With 2023 fading in the rearview and decision-makers returning to the office, marketing’s future remains top of mind. The rapid evolution of measurement and the expansion into new mediums like CTV have built up exciting momentum. As the year dawns, Semcasting shares our top trends for 2024.
Balancing Transparency and Privacy
As Google depreciates third-party cookies for 1% of browser users, marketers are preparing to weather shifting tides across the measurement landscape. Most measurement solutions designed by the walled gardens are black-box, but accessible measurement is essential to industry-wide improvement, particularly in emergent channels such as CTV.
As 2024 dawns, the IP address will solidify itself as a foundational key of CTV measurement. Although the IP address can be “hidden,” it is the backbone of the Internet as we know it and cannot be removed from the digital ecosystem. The IP address also boasts cross-platform universality and can serve as a potential building block to connect this measurement to other mediums, enhancing omnichannel marketing outcomes.
CEO Ray Kingman said: “The IP address can actually provide the transparency in a privacy-safe way that advertisers crave throughout the full campaign lifecycle — from offline data to onboarding, through impressions and back to onboarding for measurement.”
Accessible measurement will improve the advertising industry, and the IP address will be at the heart of helping marketers tackle many of their multi-channel measurement challenges.
Ensuring Accurate Attribution
With Chrome holding 60% of the overall browser share, the impact of cookie depreciation across industries will be significant— particularly for marketers handling sensitive data in verticals such as healthcare.
Justin Thompson, GM of Identity and Healthcare Services, warns that these marketers will need a programmatic strategy that does not rely on third-party cookies by Q3 of this year. However, due to several delays with depreciation in the past, some are not considering their holistic strategy.
For healthcare marketers, in particular, it will be essential to reach their audiences in a personalized way. Particularly for practices in the dental field, with many dropping insurance plans due to falling reimbursement rates, it will be important to ensure that your differentiating factors are reaching your target audience. Cookieless solutions (like those that Semcasting offers) will be critical for future programmatic campaign execution. Semcasting does not rely on browsers or bidstream traffic, resolving instead at the modem level using patented technology. Our technology also offers an opt-in for mobile devices, hashed emails, and a sync to external media platform identifiers.
Efficiency in Political Advertising
With cookie deprecation, mobile device restrictions and browser blocking that will all converge in the open digital ecosystem during the current election cycle, an important core value for online voter list targeting is going to be challenged.
Online voter targeting is evolving beyond the realm of social media and browsers to truly become cross-platform spanning desktops, CTV, video, mobile devices and radio. However, to spend efficiently, measurement is a vital aspect of the campaign planning and optimization process. Standard digital media platform tactics such as audience expansions and lookalikes work in direct conflict to the efficacy of voter list targeting.
Kingman warns, “The impact of the lack of meaningful measurement may dispatch the benefits of targeted political outreach on the sidelines when it matters most.”
With economic, foreign, and domestic issues competing for mindshare, more efficient voter communications strategies that are anchored in a transparent understanding of who has been reached and who has not are essential for positively impacting fundraising, persuasion and “get out the vote.”
Calibrating Customer Communications
With the pressure inflicted by walled gardens and device manufacturers, there is a scramble to secure first-party data. Without signals to drive efficient targeting and measurement, the open internet stands to lose significantly to these mega first-party players who have moved aggressively to capture share of wallet.
However, there is a difference between generic consumer behavior targeting and customer communication. Outreach to defined populations such as health insurance subscribers, registered voters, loyalty programs, and countless business-to-business organizations don't benefit from get-out-of-jail-free media tactics like look-alikes and audience expansion or the black-box onboarding tactics. Nor do they benefit from black-box onboarding tactics that result in spending 100% of the budget on only 25% of the audience. That difference manifests in the ability to deliver true measurement against a unique customer list with deterministic accuracy and in near real-time.
“As an industry sector, big data and open adtech are wired to innovate our way into solutions that make markets efficient.” said Kingman, “It is time for an innovation in real-time measurement that benefits customer communications."
Measuring Up Your Marketing Efforts
The year has dawned with new and lingering challenges for the industry. All signs point to an actual depreciation of cookies within the year. Rather than sounding the alarms (or, worse, burying their heads back in the sand), it is time for marketers to think critically about their holistic strategies. Adtech has always thrived on its ability to innovate and drive efficiency— with more significant technological advancements than ever, utilizing emergent identifiers and developing new strategies for customer communications will be the key to weathering the crumbling cookie chaos.