Spotlight
Welcome to the latest edition of Spotlight, your monthly recap of the biggest stories in adtech and digital marketing.
What we have for you today: The rise of AI-enabled junk websites, the continuing evolution of the Privacy Sandbox, and media agencies’ budding relationships with SSPs.
It’s now some seven years since the GDPR came into force, yet according to new research by Survey Monkey, businesses continue to struggle with data privacy and security. According to its findings, over half (52%) of UK brands admit to experiencing data-related issues since the regulation was introduced. An astonishing one in six (16%) have faced the consequences of a GDPR-related fine or penalty. With regulatory scrutiny only set to increase in the UK and beyond, it’s vital that brands everywhere get their house in order and put in place privacy-first technologies and processes.
In the UK, MPs are currently guiding the Data (Use and Access) Bill through Parliament. In addition to its proposals on automation, the Bill seeks to lay down the regulatory groundwork for digital identities and evaluate the trustworthiness of digital verification services. It’s certainly one to watch. With any luck, it will set a gold standard for assessing verification solutions, including our own telco-verified IDs.
One of the key benefits of AI is that it allows content to be created and scaled at speed. Put it into the hands of grifters, however, and it’s a great tool for hoovering up ad revenues. This month, Digiday provided a great summary of how AI is making it easier than ever for people to make “slop:” low-quality websites such as made-for-advertising sites, which no advertiser would want their promotions appearing anywhere near. With AI set to dramatically increase the stock of poor-quality inventory online, it’s more important than ever that brands and agencies have access to tools that can guarantee their content is appearing in front of the right audiences.
IAB Tech Lab has announced two initiatives aimed at modernising digital advertising infrastructure and addressing fundamental challenges that generative AI and LLMs pose to content monetisation. It’s great to see frameworks starting to take shape around AI, and some positive guidelines for publishers. However, privacy remains the elephant in the room. We would like to see some concerted, industry-wide action to address the potential for AI outputs to be based on unconsented personal data. This is potentially a ticking timebomb for advertisers and publishers alike.
There were more suggestions this month that Google’s Privacy Sandbox is dead in the water, or at very least being shifted to focus entirely on measures for Chrome’s Incognito mode. Whatever the truth, it does seem that Google doesn’t quite know what to do with Chrome, particularly now that it no longer plans to deprecate cookies. This is all a little exasperating. While there’s no denying the huge impact Google has had and will continue to have on adtech, it does now feel that the time is right for the company to open its stack up to the broader adtech ecosystem. Google doesn’t need to answer the industry’s challenges alone – working collaboratively with innovative partners could prove a much better tack.
There was some interesting news from the agency space this month with the news that media agencies are increasingly trying to circumvent adtech gatekeepers to strike their own deals with supply-side platforms (SSPs). In our view, this growing trend reflects a shift in programmatic from quantity to quality, with advertisers keen to ensure that they are reaching real, high-value audiences, rather than chasing scale at any cost. Our own telco-verified IDs are an important part of this shift, helping publishers enrich their inventory and enable agencies to deliver better-targeted, higher-performing campaigns, while maintaining transparency and compliance.
Finally this month, with the increasing maturity of programmatic, marketers in APAC are rethinking their strategies to be more precise, localised, and insight-driven as they look to reflect local nuance and cultural complexity. Novatiq aims to support such localisation with an approach to telco-verification that is built on a country-by-country basis, bringing privacy-first telco intelligence to each market in a way that respects regional differences in regulation, user behaviour, and network maturity. We believe that as brands seek relevance at scale, telco data will offer a powerful path forward for addressable advertising in APAC.
Novatiq is back in the news. Tanya Field, our CPO, has just appeared in Performance Marketing World with her byline on “The rise of ‘advertising as a service’: A new era for consumer engagement.” You can check out the article here.
And if that’s whet your appetite for some great thought leadership, then why not swing by our latest blog? Here you can learn all about how cross-site tracking is changing in our privacy-centric world.
Telcos are looking for greater revenue streams than their current models provide. Could a smart digital strategy, providing telco-verified ID solutions at scale for publishers and brands, be the answer?
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