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In recent years, workplaces of all kinds have faced a reckoning. As people across industries call out their experiences of bias and microaggressions at work, and racial diversity reports demonstrate continuing systemic injustice, employers have renewed their commitments to create diverse, equitable, and inclusive organizations.
In the advertising industry, Black professionals have faced countless barriers due to racism. Despite this, Black individuals have made paradigm-shifting contributions to advertising throughout its history. Below, we look at five exceptional advertisers who have disrupted the marketing space in amazing ways:
After earning an M.A. in musicology from Yale, Roy Eaton began his career in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He worked as a concert pianist, performer, and lecturer before being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1953, where he wrote and produced radio programs. After leaving the military, Eaton was hired at Young and Rubicon as a copywriter and composer. He is now believed to be the one of the first Black professionals to work in advertising.
Eaton made a huge impact on advertising from his post at Young and Rubicon, writing iconic jingles for brands like Chef Boyardee and Texaco. Eventually, he struck out on his own and created Roy Eaton Music Inc., which handled music production for various advertising agencies. There, Eaton went on to collaborate with Michael Jackson and produce even more iconic advertisements for companies like Coca-Cola and the Ad Council. Eaton was inducted into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Fame in 2010.
When Vincent T. Cullers returned to the United States after serving as a Marine in World War II, he applied for an art director position at an advertising agency. He spoke on the phone to a hiring manager who told him to come in and start work, but when he arrived, he was told there was no position for him. This experience inspired Cullers to start his own agency in 1956—Vince Cullers Advertising, the first Black-owned advertising agency in the U.S.
Cullers’ agency provided a training ground for Black advertising professionals who faced many racist barriers to entry and success at other agencies. Additionally, marketers have Cullers to thank for the concept of targeted multicultural advertising, having pioneered the practice of serving ads designed to speak specifically to differentiated audiences. Cullers was inducted into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Fame in 2007.
Carol H. Williams started her advertising career in 1969, at a time when Black women professionals faced extraordinary prejudice that significantly limited their opportunities in the field. Williams rose in the ranks at Leo Burnett and, in less than 10 years, became the agency’s first female and first Black Creative Director and Vice President.
Like Cullers and Eaton, Williams eventually founded her own Black-owned agency. Started at her own kitchen table, Carol H. Williams Advertising is now the longest-running independent multicultural marketing shop in the U.S., serving brands like Disney, General Motors, and Kraft.
Williams has been called the "most decorated woman in marketing,” and her awards include the AAF’s David Bell Award for Industry Service, Chicago Advertising Federation’s Advertising Person of the Year, and the National Association of Women Business Owners’ Women Entrepreneur of the Year. Williams was inducted into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Fame in 2017.
Haitian-born Gary Coichy worked with agencies and brands like WPP Mediacom, Omnicom Resolution Media, BMW, and Dell for 16 years before striking out on his own. In his years in the advertising space and throughout the rise of audio, Coichy recognized a gap in the podcast market when it came to sourcing content from non-white, LGBTQ, and women creators.
Coichy's creation, Pod Digital Media, is the world’s first multicultural podcast network, and allows advertisers to tap into a diverse podcast audience while custom-aligning creators from underrepresented groups with blue chip brands. When COVID struck, Pod Digital Media got even more innovative, meeting podcaster’s needs by creating an in-app virtual recording studio. Coichy was included in Ad Age’s 40 under 40 list in 2019.
Natalie Gullatt may be earlier in her career than some of the other leaders on this list, but she’s accomplished a striking amount in her eight years as a marketing professional. Currently employed as a Customer Marketing Manager at HubSpot, Gullatt worked as a paralegal and planned to go into law before pivoting into marketing with the help of an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.
In 2017, Gullatt founded the Black Marketers Association of America, a group that works to “empower, elevate and educate Black marketers financially, mentally and emotionally through their marketing careers.” Her work to support and connect Black marketers while strengthening and diversifying the marketing industry earned her a B2B Innovator Award in 2021.
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The individuals on this list represent the thousands of Black individuals who have shaped the marketing industry with their talent and innovation. This Black History Month, we at Basis Technologies are grateful to these innovators and to all the Black marketing and advertising professionals who continually enrich, transform, and lead this industry into a better future.
Programmatic advertising is firmly on the path to becoming the default framework for digital media buying. Even when the world has had to press a large pandemic-shaped reset button, the medium has proven flexible and effective enough to continue asserting its profound dominance over the landscape.
Back in early 2020, facing a wholly unfamiliar reality, marketers were forced to scramble as they sought to determine what mechanisms would most effectively support their advertising efforts in the “new normal.” While programmatic ad spending was initially hit hard because brands could simply pause campaigns instantaneously, it rebounded quickly to continue growing at double-digit rates year-over-year. In 2022, eMarketer predicts that a shade more than 90% of digital display ad dollars will be transacted programmatically, with the dollar volume of programmatic display close to doubling the 2019 figure ($115 billion and $61 billion respectively).
These are not insignificant milestones and point to the fact that opportunities for expansion and refinement within the programmatic sector still abound despite its prevalence and popularity. With connected TV (CTV) adoption showing no signs of slowing down, the digital out of home (DOOH) market back and booming, and the use of audio platforms rising rapidly, advertisers are awash with new programmatic inventory to better connect with their audiences.
Naturally, venturing into these emerging forums will present novel technical and strategic challenges, ones that will sit alongside broader industry goings-on—most notably those pertaining to the impending deprecation of third-party cookies and the growing prioritization of consumer privacy. To help marketers strategize and structure their organizations to embrace the next stage of programmatic evolution more effectively, we’ve compiled a list of the latest trends within the space that point to where 2022 priorities ought to lie.
