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Marketers look to adtech and agencies to solve the addressability problem

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Marketers look to adtech and agencies to solve the addressability problem

NEW YORK — Addressability and privacy present nothing less than “existential challenges” to the advertising industry, said Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, on the Annual Leadership Meeting stage this week. Add this to CEO David Cohen’s calls for “burning impatience,” and the threat to $8 to $10 billion of ecosystem revenue by 2025, and we seem to have a five-alarm fire on our hands. “Sitting on the sidelines is probably at your peril,” said Cohen later in the day.

The twin threats to addressability

Cookie deprecation (which, as several speakers pointed out, has already happened across the web) and ever more stringent regulation dominated the day’s discussions. Cohen’s keynote condemnation of the “someone will figure it out for me” attitude was underlined by a lack of engagement from brand marketers. At one session, specifically focused on alternative identity solutions, most of the audience were adtech professionals. There were a handful of agency marketers and a couple of publishers. When the moderator asked brand marketers to identify themselves, not a hand was raised.

One audience member affirmed that marketers just don’t have the time or skill-sets to solve these problems themselves. First-party data, alternative identifiers, clean rooms, privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) — some combination of those can surely be made to work by adtech, or the agencies, or the publishers. And then, of course, there’s Google and its Topics API.

Google doesn’t have all the answers

Topics is the replacement for FLoC, Google’s proposal to allow interest-based advertising to anonymized audiences. Topics is certainly easier to understand. It will assign a small number of interests to a user, changing every few weeks, enabling advertisers to target those users without knowing their identities. This does preserve cross-domain targeting and is thus richer than contextual advertising. If a consumer searches for camping equipment on outdoor activity websites, the same consumer could be shown ads for tents when shopping online for clothes or groceries.

But starting with a list of several hundred topics, and with no plans to expand the list to many thousands, the Topics API is surely a very blunt tool. It might detect a consumer’s interest in hotel rooms, but how could it show ads for hotels at any specific destinations?

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The same reservation was expressed in a forthright comment by Mike Woolsey, COO at data and identity solutions platform Lotame: “Even the difference between ‘sports’ and ‘hockey’ can be the difference between worthless and worthwhile for the digital marketer. The latter category might just be 3 to 4% of the traffic in the former. Google could never survive relying on such basic tools for it’s vast empire of authenticated traffic, and to bequeath it to the rest of the world borders on insulting for most of the digital media industry.”

Woolsey concedes, nevertheless, that Google is trying to be helpful. “Ever since some of these regulations like CCPA and GDPR became effective, there are certain players that are independent adtech, not just Google, saying we need to go back to 2003, 2004, contextual targeting. I know these regulations are complex and hard to comply with but I just don’t feel that it’s a genie that will ever go back in the bottle.”

He also concedes that Topics is an improvement on FLoC. “Only a data scientist could understand how to develop methods to use the FLoCs, and a person could only be in one FLoC at a time — and there’s different cells of interest people have.” But Topics, he says, “is a child’s toy.”

Lotame, of course, offers its own identity solution, Panorama ID, which probabilistically clusters IDs from different devices — CTV, phone, web-based, and so on. “We operate on the open web,” he said, “and we do require consumer consent.” However effective this approach is, it’s one of literally dozens of alternative identity solutions, in many different flavors from The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 and LiveRamp’s ATS to Tapad’s Switchboard and Neustar’s Fabrick.

This is the universe of complexity many marketers are reluctant to enter.

Read next: Addressability is a ‘slow-motion train wreck,’ says IAB CEO

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Looking for common ground

Opposing camps at the IAB meeting were searching for common ground. On the one hand, there were voices — including from publishers like News Corp and Business Insider — who saw first-party data, given with full consent — as the future of targeting. This is despite investment in first-party data being flat year-over-year according to IAB’s 2022 “State of Data” report

On the other hand, voices from the adtech community were still talking about more extensive targeting capabilities while acknowledging they would need to respect consumer privacy in a way that cookie-tracking never did. But as Woolsey told us, “Some of the regulators, and a lot of the people that are in regulators’ ears, really just mean for the end of the use of identity in digital media. That’s the objective, so nothing is really going to be okay.”

Nevertheless, that’s where clean rooms or PETs might come in. Clean rooms are neutral space that can cluster first-party data about the same customer from a number of brands. PETs? Well, some PETs, like multi-party computation, seem indistinguishable from clean rooms. PETs are already at work in the financial and health sectors, for example enabling sharing of insights about COVID without sharing sensitive patient information.

This proliferation of terms, however, shows how big a challenge IAB faces. There were calls at the meeting to finally develop a common taxonomy for discussing addressability and privacy. There were also calls for standards around alternative identity solutions and measurement. The IAB points out that standards are effective only if they’re generally adopted. It’s hard to see that happening when so many vendors are competing for commercial advantage in the identity space.

The industry is trying to sing in harmony and IAB is striving mightily to direct the choir. Right now, though, cacophony would be a better word.

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Marketers look to adtech and agencies to solve the addressability

Identity resolution is not only critical to marketing success but is essential for compliance with consumer privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR. Explore the platforms essential to identity resolution in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!



About The Author

Integrate announces the recipients of its College Game Changers awards
Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.


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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

Get MarTech! Daily. Free. In your inbox.

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