SANTA MONICA, Calif. – As addressable advertising expands throughout the television industry and matures, marketers have greater expectations that it will deliver results in terms of business outcomes.
“We’re going from the potentiality of an industry to one that now has tens of billions of dollars in streaming and advanced TV advertising dollars being spent,” Dave Morgan, founder and chief executive of Simulmedia, said in this interview at the Beet Retreat Santa Monica 2022. “It’s now not just about the theoretical or abstract way the different technologies or processes or people could work together, but what do the deals actually look like?”
Technology companies such as Google parent Alphabet, Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Amazon collect vast amounts of consumer data, helping them to offer customized audiences to advertisers. Their ad platforms are often called “walled gardens” because they behave like data clean rooms that mask user-level information from brands. Instead, each platform categorizes consumers in different groups based on common attributes.
The difficulty for advertisers has been that they can’t necessarily apply the insights they receive from Google to other platforms such as Amazon. Marketers can only attempt to match their first-party consumer data with the data from each walled garden.
“There’s a lot of risk about the walled gardens actually being able to be more integrated and control a fair amount of consumer data with very clear privacy protections around them,” he said. “What is challenging is making decisions on how to protect proprietary data in ways that you can benefit or others won’t be able to over-benefit.”
Economic Pressures
Marketers face a variety of challenges outside of their control, such as high inflation, rising borrowing costs, war in Eastern Europe and the ongoing pandemic. These difficulties will help to sharpen marketing strategies, Morgan said.
“The big tech companies massively over-hired over the last five or 10 years. We had a bull market for 14 years. Capital was basically free … and so companies got sloppy,” he said. “We’re going to have to be tight and we’re going to have to be focused. We’re have to be realistic and pragmatic that things are going to take awhile.”
You are watching coverage of Beet Retreat Santa Monica 2022, presented by Ampersand, MiQ, Nielsen, PubMatic, T-Mobile Advertising Solutions and The Trade Desk. For more videos from the Beet Retreat, please visit this page.