With the removal of third-party cookies from Chrome lingering just over the horizon, 2022 will be a make-or-break year for the development of new identifiers and technologies that can either reimagine the concept of tracking codes or replace them entirely. This is very much a watershed moment for the advertising industry—one in which organizations must seize the opportunity to become more transparent with their audiences. It is vital that new identity solutions put consumers in the driving seat and empower them to control how, when, and where their data is used.
These changes, of course, do not need to incite any panic. The end of targeted campaigns is not upon us. Programmatic advertising—even in the absence of many once-relied-upon persistent IDs—will continue to give media buyers access to publishers and placements, with contextual targeting likely re-emerging as an integral piece of the puzzle.
There is actually a huge opportunity here for savvy brands to deepen their relationships with consumers in ways cookie-based tactics never truly allowed. Recent research by Deloitte Digital exploring emotion-driven engagement revealed consumers prefer contextually sensitive brand experiences since they tap into their more immediate concerns, rather than over-relying on past behavior or browsing habits. By embracing the use of contextual data in programmatic campaigns, marketers can foster meaningful connections with consumers that inspire and frame the depth of brand loyalty and brand advocacy.
A mere decade ago, only a handful of brands were managing their own programmatic ad buying. Today, however, the story is considerably different. A 2020 IAB report dissecting the general state of programmatic found more than two-thirds (69%) of marketing organizations globally have partially or fully brought their programmatic campaigns in-house in a bid to remove the medium’s black box aura.
The primary driver behind this trend is a desire among brands to strengthen consumer bonds and control first-party data and operational functionalities that relate to both legal and regulatory compliance. In other words, advertising teams want increased transparency into the buying process. At a time when consumer sentiment changes like the wind, media buyers must be closer to the action with direct access to the raw, real-time data they need to react in the moment, create relevant content at a faster clip, and run off-the-cuff A/B testing. In-housing programmatic comes with other benefits, too, not least monetary savings and resource efficiency. By cutting out managed service fees and eliminating associated data consolidation and integration costs, advertisers have more dollars to throw at campaigns and more time to optimize strategies. The end result: greater ROI.
The process is not all rosy, though: it can often be many years in the making and extremely complex, involving much more than just a deal with a DSP provider. Business leaders need to think about the set-up, change management, data centralization, tools, and talent (which is scarce). You can learn more about the nuances associated with this subject here.
With the worlds of TV and digital gradually coming together over time, more and more consumers have chosen to unplug from traditional linear TV options and embrace online streaming—a move that’s fueled the connected TV phenomenon. Then, as the pandemic gripped the world and forced people to spend more time at home, the media landscape was set perfectly for CTV adoption to soar to new heights and, now, what was once a “nice-to-have” programmatic channel is unequivocally a “need-to-have."
Programmatic's penetration of the CTV arena reached a massive 70% in 2021 and it is expected to surpass 78% by 2023. However, while there is undoubtedly momentum here, there are still some obstacles to further growth. Unlike, say, mobile app advertising, where the vast majority of inventory is available within just two operating systems—iOS and Android—the CTV space is infinitely more fragmented in terms of different devices and providers where an ad could be displayed. Think streaming sticks (Apple TV, Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku, Android TV), games consoles (PlayStation, Xbox), and Smart TV devices (Samsung, LG, and other manufacturers), each of which have distinct standards and advertising capabilities. In 2022 and beyond, programmatic CTV has huge potential, but to maximize campaign success, advertisers must carefully consider where they are serving their ads and which devices to embrace.
Following what has been a challenging period for the medium, digital out of home is spiking again as advertisers search for creative ways to target consumers who are back on the go. US DOOH spending will reach $2.58 billion in 2022, and with more and more digital advertising screens dotting cities across the country (and the world), programmatic looks poised to take an even a bigger slice of that pie in the future.
The appeal of investing in programmatic DOOH ads is multi-faceted. First, they offer the obvious benefits of wide reach, being impervious to ad blockers, and dwelling in non-invasive environments. And second—and perhaps more importantly—this media newcomer should be a major beneficiary of the cookieless future due to its alternative means of audience targeting and the opportunity it presents for contextual marketing to come to the fore. To put it another way, PDOOH is not executed on a one-to-one basis, yet rather one-to-many. Brands employing this technology can tap into fluctuating societal, cultural, and environmental trends in real-time, and reach consumers en masse with relevant ads as they navigate their daily journeys.
It also opens up new creative opportunities, great examples of which include when Renault bought OOH inventory to promote its latest electric car whenever air quality dropped below accepted levels, or when Flonase ran DOOH campaigns anytime pollen levels rose in target areas. Brands that adopt PDOOH have an opportunity to create meaningful, head-turning experiences that leave a marked impression on consumers. There is no doubt that this channel is emerging as a compelling disruptor to brands and advertisers looking to develop their presence during uncertain times.
After a decade that’s been dominated by visual media, audio advertising has surfaced as an important outlet for brands. It is a channel that empowers marketers to evolve their omnichannel strategies naturally through its capacity to reach highly targetable and mobile audiences in brand-safe ecosystems where screens are removed from the equation.
