New Year, New Trends: 2024 Predictions & More!

Ad Tech Insights

Fast Figures: Breaking down Dentsu's 2024 forecast

The story: Last month, the agency network Dentsu released their 2024 forecast, which covers 58 markets across the globe. Here are some of their key takeaways and projections for the new year:

• Global ad spend to increase 4.6% in 2024, reaching $752.8 billion USD.
• When adjusting for inflation, and tracking global ad spending at constant prices, actual expected growth sits around 2.5% versus 2023’s 2.7%.
• Digital advertising to command 58.8% of the ad market in 2024.
• Retail media to experience the fastest growth in 2024, with a 17.2% three-year compound annual growth rate.
• TV advertising to grow in 2024 with a 2.9% boost.?

The takeaway: 2024 marks significant growth for TV advertising, likely owed to major events including the Olympics, 2024 U.S. election, and the UEFA European football championship. In other areas, like global ad spend, when adjusting for inflation, growth does not substantially outpace 2023. With an increasingly fragmented landscape, advertising is costing brands more, leading to a shift in ad priorities. We expect even more emphasis on standardization, especially in the retail media sector, going into 2024.?

4 Personalities: What's your approach to a cookie-less world?

The story: The industry has been approaching the end of widespread tracking for some time, encouraging marketers to employ innovative and diverse strategies. Digiday’s Seb Joseph buckets marketers into four groups based on characteristics and approaches to the cookie-pacalypse:

• Visionary Voyagers: These marketers are “dead set on the idea that large-scale targeting outside the walled gardens is a goner.” They champion privacy-centric approaches and media mix modeling for measurement. Voyagers make up a minority of marketers.
• Privacy Pragmatists: These marketers are “well aware that by the turn of the year, they’ll have no choice but to confront [life after the cookie] head-on” -- but who still have things to tackle. Privacy Pragmatists are testing alternatives that don’t revolve around Google’s Privacy Sandbox, but remain skeptical and mindful about the short-term impacts that come with change.
• Perpetual Hopefuls: Perpetual hopefuls are those “waiting for Google to work its magic and fix everything.” This group of marketers have done very little to prepare for the loss of third-party tracking, and likely won’t.
• Chief Evasion Officer of Reality Avoidance Inc.: These marketers “still firmly believe that third-party cookies are going to stick around.” Unconvinced that any significant change will come to pass, these marketers aren’t taking any proactive steps to prepare for an inevitable, crucial event.?

The takeaway: With an end to widespread tracking looming in the distance, marketers are either adopting diverse strategies or denying impending change. This diversity in approaches is leading to an even more fragmented landscape which will likely pose even more industry-wide challenges down the road.?

Contextual advertising predictions for 2024

The story: Contextual advertising is poised for a resurgence in 2024, emerging “as a cornerstone for brands seeking to engage with consumers through more privacy-compliant and contextually relevant methods.” Experts predict emphasis on hyper-granular targeting, an industry-wide focus on combining privacy-first solutions, a market reliance on contextual targeting in a post cookie-world, and an integration of first-party data.

Read the full 2024 predictions on contextual targeting here.?

The takeaway: There’s no doubt that the industry will be prioritizing privacy in 2024, making contextual advertising a cornerstone of the post-cookie digital marketing landscape. With increased emphasis on privacy and relevance, contextual targeting is a pivotal solution for marketers in the coming years.

Opinion

Future-Proofing Retail Media: The Programmatic Revolution

Although the retail media landscape is set to reach $106 billion in ad spend by 2027, retail media still faces steep challenges due to a lack of transparency and efficiency. This article by Kevel Founder & CEO James Avery outlines a path forward for this increasingly fragmented market: a centralized OpenRTB industry standard in retail media.?

The current system, and its subsequent fragmentation, has led to as much as a 23% waste in programmatic ad spend. A unified buying solution through OpenRTB framework would not only streamline processes, but also cut down on waste and protect advertisers’ investments.?

Read Now

Keep Learning

WATCH

No, the ad industry as a whole is not prepared for the third-party cookie to go away. That's the assessment of programmatic ad experts who attended the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit.?

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It seems like every time industry organizations trawl for muck, they find it. Is there an end in sight? AdExchanger discusses these questions and more.?

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LISTEN

This episode of The Big Story by AdExchanger talks the end of cookies, the rise of first-party data, and growing retail media businesses; and how all these trends intersect in 2024.?

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