To wrap up 2023, Mediaweek is looking at the biggest trends, events, platforms, and brands of the year. Welcome to Mediaweek’s A to Z of 2023 … and beyond.
By Kate Steven, Director of Customer Success ANZ at LiveRamp
As 2023 draws to a close, it’s important to look back on the year that has been. It has been yet another year filled with new innovations and challenging market conditions. One lesson I’ve learned is the power of data collaboration, and how it can be used to elevate CTV strategies for advertisers.
2023 in a nutshell
Australia’s advertising industry underwent significant transformations in the past year, continuing to reshape the video advertising market. Notably, the landscape witnessed a surge in cord-cutting, with reports suggesting a 7.9% decline in the TV advertising market in 2023, signalling a further departure from traditional TV.
The adoption of Connected TV (CTV) adds a new layer to the data landscape, as does the rapid ascension of ad-supported streaming services, like Netflix’s ad tier, as well as competitive offerings from other streamers. This trend is twofold – while these new services and tiers give marketers new, highly-targeted means to reach their consumers, they also lead to a fragmentation – not just of platforms, but within each platform, also of viewing habits, across set-top, app, mobile, and more.
What we can expect from 2024
In 2024, we will see this fragmentation sustain, and perhaps even accelerate: in order to find your audience via not just CTV, but TV as well, you need to understand their content preferences – that is, what streamers and channels they use – but also, their viewing habits, in order to create an omnichannel view of the touchpoints you have with consumers, to better target, understand, and measure them and your brand’s interaction with them. For marketers, data collaboration offers the data and deep insights needed to win here, enabling them to better collaborate across their datasets and publishers’ datasets and understand their audiences. At the same time, data collaboration across multiple publishers offers marketers the opportunity to follow their audiences across whatever channels and platforms they may be using. Within data collaboration, and data clean rooms, interoperability will be key, as marketers will need to be able to move nimbly across the ecosystem to prioritise where their audiences are.
In particular, CTV dovetails with the key trend of the rise of first-party data. As publishers and marketers alike prioritise building deep, engaging relationships with consumers that will endure beyond third-party signal loss, and gleaning actionable insights to better personalise each relationship, and specifically, each touchpoint with consumers, CTV offers a valuable, and customisable way for marketers to engage consumers using these deep stores of data. Furthermore, with the rise of premium, authenticated CTV – that is, CTV tied to authenticated, logged-in consumers using their real information – marketers have another means by which to engage real people and action valuable marketing use cases like end-to-end measurement.
Takeaway for advertisers
In the new year, advertisers find themselves at the juncture of a shifting video advertising landscape. On one hand there will be an opportunity to tap into the wealth of data from multiple sources, and on the other hand there will be a challenge to manage this data effectively and efficiently to gain a more accurate and granular view of their consumer.
Success in the coming year hinges on strategic adaptation. By navigating market fragmentation, embracing data collaboration, and leveraging emerging trends, advertisers will be able to set themselves up for success in 2024.
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Top Image: Kate Steven