Today’s advertising landscape is at once incredibly exciting and yet uniquely challenging for executives attempting to navigate it. On one hand, our rapidly evolving digital ecosystem is constantly providing new creative, data-driven ways to engage audiences and an expanding variety of channels through which to reach them. But on the other hand, the need to track and optimize the performance of multimedia ad campaigns across so many different platforms has introduced an unprecedented level of complexity into the mix, resulting in a sharp increase in wasted advertising dollars.  

According to a study published by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) earlier this year, wasted ad spend has grown by a startling 34% in just two short years. More specifically, due to a confluence of issues, including rising fraud, ad duplication, and inefficient targeting and tracking processes, programmatic ad campaigns distributed across the open web are now responsible for nearly $27 billion in losses each year.   

It’s an extraordinarily high and unsustainable price to pay. Unfortunately, as consumer preferences continue to shift from traditional media toward modern streaming and social media platforms, if companies don’t have line of sight to their digital investments, that's exactly what they are doing: Wasting their ad dollars.   

Balancing Increased Opportunity and Complexity   

For as much as digital media is driving ad waste, its growing influence over consumers and subsequent importance for advertising is undeniable. Ongoing research suggests the growing prevalence and success of digital ads is actively creating a fundamental shift in the hierarchy of ad effectiveness.   

According to a recent Harris Poll survey, commissioned by AD-ID, of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, the effectiveness of TV advertisements, while still dominant, is losing more ground each year to that of digital alternatives. More specifically, whereas 68% of consumers describe TV ads as somewhat or very influential, around 64% say the same of streaming and targeted social media ads.   

This is a significant gain compared to previous studies, suggesting it’s only a matter of time until TV ads forfeit the top overall spot to the broader digital landscape. However, when we look a little closer, we can see that traditional media is, in fact, already being outperformed by certain digital channels and content creation strategies.   

Measuring by the relative depth of influence, for example, more U.S. adults (~26%) already find streaming and social media ads to be very influential compared to TV ads (22%). Additionally, advertisements in the form of social media influencer content appear to be owning the lion’s share of recent momentum, with over half of U.S. adults (58%) finding influencer-focused content to be somewhat or very influential, a number that is bound to continue rising, particularly among consumers aged 18-44.   

Put simply, advertisers today are faced with an unprecedented opportunity to capture the attention of generations of viewers as their preferences evolve in how they choose to seek out and consume content. As we’ve seen, however, the tricky part is solving for and maintaining visibility and control over ad spend across an increasingly vast and complex ecosystem, a task that is significantly more challenging to overcome in the absence of utilizing the right tools and forward-looking strategies.   

Tracking Ads Effectively in the Digital Age   

The concern over distribution and performance tracking is not new in the advertising space. In fact, both the problem and its solution are decades old and find their roots in traditional broadcast TV advertisements, which had been notoriously challenging to understandat scale before the introduction of standardized systems.   

The essential lesson from this history is that for any medium to become truly measurable at scale, it needs a universal identifier. If such a system could so quickly become essential in simpler times, it’s considerably more imperative now. Ads are much more widely distributed across a significantly more vast and complicated media landscape, whose inherent fragmentation, lack of transparency, and overall complexity make it harder to accurately place, follow and/or measure and control the creative asset’s influence over consumers.   

The Imperative for a Standardized Creative Identifier   

Fortunately, while the media landscape continues to evolve rapidly, the concept of a standardized identifier system remains as effective as it's ever been, offering a wide range of benefits across the advertising ecosystem, each of which has its own role to play in combating modern ad waste.   

For example, creative registration helps advertisers reach the right consumers with the right content at a time when consumers are experiencing high rates of ad fatigue and expecting increasingly relevant and personalized experiences. Moreover, as more advertisers take the automated and programmatic approach to digital marketing, efficient tracking becomes non-negotiable for validating the relevancy of personalized campaigns and, most importantly, being able to cut through the noise to more accurately evaluate and optimize their financial impacts.   

The challenge today isn't inventing a new solution from scratch but applying the existing successful strategy of standardized creative identification to the digital world. The industry must champion the widespread adoption of a single, neutral, cross-platform identification standard for all digital ad creatives. This would deliver the transparency and control necessary to unify reporting, prevent ad duplication, reduce fraud, and ensure that every advertising dollar is working toward a measurable outcome.   

Overall, while the recent and ongoing rise in ad waste across the industry may appear to be the product of a new and increasingly complex way of creating and distributing content, by leveraging the full and intended potential of an industry-wide standardized tracking standard, the solution is much simpler than many advertisers expect. The digital age demands a digital solution, but its foundation lies in proven, decades-old principles that simply require the adoption (not creation) in the digital space.