DIGITAL ROUNDUP - SEPTEMBER 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

X Takes aim at Advertising Bodies / Brands, forcing GARM to Dissolve

DEEPDIVE

This is quite a serious but important topic to talk about. At the end of the day, it is up to a brand to decide whether they want to spend advertising dollars with a given platform. Intermediaries likes agencies / consultants or even non-profit bodies like GARM can have an opinion but it is down to the brand.

It would be cynical to say that other social platforms & the open web in general do not have the same issues regards misinformation / user generated content / brand suitability that X does. But clearly in the Elon Musk era, this has become more fragile.

As an advertising solution, it is hard to argue that X is anywhere near their competitors across the funnel. It has never had a serious pixel, that is made performance marketing borderline impossible. The brand money is what has been key to its success over the years and it still is the best place to go for “real time” advertising.

But is that at the risk of other challenges that exist on that platform? That is a decision for each brand to take. Is Meta / TikTok / Reddit much better? Debatable. And clearly, the ads are drying up on X, as my own personal experience shows with the insane amount of ad slots / disregard for frequency caps.

Meta introduces several ad upgrades for measurement

DEEPDIVE

These updates have been in beta for a while, but are now starting to roll out to all advertisers. Each one is quite interesting in their own ways:

• The use of Conversion Values allows advertisers to go a step further with telling the algorithm to optimise towards / learn against. This could be done in the past through a mix of custom conversion optimisation or for the more tech savvy, bid multipliers. But the introduction of this approach will appease the wider userbase of Meta ads, though should still be done in conjunction with a strong pixel / CAPI backbone.

• The idea of Incremental Attribution has always been part of Meta’s DNA. Historically this has been more around doing forms of conversion lift tests and this won’t be going away anytime soon. The update here comes in a few forms, which also including the introduction of first touch attribution reporting within Ads Manager. It does feel like we are going back in time to pre-iOS14.5 days & also where Facebook Attribution as a tool threatened to solve MTA across the board. But this is another valuable view that will include impression data to look at in conjunction with experiments / MMM.

• Finally the most exciting for a lot of brands is Meta’s official integration with GA4 where you can integrate the 2 platforms together for the first time in an authenticated way. Northbeam was also announced as a launch 3rd party partner too but to quote Jose Mourinho, if I speak I am in trouble. The GA4 integration has some requirements, none more so being the approach to UTM tracking that ideally allows you to track campaign / adset / ad level data via UTMs. This may not be viable for certain brands who have a defined approach to GA4 tracking & nor should this integration be seen as a mean to optimise to a flawed click based attribution model that GA4 is. But again it is another view to key an eye on.

OTHeR KEY CALLOUTS

SOCIAL / SEARCH HIGHLIGHTS 📱

• Reddit have finally introduced a Custom Audience API, allowing the integration of 1st party data from CDPs into it (Reddit)

• Google have formally announced Partnership Ads via BrandConnect, to allow YouTube creators videos to be promoted as ads (Google)

• TikTok have teamed up with Amazon in the US to offer a native checkout experience, in the same theme as Amazon’s other integrations with social platforms (TikTok)

• Snapchat have followed the other social platforms to consolidate objectives for campaign build, making a smaller amount of options to choose from (Snapchat)

• Perplexity looks to introduce a wider ads strategy in Q424, showcasing the continual move of search into generative AI (Adweek)

PROGRAMMATIC HIGHLIGHTS 🌐

• Google will be enabling Enhanced Attribution & YouTube auto-tagging on DV360 by default in an effort to maintain accurate measurement (Google)

• Google have released a few new updates to Performance Max campaigns alongside GenAI reporting capabilities (Google)

• A nice test from Dentsu on the viability of serving on news websites for programmatic alongside concerns for brand suitability (LinkedIn)

• Adalytics have released another piece of analysis, this time focusing on the use of AI in context within ad verification & how it has not worked particularly well on certain websites (Adalytics)

IDENTITY HIGHLIGHTS 🆔

• Google have made some new updates to Google Tag Manager with more integrations alongside Google certified consent management platforms (CMPs) for easier configuration (Google)

• Brave have called out Google on one of their Privacy Sandbox proposals Related Website Sets, calling it a privacy concern (Brave)

• Apple have made further adjustments to its App Store in EU, including the more neutral approach to define a default browser (Apple)

• TheTradeDesk looks to be working on its own Smart TV OS, which could be the start of a wider push to take on the larger OTT market as well as expand its UID 2.0 offering (Lowpass)

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