In recent years, fatigue from spending too much time glued to our smartphones has become real. More than half of millennials and Gen Z—the holy grail of advertising demographics—say audio represents a welcome escape from too much ongoing ocular bombardment. These sentiments have become tangible as well, with eMarketer predicting that, per day, listeners will spend 97 minutes with digital audio—nearly a half-hour more than the average user will spend on social media (70 minutes). Unlike their visual equivalents, audio ads are served one at a time in places where consumers are not typically connected to a screen—be that listening to a podcast during their commute, listening to a playlist during a workout session, or unwinding with Pandora after dinner. In essence, audio ads are both unique and highly valuable as they offer premium environments and an effective way to fill otherwise untouchable voids in the user’s buying journey.
Beyond that, programmatic audio offers remarkable granular targeting capabilities. Media buyers can tap into a range of advanced audience segmentation parameters, including location, point of interest, device, weather, user, agent, format, genre, day parting, mood, and more. Through this channel, the ability to engage a user in the right place, at the right time, and within the right context becomes just that bit more accessible.
Compelling, insightful, captivating creative is one of the foundational pillars of effective advertising, but, for a host of reasons, this age-old connection has been badly severed. Unprecedented technological advancements over the last 10 years have led many advertisers to shift focus toward media optimization as opposed to creative optimization: smarter targeting, omnichannel expansion, algorithm hacks, and evermore granular reporting have all become top priorities... often leaving creative behind as an unfortunate casualty.
It is an approach that has bred general content erosion and brand dilution. Without any creative spark, performance ceilings become much lower, and regardless of how good advertisers are at maximizing media outcomes, they will never be able to mitigate the shortcomings of ads exhibiting underwhelming creative. This is particularly pertinent with the cookieless future looming. The digital marketing industry as a collective must now reappraise all the levers that contribute to driving results and no area is riper for improvement than creative delivery.
This is not to say advertising teams should constantly be creating new swathes of creative concepts. Instead, they should focus on building a library of assets and then tweak and refine them depending on the nuances of their targeting strategy. By generating a high volume of creative iterations, programmatic marketers can better react to market changes, tailor their messaging for audience personalization, and A/B test on every channel they are invested in. They will essentially be able to stay one step ahead of the competition.
Advertisers today must navigate an ethical minefield on a permanent basis. While programmatic brings untold opportunities to the table, it also presents some perpetually evolving challenges—namely ad fraud, concerns around brand safety, and ads appearing in disreputable contexts.
Consider these statistics from a 2020 survey by the Brand Safety Institute:
What these numbers highlight is the value consumers now place on how and where brands intersect with society. As such, it is more important than ever that digital messages appear in safe, trustworthy, and suitable environments—not just to avoid risk, but also to effectively reach the right audiences. Ultimately, this is a call to action from consumers: “Be proactive about where you put your ads, or we’ll take our business elsewhere.”
The fact that this phenomenon is actually influencing buying decisions has pushed it to the top of the marketing priority queue. The industry has made tremendous improvements in this area over the last two years, with top DSPs integrating brand safety mechanisms into their platforms, but agencies and brands must continue to be scrupulous in their programmatic media planning to ensure brand suitability is upheld day in, day out.
If 2020 was marked by uncertainty and 2021 was all about the rebound, 2022 is the year programmatic marketers can return to focusing on growth initiatives and begin capitalizing on the opportunities that have sprung from the pandemic—specifically, the rise of connected TV, digital out of home, and audio advertising. Now is the time for advertisers to stare down the challenges they face and implement media solutions that are going to really move the metaphorical needle.
If you’re looking to level up your programmatic game, check our Programmatic Readiness Guide, which breaks down the barriers to success with the medium.
In the past two years, the world has faced a cascading series of economic crises—from the COVID-19 pandemic, to ongoing supply chain woes, to creeping inflation, to the Great Resignation. Many (if not all) of these predicaments are due to global shifts beyond the control of any one company or brand. However, as a result of these myriad of challenges, brands are facing an unprecedented test when it comes to maintaining customers’ patience, focus and allegiance.
As supply dwindles, prices rise, and challenger brands emerge from the digital world to threaten the supremacy of legacy brands, brand loyalty is very much under threat. In 2021, more than 80% of consumers bought a different brand than their usual choice, driven largely by lower prices and/or dwindling supply. Of those, more customers said they’d prefer stick with their new brand than return to their old go-to’s.
In this cutthroat environment, marketers will need to embrace new tools and strategies to distinguish themselves from the competition—and, of course, to maximize their success once they’ve got someone’s attention. Three factors in particular are key to thriving: showcasing your brand’s values, creating a seamless omnichannel experience, and capitalizing on your data across all channels.
In a world of seemingly endless online options that are one Amazon click away from stealing your customers, brands will need to change how they advertise and present themselves to the world. One key for advertisers will be to go beyond products and services to highlight their brand’s heartbeat—i.e. the traits, culture, goals, mission, vision and community that brand embodies.
Generationally speaking, this is a matter of particular import. Studies have found that half of millennials and nearly 60% of Gen Z say they don’t trust companies, while around 40% of millennials and almost half of Gen Z believe most brands come across as inauthentic.
In an era where audiences have more choices than ever—and many millennial and Gen Z consumers aspire to support companies whose corporate values and “style” reflect their own—showcasing your ethos can drive brand loyalty in an era where stickiness is increasingly hard to come by. Ads trumpeting values and purpose help lend brands some much-needed authenticity, and that is a currency that’s always in short supply but high demand.
Once your brand has honed its voice and launched campaigns showcasing its “heartbeat,” it has to show it can deliver an experience that meets customers’ sky-high expectations wherever and whenever they want to engage.
