The old saying “may you live in interesting times” has never felt more true.
Signal deprecation remains in play, privacy considerations are part of every conversation, consumers are increasingly sensitive to brand values and everything has become politicized.
This new reality means that where and how brands choose to advertise is perceived as a reflection of the brand itself. We’ve entered the era of responsible advertising.
Amid these tumultuous times, brands and their agencies are rushing to build more responsible strategies for 2025 while maintaining performance. Making matters more challenging is the uncertainty around addressability. Changes are coming to cookie support that are forcing media buyers to rethink their data signal and media choices. Throw in what looks like constant global crises, coupled with industry sentiment shifting back toward supporting quality journalism, and there are a lot of decisions to be made.
While the world outside feels unpredictable, advertisers have an opportunity to remake the programmatic landscape. By seizing their responsibilities – to publishers, to consumers, to democracy itself – they can usher in a new era. Advertisers can get there by practicing a few clear, easy, nonpolitical practices.
Buy quality journalism
Supporting only high-quality news is the best place to begin. It boggles the mind that it needs to be said.
Decades ago, no brand would buy advertising in the mimeographed manifestos that conspiracy theorists printed up in their basements. Yet today, the “audience over all else” approach to programmatic means advertisers are indeed spending their budget on outlets of similar caliber to the basement-dwelling kooks.
Buying quality journalism is paramount to advertisers’ reputations, as well as the continuation of balanced, well-done reporting in this country.
Advertisers need to actually spend the money, rather than making promises and continuing the status quo. Brands and agencies need to rework legacy blocking tactics so they are not unnecessarily blocking out high-quality and suitable ad placements.
Focus on signals, not “cookieless”
Google may have changed its mind on cookie deprecation, but that doesn’t mean advertisers should abandon all of the innovation that resulted from the expected changes.
We already live in a world where a huge percentage of inventory is not tied to legacy cookie signals. Forward-leaning advertisers are already putting together smart strategies that build in as many ad environment signals as possible to enrich their targeting and reporting needs.
Doing so requires an update in strategy away from narrow, behavior-based targeting.
Believe it or not, some ad environment strategies still miss important components of ad effectiveness. These factors include the technical components of a page, the genre or “type” of CTV content, time of delivery and the combination of location and sentiment.
These are all persistent signals that will help with relevance and performance, but they are often overlooked when advertisers focus solely on audience behavioral attributes.
Abandon reporting silos
The sky-is-falling feeling that came with cookie deprecation forced advertisers to dig into which signals would actually matter in the future. This urgency gave rise to targeting and reporting strategies that factored in metrics like viewability and attention. Unfortunately, many brands and agencies siloed these measurements, doing themselves a disservice.
Viewability without attention is incomplete. Attention without context and consideration of creative is even less complete. Carbon emissions measurement without understanding ad clutter and content-to-ad ratios is also incomplete. These metrics may be available across all ad impressions, but they need to be measured holistically to provide the best perspective on the ad impression itself.
Deploy thoughtful creative strategies
Creative is the part of ads that consumers actually remember. Yet so much of our industry chatter is about data, targeting, deployment and measurement.
An advertiser can do everything right, using the latest tools and media buying strategies while adhering to the strictest privacy protocols to reach an in-market consumer. Ultimately, none of that matters if the creative is lackluster or, even worse, inappropriate for the setting.
In the responsible era, creative works best when it reflects consumers’ vision and aspirations back to them. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. This could mean ad messages that are built around inclusivity and/or considerate of harder news environments. It could also be about creativity that reflects a desire to make a better world, practice sustainability or be tied close to causes.
What matters is that brands show they are not focused solely on pushing a product, but on matching their consumer in a mission to create a better world.
Embracing responsible advertising isn’t necessarily hard. What’s most important is that brands and agencies have the discipline to consistently practice all of these steps at once.
Cheap reach will always have an allure. But it will never pay off in the same way as when a consumer can see a brand’s values deployed in the media touch points they see every day.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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