• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, December 9, 2016

Haylee Adkins, global head of client strategy at Drawbridge, sees attribution, identity-based marketing, and addressability as key trends taking shape in 2017.

Product-Based Attribution Gets Granular: Attribution will become more granular in 2017—both in terms of what’s measured and how it’s measured. Today, we have same-device and cross-device, plus offline attribution in the form of store visits measured by location data providers, and transactions measured by credit card/loyalty data aggregators.

Look for attribution to reach its natural endpoint with individual product-level measurement in 2017. This will be a boon for consumer packaged goods brands and retailers desperate to tie online impressions to specific offline purchases, not just store visits or an indication that a purchase was made. Secondly, single-touch, last-click attribution will hopefully go away, as multi-touch attribution gets more than just a passing glance and helps brands understand the entire path to conversion.

Identity-Based Marketing: Digital identity, people-based, or cross-device marketing—or whatever you want to call it—is quickly becoming foundational for real-time marketing. Brands are increasingly turning to third-party vendors and identity graphs to understand who their users are and which devices they own. The global proliferation of devices isn’t expected to slow down, and as a result, more brands, agencies, and enterprises will use these identity graphs to supplement their first-party CRM data to integrate marketing efforts to achieve efficiencies.

TV Gets Addressable, More Marketers Will Do Audience-Based Buying: TV is still the screen that captures the most media time from consumers. Next year, we’ll see TV becoming more addressable and thus, more meaningful for brands. Today, we have connected TVs in the form of over-the-top TV boxes and smart TVs, but there are still millions of traditional linear television sets that haven’t come online and been made addressable. The single biggest benefit here will be the ability for brands to buy audiences instead of programs. It will also enable brands to extend their first- and third-party audience data for more granular targeting in this “new” channel.