Modern consumers expect a seamless, unified brand experience across all channels. As such, savvy marketers have increasingly come to rely upon omnichannel strategies. Again, this is particularly essential for brands that want to reach younger audiences, with 88% of Zoomers saying they prefer an omnichannel brand experience.
From the moment a consumer sees your ad on Instagram, to when they visit your website to learn more about the product, to their subsequent trip to your brick-and-mortar location for in-store or curbside pickup, to the follow-up emails you’ll send them showcasing other products or service they might enjoy, today’s customers want (and even demand!) a seamless and personalized experience. An omnichannel approach can ensure that brands not only convert more of their leads into customers, but that they keep them coming back for more.
However, if a company is going to truly capitalize on omnichannel marketing, it also needs a comprehensive and effective data strategy.
Dynamic data collection and data analytics solutions are foundational to any modern marketing campaign, but perhaps nowhere more so than omnichannel campaigns. Proper data processes can give marketers a host of key insights, such as where and when specific audiences are likely to spend their time, how your brand can best engage them, what products and services may make for repeat customers, and much, much more.
With the right lessons from the right data, marketers can confidently make the messaging, budgeting, and timing decisions they’ll need to create and convert as many opportunities as possible—or to make mid-campaign adjustments as necessary. And in a world where brand loyalty is tenuous at best, the ability to stay nimble and adapt to customer expectations is critical to success.
Change is constant. Consumers’ preferences are always evolving, and the pandemic has accelerated that evolution and brought about major shifts to many elements within the digital marketing world. Whether it’s eroding brand loyalty, DeFi advertising, or the future of cookies, marketers have no shortage of questions for the year ahead.
Our 2022 Trends Report walks through four of the key trends marketers need to know to keep up with consumers and stay ahead of the curve.
What's new in the realms of paid search and social media? Basis' Senior Vice President of Paid Search and Social compiles all the latest news, trends, and resources each month for easy access.
How the Metaverse Went from Sci-fi to Mainstream in One Year
The pandemic accelerated the use of digital worlds for work and entertainment. While Facebook’s rebrand to Meta helped put the word "Metaverse" on many people’s radar for the first time, a lot happened in 2021 to support this evolution. eMarketer provides a quick chronological recap of all the Metaverse-adjacent events that happened in 2021.
Platforms Catch Social Commerce Fever
It’s clear that social platforms prioritized expanded ecommerce features in 2021, although some are more sophisticated than others. eMarketer has compared and contrasted the features available on Facebook/Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest to show where the industry stands.
Insider Intelligence Q&A with Google Commerce: Understanding the Google Shopping Ecosystem
eMarketer recently spoke with Google’s lead of strategy, operations, and go-to-market initiatives for Google Commerce, Martha Walsh. Read this to get her take on the trends influencing consumer shopping behavior, how Google's relationship with brands has evolved in recent years, and what Google Commerce is doing to improve the ecommerce experience.
Pinterest Insights: Male Pinner Usage
The platform’s latest research reveals information about how their male user base is planning (and planning on spending) in 2022. More importantly, Pinterest provides some recommendations on how brands can get into their consideration set as searches and intent begin to convert into sales.
Brands Need to Leverage Customer Content Now
Luggage maker Calego shared insight into how they began leveraging UGC during the pandemic in this interview with Search Engine Land. The result was a wider top of the funnel than ever before, and higher than average conversion rates as they harnessed the power of customer reviews.
TikTok Tops Facebook and Google As the Most Visited Website
Cloudfare analyzed web traffic from 2021 and found that TikTok was the most-visited website and the most widely used social media platform of the year. This article also includes the other top 10 most-visited websites of the year, as well as the top social media platforms (in order).
How TikTok Drives Offline Sales Impact
Through a series of offline sales lift measurement and MMM studies, TikTok aims to prove how the platform drives offline sales outcomes and positive return on ad spend. Overall, the studies showed a 14% higher paid media ROAS compared to all digital media measured, and a 2x offline sales efficiency. In-feed video was, not surprisingly, proven to be the best performer against these metrics.
Report: US Social Video Advertising in 2022
eMarketer updated their forecasts for how much US advertisers will spend on video ads on social networks in the coming year. Spoiler alert: video ad spending will make up over a third of total US social network ad spending. The report also discusses how iOS privacy changes continue to affect social video advertising, and how advertisers are approaching video to drive both branding and performance goals. One key theme that stands out is marketers investing in more informal creative, likely as a result of the rise in popularity of TikTok.
Check out Basis' Video Unleashed Guide for a deep dive into how to leverage video advertising.
Report: Social Media Video Sees as Much Consumption Time as Traditional TV
A new study conducted by the Consumer Technology Association showed that user-created content on social platforms accounts for 39% of all weekly media hours consumed by Americans. The trend is more pronounced for teens, who spend more than 56% of their time with user-created content. The data shows the evolving shift away from traditional media and toward social media platforms as the key form of content consumption. As a side note: Google also recently weighed in on this topic on their blog, Think with Google.
New Year, New Snapchat Features
Snapchat released a few new features earlier this month to help make messaging with friends more expressive and interactive, including: chat replies in ongoing conversation strings, Bitmoji reactions in chat; poll stickers for Snaps and Stories, and improved video and audio calling capabilities.
For fast reference, Twitter recently published a comprehensive list of all the important events to plan your year around. You can use this link to navigate between months (and regions across the globe) for a better understanding of upcoming key moments.
FloC is dead. Long live Topics?
Some seven months after delaying the removal of third-party cookie tracking from its incredibly popular Chrome browser until 2023, Google introduced a new toy into its Privacy Sandbox: Topics API.
