To wrap up 2023, Mediaweek is looking at the biggest trends, events, platforms, and brands of the year. Welcome to Mediaweek’s A to Z of 2023 … and beyond.
By Jonas Jaanimagi, technology lead of IAB
Making sense of measurement
Potential signal loss, both ongoing and forthcoming, continues to dominate the thinking for all parts of the industry, along with an increased focus on responsible addressability. These critical topics, which will continue into 2024, are impacting how publishers are strategically investing in their future products and capabilities and how marketers look to plan, activate, measure, and manage their digital campaigns.
The industry remains very focused on the deprecation of the 3rd party cookies as an identifier, but we’ve already seen restrictions on cookies in Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers as well limitations on Apple’s iOS device identifier. We also know that changes are coming in both Google Chrome and ultimately the Android device identifier, GAID. IAB has for some time been providing education and awareness around the various ID solutions and their related identifiers available here locally and we are committed to refreshing this guidance in early 2024.
From a measurement perspective, recent IAB Australia industry research showed an increased usage of more resilient measurement techniques such as experimental lift studies and MMM (Market Mix Modelling) to evaluate the success of digital advertising. Concurrently, the adoption of 3rd party cookie reliant methods such as MTA (Multi-Touch Attribution) have declined, supported by research such as was presented by Analytic Partners at our MeasureUp conference this year which clearly demonstrated the issues buyers will face if they continue to solely rely upon traditional direct response attribution techniques.
Responsible approaches to data collaboration in digital advertising have come forth this year, including Data Clean Rooms. Clean Rooms are gaining traction and are a good example of a PET (Privacy Enhancing Technology) as they are privacy preserving yet can still provide the capabilities for multiple organisations to come together to quantify the effectiveness of campaigns without exposing or directly manipulating any data shared or transferred between different parties.
PETs as a maturing category of innovation are also now assisting the resurgence for MMM leveraging advanced machine learning for even faster and deeper insights by surfacing more granular evaluation, prediction, and optimisation recommendations that are both meaningful but also actionable. There will be more examples of PETs in 2024 with solutions such as k-anonymity, trusted servers and synthetic data gradually coming to the fore and we’re looking forward to some related initial guidelines from the US-based IAB Tech Lab in the new year.
Industry collaboration will also be critical in CTV measurement (which remains an important area of growing spend) as we’ll soon see the delivery of best in class cross-media measurement here in Australia with a world first integration of CTV currency data from both OzTam and IAB endorsed Ipsos iris. This will provide de-duplicated total audience planning data for all buyers – across CTV, smartphones, tablets, and computers.
We’ll also be working hard to keep industry updated on the Attorney-General’s Department final decisions on privacy legislation amendments expected next year. Regardless we’ll be providing some guidance on managing consent from a technical perspective, highlighting the current requirements in both Europe and California as examples of what is possible and how the frameworks for both these markets work in practice. We also recommend regularly checking Google’s 2024 timelines for the final phase out of third-party cookies and evolving privacy-preserving APIs in both in-app environments (Android) and web (Chrome). It’s also been interesting to recently see a resurgence in actively testing between Mozilla and Meta of the Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA) proposal. IPA leverages another PET called Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) and is quite forward thinking it it’s approach for both cross-device privacy but also conversion attribution.
It’s important for marketers to be aware of and better understand how technology and regulatory changes will impact their digital advertising and measurement capabilities in 2024 and to have a plan in place prior to the implementation of these changes next year. Importantly industry must be ready to competently and thoroughly test whilst 3rd party cookies are still functioning and in prevalent usage for a full comparison.
With new privacy legislation coming, the final step in retirement of 3rd party cookies in Chrome imminent, the adoption of strategies to decarbonise digital advertising increasing and the continued expansion of digital channels and formats, the industry will once again have to come together collaboratively in 2024 to make a difference. This is at the heart of how we function as an industry body, so we expect to be busier than ever next year. Ultimately it will require a portfolio approach to campaign activation, management, and measurement post 3rd party cookie deprecation and IAB Australia will continue to work hard to support industry through these changes via the various outputs from dedicated councils and working groups and at our various events through 2024.
See also: Mediaweek’s A to Z of 2023: C is for Cinema
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Top image: Jonas Jaanimagi