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Articles by Will Melzer
Retailers can’t ignore privacy-first advertising
In July, Google made waves when it announced that third-party cookies wouldn’t deprecate just yet. This was met with relief and frustration across the advertising industry. Retailers, already knee-deep in preparing for a cookieless future, have been testing alternatives like Google’s Privacy Sandbox for years. But even with this delay, the shift towards privacy-first advertising is unstoppable, and the retail brands converting to privacy-first measurement will be at an advantage.
esbconnect and Sagacity to connect datasets
On 24 October, the customer acquisition specialist, esbconnect, announced that it has partnered with the data and analytics consultancy, Sagacity. This partnership will combine Sagacity’s Intra dataset with esb’s email dataset to help advertisers engage new and existing audiences through email, social, programmatic and postal.
Non-profits: where people power fuels change
This column is for all the non-profit marketers out there, who are using their own ‘people power’ to improve our world. Some of the most inspiring marketers I have met work for non-profits. Money for their cause is usually hard won, and so they face constant pressure to make sure every penny is spent wisely. This combination of passion and resource challenges are why it is especially disheartening to see non-profit marketers deplete resources trying ineffective marketing strategies.
No emails? No problem! A world of data beyond known identifiers
While some brands and publishers have amassed enough email addresses and mobile IDs to build and target valuable audiences, many more have hit a wall in both the scale and detail of their authenticated user data. Faced with shrinking addressability, it can feel like there’s no choice but to pay to play in the walled gardens of social and retail platforms. But there’s a lot more to first-party data than emails, and there’s a lot more to data than first-party.
Google postpones third-party cookie phase out to 2025
Google announced this week that it will, for the third time, delay the third-party cookie phase out. The company had originally set the deadline for the third-party cookie phase out for January 2020, promising that within two years user tracking technology would be eliminated. Since then, the tech giant has had to postpone the date twice, due to uncertainties around the alternative, called Privacy Sandbox.
Scared of losing scale post-cookie?
Despite years of warnings, the digital advertising industry finds itself about to collide with a hard deadline. In the rush to test and implement new solutions, achieving scale for targeted campaigns in a privacy-first landscape and with incoming limits on available data is a top priority. A UK study by LiveRamp found that reaching target audiences at scale is at the top of marketers’ list of concerns after the deprecation of cookies, with 60% of respondents citing it as a concern.
Nectar360 partners with The Trade Desk to expand retail media offering
Nectar360 has partnered with The Trade Desk to provide advertisers with the capabilities to connect with customer purchases on the open internet. The partnership enables advertisers to target campaigns to Nectar audiences. Advertisers will be able to optimise and report on the performance of ad campaigns through a combination of Nectar360’s and The Trade Desk’s capabilities, allowing brands to connect their digital marketing campaigns with in-store and online sales.
Navigating the new mobile ad landscape, with Moloco's VP
In this interview, Ben Jeger, VP EMEA at Moloco, discusses the company’s journey, mobile app advertising, and the future of the adtech industry. What sets the likes of Meta, Google and Amazon apart from the others is they excel at achieving results. Return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) and driving real performance is what helped them grow to the behemoths that they are today. These adtech leaders make it extremely easy to get started in performance marketing, which, in part, is what draws advertisers to them.
WARC: The strategic bravery gap between agencies and clients
The Future of Strategy 2023 report released today (3 October) by WARC shares insights from marketing strategists across the globe and highlights a strategic bravery gap. This eleventh edition of the annual WARC study unpacks the key trends considered pivotal to the future of strategy.
New whitepaper urges advertisers to focus on in-flight optimisation to improve media value
A new whitepaper from creative effectiveness ad platform Automated Creative and the World Federation of Advertisers, suggests brands who fail to track and optimise the performance of their digital campaigns could be leaving significant media value on the table. The Compounding Creative whitepaper revealed that with proper in-flight creative optimisation, marketers can improve their media value by an average of 17%.
What’s next for programmatic DOOH?
In the ever evolving landscape of digital advertising, Programmatic Digital Out-of-Home (prDOOH), a powerful tool for brands to engage with target audiences, is becoming a must-have on every media plan. Our recent State of the Nation research, sheds light on the current trends and dynamics within the prDOOH market globally.