The search and ad behemoth’s new identity solution would pull in a user’s web history from Chrome, then utilize that information to assign that user up to five Topics (such as “Auto & Vehicles,” “Books & Literature,” or “Rock Music”) that advertisers could use for targeting relevant audiences. New topics would be determined every week, and after three weeks, old topics would be permanently deleted. Also of note: Google is officially putting an end to its FLoC experiment, thus ending the life of its previous (widely unpopular) proposed identity solution.
What does this mean for the advertising industry? Certainly, it’s far too premature to know whether Topics is really the future of targeting on the world’s most popular web browser (from the world’s most popular search engine and the world’s most profitable online advertising business), but here is a quick look at the new proposal as well as some immediate takeaways:
Let’s start with the upsides. In a lot of ways, Topics looks like Google’s attempt to placate as many FLoC-related fears as possible while still maintaining a means for cross-site tracking based on browser history. As a result, Topics seems like a solution that may ultimately appeal to more stakeholders—but, as you might expect, not all stakeholders.
For advertisers (and regulators), Topics does not look like the sort of “power grab” that made FLoC the boogeyman to many in the industry and around Washington, while still providing key insights on consumer behavior that can help compliment a larger audience-driven marketing strategy. Publishers, meanwhile, have a blueprint for how their sites fit into to the new topic categories.
As for consumers, the new API’s simplified groupings and the absence of more sensitive identifiers such as “gender” or “race” may appeal to privacy-minded individuals who wish to remain more anonymous while using Chrome and retain more control of what advertisers can see and learn about them online. As Basis SVP of Media Operations Zach Moore puts it, “Topics seems like a much easier way to explain to privacy-conscious consumers that they themselves have the power in their own hands when it comes to targeted ads, vs. having to explain FLoC’s cohorts and algorithms.” Additionally, Google plans to empower consumers to easily review and remove topics from their profile, or to opt-out of Topics API entirely by simply turning the feature off, which may help some skeptics feel a greater sense of power over their own privacy.
Of course, it can’t all be good news, and there are still many aspects of Topics that Google will need to address—or at least iron out a bit—before any widescale implementation or adoption. For publishers and advertisers, Google’s initial draft around how they plan to categorize interests for Topics may be a cause for some concern. It would appear, at least for now, that Google intends to gather its behavioral data based on a website’s hostname alone—rather than the full context of a page’s URL—before bucketing those interests into one of 350 topics. That number makes Google’s list fairly distinct from, say, the IAB’s much more expansive content taxonomy.
However, this strategy may inherently overlook some meaningful contextual information and granularity that could potentially benefit advertisers, publishers and willing consumers alike. For example, someone visiting a website like Amazon or Target could place that user into the Topic of “Shopping,” but that information is much less helpful than knowing the full context of a specific page’s URL (ex. https://www.amazon.com/diapers/s?k=diapers), with which advertisers can infer much more about someone’s behavior and actual needs.Additionally, there will likely be many within the industry who question Google’s initial plan to cap topics at five per week. As Basis VP of Media Systems Ken Rood puts it: “I contain multitudes. Grouping me into five broad topics is good for privacy, but it may not be good for showing me the most useful advertising.”
As for privacy advocates, while Topics is clearly a step in the right direction as compared to FLoC, any browser-based cross-site tracking solutions are likely to face extraordinary skepticism, particularly when they come from Google. It also does little to allay the concerns of those who fear Google having an outsized influence on the online advertising ecosystem. Whether that proves to be a vocal minority or a larger segment of the population remains to be seen, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on in the months ahead.
In many ways, Topics looks an awful lot like another longtime advertising solution that has reemerged in recent years: contextual advertising. As we have previously detailed, contextual advertising shirks user data entirely and instead involves placing ads that are related to a webpage’s content. Topics, then, seems almost like a contextual advertising martini with a browser data twist. Whatever happens with Topics, the fact that it is so similar to contextual advertising only reenforces the important role that context will play in the future of digital advertising.
All in all, Topics may well be just another sign that there is no true “heir” to the third-party cookie throne. Instead, advertisers could be relying on a series of solutions (rather than one single solution) to stitch together their targeting strategies. One thing, however, still seems clear: in the land of the cookieless, first-party data will be king.
There will, of course, be much more to come on the topic of Topics, but the news is certainly a major development for the advertising industry and will undoubtedly be the subject of serious scrutiny in the months ahead.
In the meantime, media buying professionals are still looking for answers on the future of targeted advertising. For our perspective, check out Beyond Third-Party Cookies: Your Guide to Overcoming the Identity Crisis.
Finding a mentor is difficult in any industry, but the adtech world poses its own unique set of challenges for those seeking guidance in an ever-evolving field.
Renowned adtech sales leader, executive advisor, and ExchangeWire AdTech Personality of the Year Matt Barash has been a longtime beneficiary of mentorship and enjoys mentoring others as well. In this episode, he chats with host Noor Naseer about how to find well-suited mentors, how to make the most of mentor relationships, and reasons to become a mentor as you grow in your career.
Christine Kim is the VP of Client Learning and Enablement at Basis Technologies, and has been developing our certification programs since 2015. In 2021, Basis Certified was awarded Best Education Program by AdExchanger.
The Great Resignation has not spared the advertising industry. According to a new Advertiser Perceptions report, one-third of advertising professionals plan to leave their current positions within the next two years.
The same study found that most advertising professionals use an average of nine platforms for a typical ad campaign, and touch seven of those platforms on an average day.
