• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, December 22, 2016

Jay Friedman, COO at the programmatic media firm Goodway Group, makes a bold prediction: Return on ad spending (ROAS) will decline for all parties in the ad-tech ecosystem, especially for providers of retargeting services.

ROAS drops for everyone, but especially performance retargeters: Header bidding has ended the second price auction, and those vying for the retargeted cookie are going to keep paying more. The problem is that the return portion of the equation doesn’t improve—the cost just increases.

At least one major DSP [demand-side platform] and/or SSP [supply-side platform] will make a less-than-desirable exit to avoid further negative financial impact: Whether a private company that gets out of the rain, or a public company whose value has fallen too dramatically, at least one major player in this space won’t see the fairy tale ending that they’d hoped for.

Marketers still won’t figure out there are SSPs that have more fraudulent inventory than clean inventory: The false sense of security provided by fraud detection vendors, along with the depth and complexity  of the problem, makes marketers lose focus on a problem that remains very important.

At least 5% of 25 of the Fortune 500 head into 2018 planning from an ROAS or entirely measurable perspective vs. a reach/frequency perspective: This means these companies no longer take on a standard Nielsen demographic. Instead, they know who their audience is, who buys and who doesn’t, and focus their entire plan around supporting sales lifts and brand metrics. The chief marketing officers of these companies will be poached to bring this discipline to rival companies.