The Day-to-Day Is Changing For Advertisers

It’s the start of a new year, and as always, there are many changes on the horizon for the paid media world. As we look at the next 24 months, we can expect to see continued developments in the areas of

• Measurement

• Automation

• Privacy

• Artificial Intelligence

As ad tech evolves and consumer behavior shifts, the day-to-day life of advertisers will start to look much different compared to what it looks like now. As these changes occur it’ll be important for not only practitioners to understand what to expect, but also the teams that work with them on a regular cadence. I’ll cover the above topics briefly in this post, and dive into my thoughts on each at a deeper level in the coming weeks.

Measurement

While many brands that are more digitally mature have already moved past in-platform attribution for performance reporting, I expect that leaning on incrementality tests and media mix models (MMMs) will become standard practice for any organization running paid media campaigns. As a result, advertisers will start to focus less on comparing time decay vs data-driven attribution models, and more on incrementality test design.

With an increasing reliance on incrementality testing and MMM, both practitioners and supporting teams will need to accept that making “daily optimizations” will become an outdated practice. In order to generate statistically significant test results that teams can be confident in, campaigns need as much stability and consistency as possible in this age of automation.

Paid media professionals will need to shift from a short-term to medium-term mindset when it comes to reporting on performance. Measurement test designs and longer roadmap plans will become part of the new normal if they haven’t already.

Automation

Over the past few years, industry leading platforms like Google Ads and Meta have rolled out several new features that leverage automation. These tools range anywhere from automated bidding, to dynamic ad types, to consolidated conversion events. Many other platforms have followed suit, and with each of these advances advertisers have seen the number of campaign elements they need to manage decrease. In addition to management, setting up campaigns has even become easier with features like optimized targeting and broad match.

With fewer considerations related to campaigns and accounts, becoming a platform expert is trending toward commoditization. To be clear, I don’t think this skill set will become a true 100% commodity, but it will become more attainable with a lower level of effort required to gain this knowledge.

It will be important for the current experts in the space to provide more strategic value and act as consultants. This practice can manifest itself in many ways, such as holistic user journey optimizations or industry trends reports. In some ways, all of these advancements will force digital marketers to flex those more traditional marketing skills.

Privacy

I’m sure everyone has read an article or two about the death of the third party cookie by now, so many of the coming changes should be expected. We’ll see an impact to platform capabilities like

• Conversion tracking

• Audience targeting

• Retargeting lists

• And more

Advertisers will spend a lot of time preparing for this change over the next 18 months. Implementing conversion API connections and designing first party data strategies are just two of many tasks these professionals will need to take on.

While many thought leaders in the industry cover these topics, one that isn’t discussed in as much detail is the greater degree of collaboration that digital marketers will need to have with their legal, customer data, and UX teams. Although it’s not directly related to cookies, policy changes like CPRA have changed how organizations can legally collect and share data. This has vast implications across all teams that work on digital properties within an organization. Paid media professionals are not immune to the ripples caused by these legal decisions.

Artificial Intelligence

AI tools have made a big splash coming into 2023, and I even asked ChatGPT to give me some thoughts on the potential implications to paid media a few weeks ago. One of the big benefits to using artificial intelligence tools is the speed with which they can generate outputs with limited inputs. With only a brief description of the desired result, a marketing team can generate multiple variations of ad creative, landing pages, content, and more in minutes. Not the days, or even weeks, we’ve all been accustomed to.

This lowers the barrier to entry for creative development, and allows paid media professionals to start providing some of these services. Similar to one of the call outs I mentioned regarding automation, AI tools will allow advertisers to take on a skill set with a wider scope. Outside of being platform experts, they can also provide creative strategy, with examples or even finalized assets.

Advertisers can now use these tools to become the catalyst that propels brands to test new channels and platforms when they may have been prohibited from doing so in the past by a lack of creative resources.

With All of That Said…

There’s a lot going on in the paid media world right now, and plenty of change to prepare for in the coming months. I’ll be diving into each of these four topics in more detail with my own thoughts in the next few posts.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).