US— from California, to Virginia, to Connecticut.
Of course, data privacy isn’t the only aspect of digital advertising that’s being pulled into the spotlight. A slew of Justice Department lawsuits and FTC activity now show that the world is paying very, very close attention to the inner workings of digital advertising and many of its major players. And while the coming deprecation of third-party cookies might seem like all the massive change that advertisers can handle right now, marketers will need to read the writing on the wall if they want to position themselves for success in this new era of heightened scrutiny.
For those keeping track at home: Trust + Advertising = Essential. Anti-trust + Advertising = Huge, Existential Problem.
A handful of high profile antitrust lawsuits are currently poised to impact two of digital advertising’s biggest players—tech titans Google and Amazon—and, depending on the results of those suits, reshape the entire industry.
Let’s take a closer look at each:
The US Justice Department, together with 11 state Attorneys General, is taking Google to court over its alleged violation of US antitrust laws, claiming the company—which owns a 90% market share in search—made anticompetitive deals to secure and maintain its status as the preeminent search engine on phones and web browsers. These included multibillion-dollar agreements with Apple and Firefox-maker Mozilla ensuring their products would use Google as the default search engine on consumers’ phones and browsers. The Justice Department’s argument is that Google's made these deals to maintain its dominance and eliminate opportunities for competition from other search rivals. Meanwhile, Google maintains that the company’s longtime search market supremacy is due simply to the fact that its search engine is just better than everyone else’s, and that consumers are going with the best option out there.
A key part of the government's case is focused on how Google has long leaned on its search dominance to fuel its $162.5 billion paid search empire and to harvest reams and reams of consumer data, which it then uses to power its larger ad business and, of course, to keep people using its platform and its products. But it’s that overall ad business that’s the focus of yet another lawsuit facing the tech giant.
The Justice Department’s second suit against Google (which, like the other case, is also supported by several state Attorneys General) pertains to the company’s digital advertising presence more broadly. In this case, the Justice Department is arguing that Google is so deeply involved with every aspect of the digital advertising ecosystem that they have an anticompetitive and monopolistic hold on the space. The following visual from the Justice Department illustrates Google’s dominating presence on both the sell-side and the buy-side of the digital advertising business (and, for good measure, its ad exchange):
If the Justice Department is successful in either of these antitrust cases against Google, the outcome will likely result in massive fines or, potentially, the forced breakup of Google’s advertising business. Whether that means a negotiated deal with prosecutors where Google spins off some or all of their ad business into its own separate entity, or whether it means that selling certain parts that ad business to other folks in the industry, remains to be seen. But no matter the outcome, if the Justice Department is successful, it will mean monumental implications for everyone in the digital advertising industry.
Before we dive into all of those implications, though, let’s look at one final antitrust lawsuit for good measure, this one targeting Amazon:
Lastly, we have the lawsuit against Amazon by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Here, the FTC has filed a suit against Amazon alleging an anticompetitive hold of the online “e-tail” space, where Amazon has an enormous advantage over most of its “competitors” (if you can even call any other American online retailers “competitors” to Amazon). While this case only just filed, Amazon will likely point to brands like Walmart or Kroger as suitable adversaries and question why those retail and grocery giants aren’t being sued, too. It remains to be seen how this case will play out, but it's certainly worth keeping an eye on, especially given Amazon's Prime dominant position in the retail media space.
The convergence of these three cases, along with the increased scrutiny over data privacy in digital advertising and Meta’s ongoing struggles with regulators in both the US and the EU, reveals some inconvenient but essential truths about the current state of digital advertising and the larger digital ecosystem in which advertisers participate.
First, it shows that regulation of digital advertising is starting to pick up here in the US, much more so than we have seen in previous years or under previous administrations. Combined with the continued rollout of state-level privacy laws (not to mention the industry’s own self-regulation in cutting down on third-party cookies), we are starting to see more regulation in the US around these platforms and large tech companies in a way that could lead to an industry-wide sea change.
Second, it shows that the digital advertising industry has a big, bright spotlight on it for the first time since…well, pretty much ever. Historically, much of digital advertising industry has felt like a black box, and that has led to some fairly understandable criticism—from complaints about insufficient transparency within programmatic advertising, to the too-often-covert ways in which many companies have gathered user data, to the subsequent difficulties users have had in trying to manage that data. But with government entities and consumers alike showing new levels of interest in the digital advertising ecosystem, how it works, who the main players are, and what exactly they’re doing with people's data, that black box is being pried wide open for the world to see.
Add it all together, and it’s very possible that we’re entering a new era of digital advertising—one defined by a level of scrutiny this industry has never before had to feel. Consumers are pushing for increased transparency, and regulators are cracking down on giants like Google and Amazon in ways that could significantly reshape the landscape. Advertisers will need to prepare accordingly.
So, how can digital advertisers best situate themselves for adapting to all this change? A few recommendations:
At a minimum, digital advertisers should make sure they’re keeping an eye on regulatory developments. It’s not yet clear how these three cases will play out—they could lead to anything from the indefinite continuation of the status quo up to (and including)a radically and permanently altered digital advertising landscape. Regardless, it's critical for digital advertisers to keep tabs on what’s going on so that they can make informed decisions based on the latest developments.
Next, advertisers must prioritize consumer data privacy—not only because of the challenges posed by signal loss, but because consumers (and government regulators) are demanding it. Marketers would do well to examine the questions behind the identity crisis, integrate privacy-friendly solutions like contextual and first-party data-based targeting, and make sure their teams invest in learning everything they can about privacy-friendly advertising. Investments in first-party data hygiene (and things like CDPs) are likely to prove particularly critical—especially if advertisers end up needing to work with new partners due to the result of these antitrust suits—and finding reliable partners with access to lots of high-quality inventory and data will be essential in the years ahead.
If these lawsuits do, in fact, lead to a world in which there is even more media fragmentation and complexity, marketers will need to ensure they have the requisite tools and systems to navigate that complexity efficiently and effectively. And don’t forget the importance of the company you keep: Finding and establishing good relationships with your vendors, and aligning with future-forward partners (aka people who value data compliance and consumer trust as much as you do), will be key.
Finally, this spotlight on digital advertising creates a great opportunity for advertisers to step back and take stock of their strategies, partnerships, and systems to ensure that they’re not just using whatever the default partner or technology is simply because it’s the default. If advertising via Google or Amazon makes sense for you and your organization, that’s great! But it's still worth taking that step back to identify whether and where there might be other opportunities. And in a world where we may end up seeing major changes at major players in the digital advertising space, now is the perfect time to start that evaluation process with the comfort of knowing that it will likely be at least a year or two before the result of these cases start having real world implications.
With a variety of forces at work to put a spotlight on the industry, the scale of all these potential changes to the digital advertising ecosystem can feel a bit overwhelming. But with change comes opportunity, and this new focus on our industry offers marketers a rare moment to take that aforementioned step back and ensure that all their advertising practices are aligned with what consumers are asking for and, ultimately, are what make the most sense for you and/or your clients.
At the same time, this is an enormous opportunity for the industry as a whole. If the Justice Department and the FTC win their cases against Google and Amazon, the digital advertising world could well wake up to a more competitive playing field, ushering in new space for challengers to generate more of the thing that’s driven our industry from the very start: innovation.
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