DIGITAL ROUNDUP - JUNE 2024

Welcome to this month’s edition of the roundup to some core updates in the digital advertising industry.

NB: the following represents my own opinion

Google Announces AI Driven updates at I/O + GML 2024

Google had their 2 big annual events during May with I/O being dominated by AI themed updates to Google’s suite of products whilst Google Marketing Live brought more AI solutions to its ads products.

(https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/)

(https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/ai-creativity-google-marketing-live/)

DEEPDIVE

AI was always going to dominate any form of Google product announcement, with Gemini (formerly Bard) taking different forms as it moves into different elements of the vast amount of Google solutions within its portfolio.

The one with the biggest significance for advertising is the changes to the search approach within Google. This was announced last year, but the Search Generative Experience (SGE) has doubled down with AI Overviews the core approach to change how search results operates but also working with more signals like video & audio.

Whlist this is being rolled out in the US specifically on Mobile to start, there have already been lots of negatives reported, to the point where Google had to respond, with AI giving some not so sensible results. Part of this also stems down from Google using Reddit as a source of data, to which an unmoderated user generated forum could cause validity concerns despite the real time nature of this type of data.

The biggest shock is yet to come however, with referral traffic to publishers pretty much certain to suffer alongside more focus to tying SEO strategy to PPC. Ad placements within the generative AI results is also a given at this point.

Onto Google Marketing Live, a lot of “updates” were given but in all reality, it was slightly underwhelming. My thoughts:

  • Shopping Ads with 3D / AR capabilities > Google finally catching up with Social platforms

  • Ability to optimise to profit in Google Ads UI > Smart advertisers been doing this for years with the API & will still have more granularity

  • Looklike seed threshold reduced from 1k to 100 users > Slightly ironic given how privacy / data ethics dominates the ecosystem

  • AI Essentials Optiscore > No thank you

  • Google Ads Data Manager > Nice for small businesses, pretty irrelevant for everyone else who have a more complete tech stack

  • Gen AI reporting > Agencies will be happy with this, more efficiency for weekly insights to advertisers

  • Demand Gen to DV360 / SA360 > Been delayed so many times & still question marks on the display inventory

  • Affiliate YouTube opportunities > This is interesting for DTC brands, particularly on Shopify

  • Gen AI creative updates > Moving in the right direction taking into account brand guidelines (font / colours)

  • Meridian MMM > A rebrand of what always existed as Lightweight MMM & needing to exist to compete with Meta Robyn / vendor MMM

tTD causes a stir with ranking of top 100 publishers

TheTradeDesk have caused a great debate in the industry, by publishing their top 100 publishers in a new report, which leverages Sincera data to define a quality benchmark.

(https://www.thetradedesk.com/assets/global/documents/TTD-Sellers-and-Publishers-Report_May-2024.pdf)

(https://www.adweek.com/media/exclusive-the-trade-desk-ranks-the-top-100-publishers/)

DEEPDIVE

We do love drama in adtech & this report from TTD certainly came with many reactions. Ultimately this is a good thing and it can be summarised in 1 word which at this point is mandatory in programmatic buying: curation.

But how you curate or better still define quality / premium nature is the difficultly. TTD like any other company will have their own motives which nobody can blame them for having, given how this aligns to their future vision alongside the continual push for solutions like OpenPath & UID2.0. Though they are now entering a realm of where they probably didn’t want to be, if neutrality is a key component.

Taking a step back, the list of 100 is not that bad but is clearly US dominated as well as the mediums it covers (streaming / audio etc). If anyone is putting hulu.com in an inclusion list outside of the US, have fun buying fraud. True curation is dynamic, factors in geo / channel but also being impartial. It is good to see some forms of news outlets covered in this list, but there is a distinct lack of DEI, which in part is down to these types of publishers being much smaller but nevertheless sticks out.

Having myself been curating lists like this for a long time, you need good methodology alongside 3rd party validation & a technology backbone to make this work. But the core message here I agree with: the majority of longtail particularly in display is low quality / MFA / inexcusable to deliver ads on in this day & age, so curating a dynamic list is the way to go. It does need to be paired with other techniques, as an inclusion list alone is not fraud / error free.

OtHeR KEY CALLOUTS

SOCIAL / SEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 📱

PROGRAMMATIC HIGHLIGHTS 🌐

IDENTITY HIGHLIGHTS 🆔

Finally I also had the pleasure of writing an article for Performance Marketing World on how to navigate all the solutions to 3P Cookie deprecation:

https://www.performancemarketingworld.com/article/1874254/least-25-alternatives-third-party-cookies-%E2%80%93-best

For any additional questions or comments, feel free to contact on the form below!