The combination of these two statistics highlights one of the biggest challenges raised by the Great Resignation. Brands and agencies aren’t just losing employees—they’re losing highly skilled employees, who take a wide variety of technical qualifications with them when they go.
The top challenge when a team loses members is training new employees. So while it’s tempting to deprioritize employee education, companies would do well to set up robust training programs, now more than ever.
Below, I have dug into Basis Technologies’ approach to education. While I typically leverage these tips for educating Basis clients and the industry as a whole, they're just as important for internal training!
Don’t Be a One-Hit Wonder
In other words, don’t put together an education program and then forget about it. Engaging learners beyond the basics can be a struggle, but don’t let that deter you from creating a multi-level program that will cater to the entire learning process. After all, learning is a journey—not a destination!
Diversify Content Presentation
We’ve all been there: There’s nothing worse than sitting through an intensive training that consists of one person talking for several hours. According to a 2019 Forrester report, one training program saw completion rates increase by 50% when they broke materials from longer courses down into small modules.
Put the Learner First
The same Forrester report states that while there is a correlation between education and revenue, this is not the place to put revenue first. Think about what would benefit the learner, and the money will follow.
Harness the Power of Competition and Gamification
Who doesn’t want to win? At Basis Technologies, we like to throw in random trivia games or play a round of jeopardy to showcase how much people have learned.
Establish Key Performance Indicators
Allow yourself different KPIs for different phases of your education programming. For example, when first launching an on-demand course, the KPI can be registration numbers. Once your programs begin to mature, begin shifting KPIs to number of courses completed or overall time spent. When all else fails, it’s always a good idea to include a survey to receive feedback in real-time. After all, the people using your program will be best-situated to share what’s working and what’s not.
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Here at Basis Technologies, we cater to different levels of education as well as exclusive content for our customers through our Certified programs. Interested in learning more? Check it out!
Each month, Basis Technologies' Programmatic 101 series tackles a different facet of programmatic advertising—from best practices for buyers, to competitors in the space, to trends you should know.
Programmatic advertising has been around since 1994, but like a 90’s trend, it’s really blown up in the 2020’s. There’s no overstating the prevalence of programmatic: AdAge predicts that by 2025, 90 cents on the dollar of digital ad spend will be allocated to programmatic channels (up from 70 cents on the dollar currently).
In general, programmatic advertising can be defined as the automated buying and selling of digital advertising. In this post, we’ll take a look at the benefits of using programmatic technology, as well as the history that led to the automation, transparency, and accessibility we all enjoy today.
Back in 1994, AT&T signed a three-month agreement with Wired.com to showcase the internet’s first banner ad, pictured below:
By today’s best practices, this ad shouldn’t have performed well. It doesn’t contain a strong call to action and it doesn’t communicate any messaging about AT&T or even mention the brand itself. However, it delivered click-through rates (CTR) of 44%! That's pretty darn good, given that average CTR rate today ranges between 0.05-0.09%.
This one-to-one buy was the start of direct buying and while it had its advantages (relationship building, premium placements, flexibility with ad sizes and inventory) it was very manual. As the number of online websites increased, there needed to be a way for advertisers to automate buying so that marketers’ ads could serve a variety of websites. This led to the birth of ad networks.
A year after the first display ad graced the internet, the first display ad network was founded by an ad agency called WebConnect. Marketers no longer had to go from one publisher to the next, but instead could save time and money by working with brokers who could sell inventory across websites. Adoption was slow at first, but by 1998 there were a variety of competitors in the space who specialized in different types of inventory.
While this solved the problem of automation, advertisers started to realize that there was duplication across ad networks and that the intermediary cost of working with those networks was driving down efficiency.
In 1999, GoTo.com introduced pay per placement (what we know now as pay per click) and this new buying model had advertisers questioning what margins or fees they were paying to run on these networks. In 2000, when Google released AdWords, marketers started seeing the transparency that was possible and wanted greater control over their campaigns.
In 2005, the first ad exchange was born. An ad exchange is a technological platform that facilitates the buying and selling of digital media inventory, allowing billions of impressions to be bought and sold in real time via real-time bidding (RTB). What a mouthful!
This meant that marketers were able to use technology, instead of publisher contact or a 3rd party network rep, to inform their decisions about what advertising inventory they should buy in real time—aka RTB.
The evolution from ad networks to ad exchanges had a gigantic impact on the advertising industry as we know it. There were no longer fixed site lists, fixed pricing, or even fixed impression amounts. Instead, marketers were able to pay only what the demand was at the time their impression was served. In addition, publishers were able to use technology to automate selling their inventory.
Unlike direct buying, where marketers had to rely on relationships and minimum spends, ad exchanges and RTB allowed a more democratic approach to ad buying. Smaller brands and advertisers could tap into programmatic technology to stretch their media dollars further than they could before, and since everything happened in real time, there was no fear of premium inventory already being bought by the top advertisers in the industry.
So there you have it: The need for automation, transparency, and accessibility were key contributors to the development of programmatic advertising. But while the invention of programmatic technology brought more of these three elements to the advertising landscape, it also introduced more complexity. Our industry continues to strive for increased automation, transparency, and accessibility, an effort that paves the way for more innovation and better solutions for advertisers.
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The modern marketing landscape is perpetually undergoing disruption. Blistering innovation coupled with the rise and spread of automation has cultivated an “always-on culture,” whereby consumers are connected everywhere and streaming anywhere. New mobile-first generational groups are arriving on the scene as true digital and social natives and, as a result, marketers are fighting to keep pace with unprecedented demand for instant gratification and personalized experiences. Society is firmly in the midst of a shift from being about the masses to a story bespoke for one, and marketing organizations have no choice but to meet that challenge head-on.
