Trends in 2024 Programmatic Advertising

In today’s dynamic digital advertising world, programmatic has emerged as a critical pillar of marketing strategy. In Spain, the discipline’s ongoing progress is expected to set the pace until 2024. From the transition from KPIs to attention metrics to the cookieless world, the trends defining the future of programmatic advertising in Spain are critical for everyone involved in the advertising ecosystem.

In this post, we will look at the important themes that will govern programmatic advertising campaigns in the future year and identify the keys to success.

Challenges of Transparency in Programmatic Advertising

Advertisers will be forced to take a more proactive and responsible role in managing their media investments because of the challenges and changes that are coming in the year ahead for programmatic advertising.

Mega Digital champions transparency, while giving our customers confidence, clarity, and full control over our actions and the results achieved.

The recently published ANA study on the programmatic media supply chain is a rich source of valuable information and actionable proposals for advertisers. Some headline highlights include:

• The challenge for advertisers today is not what to do, but discerning where to start.
• It is estimated that there is around $22 billion available for advertisers to optimize costs and results.
• The alarming proliferation of MFA (Made for Advertising) publishers receiving large investments is a clear indication of the lack of control, opacity and inefficiency in campaign management.

One of the most compelling questions posed to advertisers in the research is: “To what extent are you satisfied with the level of transparency you are getting from your programmatic media investments?”

The results are worrying when 54% of advertisers expressed discomfort (or neutrality) with the level of transparency. There is an imbalance in the nature and quality of information held by different parties in a transaction.

Unfortunately, after the buy/sell lines have been established, the marketer is left alone. They see advertising as an expenditure (or, ideally, a growth investment). For the rest of the supply chain, that money just represents revenue, and the aims and outcomes are not necessarily in sync with the preferences and decisions of the end users.

The rise of self-service

We have seen a rapid expansion of programmatic buying capabilities (adopting more agile models – performance-based, time-first response and optimization) in the past years. recent year. These innovations have been made possible by the development of tools that empower advertisers to interact directly with technology, placements, and data, creating what is known as “self-service ad tech”.

This type of service has both advantages and disadvantages. While some argue that with “managed programmatic” it was easier to run campaigns, it also means less autonomy. Self-service is complex, necessitating the presence of programming specialists who understand the many contexts and can adapt quickly to new tools and technical innovations that are rapidly developing.

A discussion is brewing among businesses about the internalization of programmatic in their staff via self-service platforms. However, they have the problem of elevating this process to levels of excellence equivalent to those provided by agencies, where profiles with extensive industry expertise converge.

The capacity of top executives to move quickly between programmatic purchasing platforms will grow in the coming years. In our unique context, which is increasingly focused on personalization at all levels of strategy, this can only be possible if the specialist has decision-making authority. As a result, future generations of programming specialists will need to prepare for this paradigm change.

Emerging channels: Audio, DOOH and CTV

As advertising tactics grow, we’ve witnessed a greater integration of numerous channels that cover different phases of the consumer journey, creating sufficient opportunities for successful multi-channel campaigns. Undoubtedly, three channels will stand out in 2024 due to their exponential development and increased investment: audio, digital out-of-home, and connected television.

• Audio, being an intimate and personal medium, stands out as a channel with a devoted audience that is less prone to distractions than visual media.
• Digital Out of Home, which represents the 21st-century development of outdoor advertising, is transforming how we affect, monitor, and reuse audiences produced in outdoor contexts.
• Connected TV, which emerged alongside the demise of traditional TV, offers customers a flexible way to watch audiovisual material with personalization adapted to their requirements.

These three channels are expected to be prominent participants in the programmatic environment in 2024, adding considerably to the success of advertising campaigns by capitalizing on the unique qualities that each provides.

Shifting from KPIs to attention metrics

Advertisers are increasingly seeking indicators to back their branding efforts, such as viewability, among others. In recent years, the hunt for new metrics has grown, resulting in components of reporting based on attention measures that go beyond quantitative and focus on impact quality. In this regard, biometric eye-tracking technologies are being developed to track the user’s gaze when they are affected by an advertisement.

The main issue for the next year will be to standardize this new attention measure, which must be consistent across all locations and contexts to be established as a multi-channel KPI. In addition to the technological intricacy involved, privacy limitations, which include elements such as “how we look”, will be critical to the development of this developing technology. This process indicates the need to balance technological advancements with an ethical approach that protects user privacy in the digital era.

The cookieless world

Undoubtedly, one of the most significant events of 2024 will be Google’s removal of third-party cookies. These cookies, which have been since the inception of programmatic, supplied advertisers with information based on data acquired by firms other than the site the user was viewing.

Despite Google’s many postponements of this removal, 2024 appears to be the year when the programmatic environment will undergo a major shift, giving way to a slew of alternatives targeted at protecting users’ privacy.

Concepts like “Universal IDs,” which create user profiles based on first-party and offline data, and “Cohorts,” which combine users into huge groupings based on similar interests, will work with first- and zero-party data to shape the future of the programmable world for decades to come.

Omni-channel orchestration and measurement platforms

Platforms that allow for the consolidation of efforts and may extend their functionality to the field of reporting play an important role in dealing with the uncertainty that a lack of signals can cause in our daily lives.

With the prospect of drastic changes in the technological structures that have supported the market in recent years, a new chapter is opening for omnichannel campaign management and orchestration solutions, as well as measurement tools capable of providing a comprehensive view of the effectiveness of integrated actions.

In this setting, it is critical to create new tools that provide us with more information about the impacts of marketing efforts, allowing us to make better judgments. This is where Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) comes into play.

Conclusion

We are approaching a new era in which quality measures and adaptability to new technologies are essential. In the face of these problems, omnichannel solutions and sophisticated approaches, such as Marketing Mix Modelling, are critical tools for understanding and optimizing the effectiveness of marketing initiatives. Exploring developments in programmatic advertising, transparency difficulties, the growth of advertising channels, and substantial changes in cookie usage all indicate a dynamic and complex picture for marketers.