• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, December 5, 2016

Granted, the month of December has already begun, and the sprint to 2017 has begun in earnest. And here we are at year end looking into the crystal ball. What will happen next? How is the ad-tech space evolving? Which trends are on the rise? Which are in retreat?

RTBlog asked companies in the space it covers to weigh in with predictions for 2017. Hopefully these ideas will serve as food for thought.

Jeff Green, CEO of the newly minted public company The Trade Desk, offered the following predictions:

DSPs (demand-side platforms) will partner up to consolidate costs and increase efficiency:

Long-tail DSPs will start to adopt the technology of larger scale DSPs through API partnerships and acquisitions. Building on top of larger-scale DSPs will cut costs for long-tail DSPs and give them an opportunity to focus and invest in their core products/specialties. This is largely brought on by the fact that the sheer volume of requests makes it difficult for every SSP (supply-side platform) to reach every bidder. In other words, each request that comes in from SSPs won’t be sent to every available bidder, making it harder for long-tail DSPs to get a crack at every layer.

Brands will fundamentally change the way they look at holistic measurement:

Brand marketers will recognize that they’ve been spending billions of dollars bombarding consumers with uncoordinated messaging from specialty targeting shops. They’re spending way too much money to make their audience hate them. As a result, I think they’ll migrate towards omnichannel DSPs to streamline the process and help create a strategy, focus, and story for brand messaging. Creating a holistic message across every digital channel—display, mobile, video, audio, TV, native, social—and across every device, fosters more meaningful connection with each consumer. Brands will recognize that this is a winning strategy for the brand, the publisher, and the consumer.  

Advertisers will recognize that digital audio is one of the best values in the current media landscape:

The amount of attention captured per CPM, coupled with the higher recall ability per CPM, makes programmatic audio highly valuable. Spotify and others will guide the music industry to increased ad revenues with this new channel. 

We’ll start to see the death of the insertion order for premium inventory:

For the first time, agencies will spend hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts using programmatic pipes. This means that marketers will be able to transact any publisher deal programmatically, increasing precision and efficiency across the board.