Must-know ad tech trends steering the 2024 digital race

In an ever-evolving world, brands constantly face new challenges – from device fragmentation to sensitive online issues and evolving ad fraud tactics. Amidst this, the ultimate aim remains unchanged: optimizing digital ad investments to engage the right audience effectively.

The key to achieving this goal lies in staying abreast of the trends that will significantly impact the digital marketing space. With this ethos, let's delve into the prevailing trends in 2024.

The Increasingly Fragmented Ecosystem

Unprecedented audience fragmentation occurs across multiple channels, including social media, Connected TV (CTV), gaming, and more. Social media has evolved from a platform for connection into a thriving hub for e-commerce, significantly reshaping consumer behavior. A recent report by DoubleVerify and WARC highlighted that 35% of marketers expressed concern about this fragmentation and its impact on consumer preferences.

While this fragmentation unveils fresh opportunities, it equally introduces challenges that demand attention. DV’s 2023 Global Insights Report highlighted quality concerns across diverse regions, devices, and nations. In APAC, brand suitability violations saw a 2% decrease, but they surged by 22% in Australia last year. Additionally, there was a 7% increase in fraud and sophisticated invalid traffic violations, along with a 6% decline in video viewability. India notably witnessed a significant drop in viewable video ads. These challenges of ad fraud schemes, brand suitability violations, and decreasing video viewability underscore the need for marketers to prioritize quality as they navigate this fragmented landscape. We can look at CTV as a perfect example of this. CTV, the fastest-growing content category, as evidenced by the 2023 Global Insights Report, witnessed a remarkable 369% year-over-year increase in viewership in India. However, amid this surge, DV's report further revealed that one in four top CTV apps continued displaying ads even when the TV was switched off. This emphasizes the critical need for protective measures—like always-on verification—to safeguard media budgets.

Unique Retail Media Developments

Retail media is swiftly becoming a significant advertising channel, with brands investing heavily due to its privacy-friendly reach and the growth of online shopping. This has led to the emergence of retail media networks (RMNs). Simply put, an RMN is an advertising service provided by retailers or e-commerce platforms, where first-party customer data is used to engage audiences both on the retailer’s site or app and offsite. In fact, according to Verified Market Research, the retail media market in the United States has become the third-largest digital advertising channel and is experiencing global expansion, with India being part of this widespread growth. For instance, Amazon India alone holds over 8% of  India’s online advertising market. Flipkart, backed by Walmart, achieved a noteworthy 50% year-on-year growth in ad revenue in India, reaching ₹2,080 crore in FY22. The success of Amazon and Flipkart Ads in India underscores the significant role RMNs play in digital advertising, capturing substantial portions of ad budgets as brands recognize the advantage of connecting with audiences during the purchasing process.

However, retail media is not immune to ad quality challenges, and brands should exercise caution.

Audience extension is a key driver in expanding retail media, providing a unique opportunity to connect with consumers in various contexts beyond retail sites and platforms. However, our 2023 Global Insights Report reveals a 129% higher audience extension violation rate than owned and operated inventory. Interestingly, we also found that audience extension boasts a 91% higher viewability rate than owned and operated inventory. This presents a significant opportunity for capturing audience attention, which has become one of the most, if not the most, critical factors in digital advertising.

Both brands and agencies should utilize third-party verification to ensure ad quality and brand safety on RMNs. These tools can also enhance performance metrics, making your advertising efforts more effective.

The Challenge of the Attention Economy

The advertising industry is witnessing a notable shift toward attention-based measurement. Traditional KPIs like viewability and clicks are falling short, prompting a shift toward privacy-friendly attention metrics recognized as robust proxies for tangible business outcomes. The Attention Economy underscores the scarcity and value of consumer attention, leading to the rise of impression-level attention measurement. Our WARC report highlights their reliance on diverse metrics as marketers seek to go beyond viewability metrics. While 98% of marketers surveyed claimed to measure attention through a range of metrics, the metrics used varied significantly based on channel, format, and desired KPIs. This emphasizes the necessity for a unified metric spanning various aspects.

The attention case study featuring Mondelēz and Vodafone highlights the crucial role of holistic attention metrics in modern advertising. Mondelēz leveraged DV Authentic Attention to identify factors driving brand lift KPIs, revealing that high-exposure impressions significantly increased brand favorability and consideration. Meanwhile, Vodafone Germany found that high-engagement impressions correlated with a 2.5x boost in qualified traffic and sales conversion rates. These insights offer advertisers valuable opportunities for optimizing campaign performance effectively.

Transforming Advertising with AI

AI is revolutionizing the global advertising landscape, notably with generative AI transforming how we create and consume content. The emergence of next-generation AI tools such as ChatGPT and Anthropic has streamlined content creation, making it more cost-effective and manageable, especially for international brands. However, bad actors are misusing these tools to generate content farms and made-for-advertising (MFA) websites, posing a substantial challenge to the digital advertising supply chain and media quality. On the bright side, AI also provides a solution to this issue. It enables the expansion of AI-driven content review and classification, thereby scaling verification processes to ensure the quality and performance of media. As both a facilitator and a regulator, this dual role of AI underscores its pivotal role in the evolving digital advertising landscape.

AI has become a cornerstone of modern advertising strategies, revolutionizing how brands engage with their target audiences. Scibids stands at the forefront of this transformation, utilizing AI to dynamically generate custom bidding algorithms tailored to client KPIs and desired outcomes. DV and Scibids combination represents a significant advancement for advertisers, providing end-to-end granular measurement and optimization at scale, ultimately maximizing business outcomes and ROI across all programmatically bought addressable paid media. With DV Scibids, advertisers can streamline manual efforts, drive operational efficiencies, and serve ads on top-performing inventory while maintaining scale and maximizing efficiency. This positions Scibids as a leader in the dynamically evolving landscape of AI-driven advertising transformation. The DV and Scibids combination integrates media quality and attention data with AI, enabling tailored optimization algorithms and demonstrating a dedication to leveraging AI for real-time optimization, achieving superior KPIs, and delivering enhanced business outcomes for advertisers in APAC's dynamically evolving AI-driven advertising landscape.

In general, trends mirror evolving consumer tastes, platform shifts, and advancements in advertising methods. Staying informed enables brands to adjust their approaches, connect more effectively with their audience, improve user experience, and optimize ad expenditure. Consequently, by staying abreast of emerging trends, brands can remain pertinent and successfully interact with their intended audience.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com.