AdTech News Round-up
In 2024, research predicts advertising revenue will soar significantly across diverse sectors, driven by digital platforms and surpassing expectations, marking a pivotal year in industry growth.
According to several US forecasts, 2024 promises to be a banner year for advertising. Last December, IPG Mediabrands predicted that ad spend would grow 8.4% this year, but last week, its research arm, Magna, raised its forecast, saying revenues would grow 9.2% to reach $390 billion.?
Some, but not all, of that increase will be due to spending on political ads. Retailers and travel brands will contribute to the boon by increasing ad spend by 9%; automotive will spend 6% more over 2023.
Much of the chatter about the impact of generative AI on advertising tends to focus on the potential future possibilities rather than current applications. Over the last six months, eBay’s in-house AI team has been figuring out how the company can leverage generative AI to help with ad personalization.?
“A lot of where we’ve focused our AI and personalization activities in the past has been in predictive modeling, really understanding more of what you want, when you might want it, how you might want it,” said Adrian Fung, eBay’s global CMO. “But then there’s always limitations, right? We might even be able to get it to very granular data. But how do we actually produce content that is appealing to you based on what you want?”
Early experimentation with generative AI ad personalization for eBay has seen the company creating more banner ads, more personalized suggestions and subject lines for emails for its owned and earned channels as well as working with YouTube on different video edits for its paid ads. The challenge for eBay is not only producing content that will appeal to its customers on a personal level but also managing the roughly two billion items on its site with content written for those items by the item’s sellers and finding ways to make that more appealing.
The first details emerged Monday from Google’s settlement of a class-action lawsuit over Chrome’s tracking of Incognito users. Filed in 2020, the suit could have required the company to pay $5 billion in damages. Instead, The Wall Street Journal reports that Google will destroy “billions of data points” it improperly collected, update its data collection disclosures and maintain a setting that blocks Chrome’s third-party cookies by default for the next five years.
The lawsuit accused Google of misleading Chrome users about how private Incognito browsing truly is. It claimed the company told customers their info was private — even as it monitored their activity. Google defended its practices by claiming it warned Chrome users that Incognito mode “does not mean ‘invisible’” and that sites could still see their activity. The settlement was first reported in December.
A file containing data including passcodes and social security numbers of AT&T customers has been available on the dark web for weeks.
AT&T has acknowledged that a data leak making the rounds online contains information from more than 7.6 million current customers and 65 million former customers. The company has reset the security passcodes of active customers affected, and says that leaked information "may have included full name, email address, mailing address, phone number, social security number, date of birth, AT&T account number and passcode."
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AT&T is reaching out to affected customers via “email or letter” to let them know what data was included and what it’s doing for customers in response.
The company's acknowledgment that the leaked data is real — the first reports of the leak emerged in 2021 — only came after TechCrunch notified AT&T of the vulnerability of its encrypted passcodes on Monday. The passcodes are typically four-digit numerical PINs used for account security on phone calls with company support or in-store verification and a security researcher’s analysis revealed that it was “easy to decipher” the passcodes.
In September, eMarketer projected that digital audio would account for a fifth of time spent with digital media in the U.S. this year. For advertisers, that should be music to their ears.
But while connected TV (CTV), for instance, has become a fast-growing digital channel for advertisers, there is still plenty of untapped potential for audio. Audio may capture 20% of digital media consumption this year, but the Interactive Advertising Bureau projects that the channel would account for just 7.4 % of ad spend.
Industry experts The Current spoke with suggest that retail media networks can help propel programmatic audio as the next essential advertising channel, and that retail media networks (RMNs) and audio platforms are already starting to strike up a harmonious relationship to take advantage of the opportunities there.
Connected TV is set to amass $20 billion in US ad revenues this year, according to the latest forecast from Brian Wieser, principal of consultancy Madison and Wall. The economist projects 18 percent growth for CTV in 2024, and the same rate of growth during the first quarter.
Wieser defines CTV as digital extensions of traditional media and other professionally produced content which is primarily viewed in the living room, as opposed to on a phone or PC. The channel will represent 29 percent of all TV advertising in 2024, according to the forecast.?
But national TV (excluding political advertising) is expected to see continued declines, with ad revenues due to fall 3.5 percent in Q1, and 3.2 percent for the full year. Wieser said TV and CTV will face ongoing challenges, as advertisers shift their media budgets towards performance channels, coupled with negative sentiment driven by cord-cutting and the erosion of national reach on TV.
The U.S. Department of Justice sued Apple Thursday over monopolistic practices. The complaint accuses Apple of moulding its privacy and security practices in ways that benefits the company financially.
One quote particularly jumps out where the DOJ calls Apple’s privacy and security justification an “elastic shield”:
“Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple’s financial and business interests,” it says.
“Apple wraps itself in a cloak of privacy, security, and consumer preferences to justify its anticompetitive conduct. Indeed, it spends billions on marketing and branding to promote the self-serving premise that only Apple can safeguard consumers’ privacy and security interests.”