EssenceMediacom expands its partnership with Sofology
Following the renewal of its commercial contract with DFS Group earlier this year, WPP media agency EssenceMediacom, announces that it has won Sofology’s digital brief, consolidating the full media scope. EssenceMediacom already handles Sofology’s linear TV and broadcast VOD advertising. The new win adds the brand’s £4 million digital spend to its portfolio, bringing the total value of the account to £10 million.
TechRadar introduces new website functions, advertising innovations
Specialist media company Future announced the relaunched of its technology website TechRadar. In addition to a new brand identity and improved advertising opportunities, TechRadar introduced its new service, Ask An Expert, through which readers can personalised product recommendations. Rebranding as , TechRadar’s new look highlights its expert technology content.
Q&A: transformation and legacy with BAT’s Elaine Chum
In today’s dynamic and digital marketplace, with constantly changing consumer behaviours and more competition than ever before, is longevity enough? In this interview, we sat down with Elaine Chum, Area Head of Digital and Omni Channel (Western Europe), British American Tobacco to discuss how heritage brands can strike the right balance between tradition and transformation. Hi Elaine, great to chat to you. In 2020 you made the move from 14 years at Philips to British American Tobacco (BAT).
What can the UK learn from WhatsApp use in India
Are we missing a marketing trick here in the UK when it comes to using WhatsApp in our campaigns? With brands launching into the increasingly popular Indian market could we learn from their WhatsApp usage as a country and how brands and marketers are tapping into it? India uses WhatsApp as their marketing and advertising tool of choice it seems. There are 400 million WhatsApp users there.
So what if TikTok gets banned?
Mention TikTok in a room of marketers now, and you’ll get: Some strong opinions Some anxious hand-wringing Yes: it’s controversial. Yes, it could get banned by the UK and US governments. But it is also true that it’s huge; that millions of people are using it — and that those brands that are on it aren’t wasting their time, even if a ban does happen. The internet is right now undergoing a seismic shift — probably the biggest since social marketing arrived.
B2B content personalisation: how far can you take it?
In the marketing ecosystem, there is a lot of digital noise constantly being created Standing out can be difficult. One way to cut through the digital noise is personalization, which can give a business’ communications greater resonance and impact, to help them secure valuable mindshare with their audience.
Harry Potter and The Death of the Author
Can a beloved franchise still be a source of hope independent of its problematic creator? The world that once shaped your sense of wonder is alive. Step inside Hogwarts Legacy, the Harry Potter RPG that topped Twitch’s charts days before its official release on February 10th. The game unveils a sumptuous, sprawling realm, packed full of side quests and secrets to unearth. Yet around every corner, the long shadow of J.K. Rowling looms.
Advertising is dead: long live the partnership economy
For some years now, digital advertising has been in its protracted death throes As a result of bad habits around data privacy, authenticity, and poor ad creative established from the earliest days of digital in the 1990s, by 2017 69% of consumers no longer trusted digital ads. Then, just as things looked like they couldn’t get any worse, Covid-19 hit, turbocharging this decline into a high speed, high energy nosedive.
Fishing where the fish ain’t…. yet
Digital relationships are quite different from their analog cousins. The way we relate to each other in the real world — that long arc of friendship mediated by proximity, shared experience and endeavour — usually has a gradual decay. “I haven’t seen that friend in ages” becomes over time “we’ve lost touch”. It is a normal and natural process. Occasionally there is an attempt to reconnect, perhaps following an alumni event, but mostly we are content to let our old friends fade into our past.
How Digital Advertisers Can Adapt to Privacy Changes With First-Party Data
By Will Melzer, VP Sales EMEA, Moloco In July, Google stated that it would push back its phase-out of third-party cookies until the second half of 2024. This announcement comes off the back of several privacy changes in the sector, such as Apple’s removal of IDFA and Google’s implementation of the Privacy Sandbox. While marketers and advertisers can breathe a temporary sigh of relief, the impending demise of cookies will force many to reconsider their digital advertising strategies.
Machine Learning is Unlocking the Power of First-Party Data
Activating first-party data has become essential for marketers, not least because of major privacy changes, including Apple’s App Tracking Transparency and Google’s Privacy Sandbox. While the move away from third-party data and cookies has been a long time coming, many legacy AdTech systems still need to be revisited and – critically – future-proofed against any new privacy changes.
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