Commentary

What We Need To Get Right In 2024

by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, January 25, 2024

I am excited to be attending the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Marco Island, Florida this coming weekend.

There is a lot going on in the digital ad world these days, much of it challenging. Almost daily we read of layoffs from so many tech companies having overhired these past years. Privacy is an enormous issue, with federal and state laws coming into enforcement windows, and Google deprecating the cookie.

Ad and audience measurement is still a mess -- and with streaming and linear TV advertising converging, getting it right matters now more than ever. Fraud is an enormous problem, and will only grow if we don’t stamp it out now.

How will we solve all of these problems? It starts by getting the foundational issues right. We have to care.

So, I offer up a New Year’s resolution that I wrote for the industry:

BE IT RESOLVED, in 2024 the digital advertising industry shall recognize that the moral and ethical ambiguity it operates under is wrong and will be its downfall – and must end.

If we can stay the course on this resolution, I am very confident that the other issues will work themselves out.

What do you think?

3 comments about "What We Need To Get Right In 2024".

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Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, January 25, 2024 at 6:01 p.m.
Who can disagree, Dave? But the missing link in your dream is motivation.

Until advertisers become involved in a meaningful way on issues like breaking down the walled gardens and getting independent and fully objective audience projections using standardized metrics and until attentiveness is part of the standard design, we may be whistling "Dixie".

The same point applies to fraud, which seems to be closely linked with programmatic media buying. The way to apply constructive pressure on the programmatic folks to at least move to fix this problem----and it wont be easy--- is to start buying more and more direct---at least with the larger sellers who account for the majority of the audience reach and GRP delivery. How can such pressure be organized when every advertiser seems to be concerned only with it's little issues---not the whole industry"s problems?That is my question.
Reply

Dave Morgan from Simulmedia replied, January 26, 2024 at 2:55 p.m.

Ed,
I'm an eternal optimist. I believe that most people want to do the righrt thing.
If our industry is comfortable not caring how business is done as long as they get a piece of the transaction, our problems will continue. I don't think that you have to cut off the transactions to get their attention. it would be sad if the rules of our industry were doing the right thing can only happen if you pay people to do it. Maybe it's just a matter of forcing more bad practices into the open?
Dave

Jim Meskauskas from Media Darwin, Inc., January 29, 2024 at 2:16 p.m.

Dave, you and I spoke on this when we last got together. There is not only an absence of courage a lack of incentive in the value chain as it pertains to programmatic. As Mr. Papazian says above, constructive pressure on the ecosystem can come in the form of more d. But that means increased unit costs. The advertisers and their procurement departments won't force a change because they can point to low or, in some cases, decreasing unit costs; agencies can make and deliver on the promise of keeping those costs low; the platform players make money coming and going in either direction; and the publishers, who lose out as much as the advertiser does (for the advertisers it is in the form of dirty data and weak share growth) in the form of lower CPMs at least get some revenue against inventory for which they might get nothing.