At the same time, general industry advances fueled by identity concerns and external pandemic-driven cultural changes have completely upended the advertising landscape as we once knew it. The third-party cookie will soon be deprecated. Privacy regulations are stricter than ever. Consumers are increasingly calling on businesses to do their part in righting social inequalities. In short, companies are now being held to much higher standards in realms that boardrooms have hitherto completely overlooked. And while many might assume these perspectives are only held by the younger generations (particularly Gen Z), they are in fact ubiquitous across all age groups.
To navigate these labyrinthine complexities, media buyers must be nothing short of exceptional in their execution. They must be nimble with their messaging, flexible with their timing, and swift with their movement of media budget. They must show conviction and assuredness in decision-making. They need attendant interoperability. They need connectivity. And at the foundation of all of that, they need high-quality, consolidated data.
When marketing organizations are armed with such, those pulling the trigger on campaigns have the weapons they need to unlock true peak performance. Harmonized dashboards that aggregate varied data sets empower media buyers with the clean, granular insights they need to understand not just what their customers are doing, but the all-important why behind it. This can then be translated into precision targeting through which brands are able to successfully satisfy and engage customers, elevate brand awareness among desired audiences, and accelerate performance to new levels.
Unfortunately, however, it is not so straightforward.
The industry’s predominant strategy throughout the last two decades has been to continually add more and more best-in-class single-point solutions designed to solve the challenges pertinent to the day. From the traditional outlets of newspaper, radio, TV, mail, and outdoor, marketers are compelled to add up to a dozen other disparate channels in the form of social, search, email, programmatic, connected TV, video, audio, native, push messaging, influencer, display...and on and on. This copious number of disparate data sources—and the overwhelming volumes of data they generate—mean it is just not feasible to respond to shifting consumer sentiments quickly and effectively.
A 2019 Domo report put some tangible numbers around these pressures, revealing that 83% of surveyed marketers at large enterprise organizations admit that the rise of new technologies and techniques has made it much more difficult to stay on top of everything. Almost half (46%) said the number of data channels and sources makes it challenging to plan for the long-term. The perils of data silos are not just related to an inability to organize or forecast either—they also drain personnel resources, fuel inaccurate targeting, and sap marketing budgets. In more extreme cases, data silos and the poor data they catalyze can lead to lost customers and revenue, and damaged reputations.
Indeed, with the consequences so profound and wide-ranging, marketing leaders must give data quality and consolidation its due. Movements within the industry would suggest that is beginning to happen. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2022, 70% of organizations will rigorously track data quality levels via dedicated metrics, improving them by 60% to significantly reduce operational risks and costs. And in the technology space, a recent report by Segment found that adoption of customer data platforms (CDPs) is picking up steam, with 73% of companies revealing that this form of software will be critical to their future customer experience efforts.
For too long, marketing organizations have held nothing more than a mere anecdotal appreciation of the troublesome nature of disparate data. They know it stymies output, but they don’t understand how, or why.
Here, we break down five forces converging on marketing right now and dissect why high-quality, consolidated data holds the key to navigating them all effectively.
As marketing organizations look to tap into the benefits promised by the new wave of technologies driven by automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), their success in doing so and their ability to own and dominate their spaces will be entirely dependent upon whether they can get their data management houses in order. This has become increasingly important as connected devices proliferate at an extraordinary rate, causing an exponential growth to an already immeasurable trove of data—far beyond what any human analyst can feasibly manage and parse.
The explosive growth of addressable data is inherently great news for automation adopters. The more data that is fed into AI and ML algorithms, the more effective they are. This is only true, though, if the data upfront is high-quality. While the age-old observation “garbage-in, garbage-out" has been pertinent in analytics and decision-making circles for generations, it carries extra special weight when it comes to machine learning. The quality demands of machine learning are steep, and bad data could snowball quickly. If the historical data used to train the predictive model is inaccurate, the new data produced by that model designed to inform future decisions will be valueless—or worse, detrimental. Marketers can easily get trapped in a vicious cycle where, inadvertently, their data gets worse and worse and worse.
To properly condition a predictive model, historical data must adhere to rigorously high standards. First, marketers must have the right data: a plethora of impartial intelligence across the entire range of inputs on which the feed is set up to work with. Second, that data must be unambiguously correct: it must be accurate, clearly labeled, de-deduped, etc. And herein lies the problem plaguing advertising professionals: the vast majority are leaning on an average of nine platforms to execute a typical ad campaign—and touch seven of those platforms each day. Working under these constraints, data collection and delivery formats are commonly inconsistent and fragmented.
The knock-on effect of this is persistent difficulty preserving the appropriate structures and context that AI requires to drive effective automation. Even a minor error at just one step in bringing the data within those disparate platforms together will cascade, causing more errors across the entire process and potentially resulting in a wreckage of wasted resources and advertising spend. A consolidated data solution will future-proof the veracity of data collection and allow advertisers to make investment decisions with unerring confidence.
The introduction of data protection legislation, like GDPR in the European Union and CCPA in California, has fundamentally changed how organizations can collect and use consumer data. Governing bodies the world over are facing pressures to pass similar laws, and so it is crucial that brands know where all their consumer intelligence is housed and how they are keeping it secure.
