In the ad industry, as in society at large, fissures are everywhere.
Deprecation of third-party cookies, Apple’s decision to up-end its IDFA mobile targeting system, the COVID-19 pandemic and civil rights protests – these factors and more mean the industry is going through one of its most turbulent periods.
But Chris Langel thinks what lies on the other side of traditional ad-tech infrastructure being up-ended is an opportunity.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Chris Langel, VP and GM of measurement at Oracle Data Cloud, talks about the changes which are reducing synchronization and matching of audience profile fragments.
Reduced scale
“I think our industry will gravitate towards sort of the high water mark on some of this,” Langel says.
“Simply put, we (in the industry) were (simply) using the tools we had at our disposal. Why would you change unless you really had to, if it was working?”
Google is following Safari and Firefox in deprecating third-party cookies over the next couple of years, whilst Apple is making its IDFA iOS ad profiling system opt-in by consumers.
Langel acknowledges the difficulty: “It makes it harder to get scale. It makes it harder to find some ways to connect and tell the story.”
Finding positives
But Langel suggests change is perpetual and opportunity awaits.
“If there’s one great thing about our industry, it’s that it has the ability to continue to evolve and adapt,” he says.
“I see these current challenges as a big opportunity for us. So I think we’ll see a way through that as an industry together.”
OTT fraud
Langel, whose company previously acquired the ad viewability platform Moat, says the growth of connected TV is drawing in ad fraudsters from other digital platforms.
“In this space, any time you have a lot of money and high CPMs, you’re going to have some bad actors emerge,” he says. “We’ve caught a few of these and we’ve been able to identify some of the activities that are going on behind the scenes.
“Over the last five or six years is when we’ve identified these, we’ve seen publishers and the programmatic partners that we work with be very quick to get that inventory out of our ecosystem, which is really encouraging.”
He acknowledges connected TV is complex in which to solve for fraud, with many devices acting as attack vectors for people to game the system.
“It’s going to be a constant part of our life here,” he adds.
You are watching a segment from a Beet.TV series titled Programmatic Buying: Accountability & Transparency in Focus presented by MediaMath. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