Using centralized architecture that collates and manages data has quickly become an integral cog in the privacy strategy of most companies, empowering them to compile safe, compliant-ready audience segments. As marketers look to confront these regulations, they must consider implementing a combination of both consent management and customer data management tools. Let’s say Customer X gives Company Y consent to collect data via website cookies, but later requests the deletion of their data through email. It’s vital these actions be consolidated and organized in one single source of truth in order to avoid potentially devastating repercussions. Just ask Vodafone Spain. Or CaixaBank. Or Italian telecommunications operator, TIM.
The cookie has long underpinned the online advertising ecosystem, but massive change is imminent. Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari already block tracking cookies by default, and now Google’s Chrome browser—which boasts a 67% market share—is set to join the fray, with plans to banish third-party cookies in 2024.
What this move presents is a new era of engagement for individuals, publishers, and marketers. It will require a switch to a trusted, people-based advertising ecosystem that relies on a deterministic, persistent identifier that relates to an individual user. By adopting this approach, marketers will be empowered to create cohesive, people-based campaigns revolving around real-time behavioral data and then activate them via major DSPs, email platforms, social networks, and other appropriate vendors. Essentially, it enables brands to meet their audiences in exactly the right places at exactly the right times.
All of this depends on one thing: strong, consolidated analytics. If this single customer journey is not tracked flawlessly, it will lead to incorrect assumptions about behavior that will ultimately give life to ill-designed marketing campaigns. Consolidated reporting is the “sine qua non” of successful people-based marketing.
Marketing was once a straightforward game. Creative agencies would be tasked with concocting a compelling message before handing that off to a media agency to push out across relevant owned and paid channels. Advertisers would then recline in their office chairs and (hopefully) watch their message reach the masses.
Of course, things are a touch more elaborate now...
Today, there are 4.66 billion active internet users. There are projected to be 3.45 billion active social network users in 2022. There are over 3 billion people who are now digital video viewers. The world is connecting at an express pace and marketing organizations need to recognize that there has been a fundamental shift in the landscape. Advertising at this moment in time is about what consumers are saying—not what brands want to say.
Modern consumers are a high-maintenance bunch: they want to feel understood. They want to feel valued. It is a sentiment summed up quite perfectly in this satirical video. Reaching and engaging them is getting trickier by the year, and so marketers are increasingly embracing an omnichannel strategy that comes with the promise of delivering a single, unified experience across different channels. While this was once considered the cutting-edge of innovation, it’s now a basic requirement for survival. The younger buyers of this world—those unknowing of a time without smartphones or social media—don’t even think of channels as having traditional boundaries. Instead, they increasingly evaluate brands based upon the seamlessness of their communication in addition to their demonstrated social and economic values.
But before marketers rush to implement an omnichannel strategy, they must first take a step back and consider their data collection and data analytics solutions. Without the appropriate infrastructure in either of these areas, value largely disappears—essentially, the absence of one renders the other useless. Marketers need robust data collection techniques to understand a range of important factors, including when target audiences prefer to interact, what type of messaging they engage with more, and what products or features they are looking for. On top of that, they’ll need powerful analytics to translate the big data into actionable insights. Marketers need to deploy one system of record that can distill cross-channel data in near real-time so they can course-correct campaigns on the fly and meet consumers in their moment.
Not so long ago, the mandate for marketing organizations was simply brand stewardship. Today’s reality is much different. Boardrooms across the globe are now turning the heat up on marketing teams and requisitioning them to prioritize driving real business growth. This is evidenced in a recent Salesforce study that found two in three marketers have realigned their priorities to focus on leading growth, and of all those surveyed, 96% believe the marketing function has a critical role to play in improving ROI.
The change has been speedy and can be primarily attributed to marketing’s unique position between a business and its customers, as well as its unprecedented access to the tools required to create flawless consumer experiences. There are indeed newfound expectations of marketing organizations, and many are having a tough time meeting them.
The main barricade is that growth metrics come in all different shapes and sizes. While revenue is the most conventional, there is also brand awareness, customer engagement, brand loyalty, conversion rates, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), relative market share, and more. With so much nuance to each of these areas, connecting investments to outcomes at aggregate and granular levels—in other words, formally proving ROI—is challenging. And even when marketers are able to effectively calculate ROI, they still run into issues. A survey conducted by Propeller Insights on behalf of Allocadia found that 61% of marketing leaders fail to use ROI in decision-making because they aren’t confident in their own data. This lack of assuredness can ultimately be traced back to the beginning of the ROI equation, where budget management is often done in multiple spreadsheets—a process highly susceptible to manual consolidation errors.
These barriers to full knowledge of ROI are directly related to an absence of a unified view of performance and real-time insights. By converging technology and data, it becomes much easier for marketers to integrate, manage, analyze, and optimize their campaigns as they work to tackle the growth directive across their organization.
There’s no getting away from it: marketing organizations need to be prioritizing data quality and data consolidation. Given that deep, predictive, reliable insights are foundational for making the best decisions, business leaders can no longer hesitate in this area if they want to accelerate their company’s digital transformation. Too often, marketers are forced to either guess what their data means or are held back by analytical bottlenecks. In an era where consumer preferences are ephemeral and media buyers must be agile to keep up, access to unified cross-channel reporting is paramount.
If data consolidation and real-time data reporting capabilities are at the top of your current wish list, get in touch with our digital media experts and have a conversation. With Basis Technologies, you can connect all your digital marketing campaign data—including programmatic, direct, search, social, and connected TV—with over 180 different business intelligence metrics via one interface. Basis is proven to improve efficiencies in this area by 48%. You can learn more in Forrester’s report, The Total Economic Impact™ Of In-Housing With Basis.