By Thomas Houge, Chief Commercial Officer at SeenThis
As a Norwegian who grew up in the US and now goes back and forth between the two countries, it is fascinating to see differences in US vs. European advertising. European advertisers contend with small populations that speak different languages, the GDPR, greenwashing laws and a generally slower to emerge CTV landscape. The US on the other hand is a huge wide-open landscape, with opportunities to reach highly scaled audiences, use data targeting, create innovative tech, and generally go further faster.
When there are huge audiences and a nearly unending amount of content on the media plan like in the US, the market has focused on scale at low prices. Issues like MFA and bots snuck in to take advantage.
US media buyers also have an interesting conundrum of too much choice. They can’t possibly test every new type of tech that comes in front of them, and so game-changing innovations can be hard to pick out from the noise when the name of the game is more impressions for lower prices, rather than delivering value.
The good news is that digital advertising in the US reached an important turning point this year. The ANA served a major wake-up call at the beginning of the year with their supply chain report that showed nearly a quarter of programmatic media spend is wasted. Jounce and Adalytics called out sources of MFA in an effort to highlight areas of the industry that needed to be cleaned up.
The results have been significant, and nearly every part of the industry in the US has played a part. Holding companies have now spent a year cracking down on low quality content and fake audiences. Major tech companies like Kargo are MFA free, and The Trade Desk pledged their alignment with quality content as a result. And publishers like DotDash Meredith and Hearst are opening up their own targeting opportunities built on good content and good audiences.
This sea change not only creates more sound media plans, where ads are shown alongside good content to real audiences, it creates more sound advertising strategies overall. Why spend time and money on a custom creative unless it is going to be shown to a quality audience on a great site? Now that those factors are the priority, there is more room to think about what new and unique creatives could deliver higher value.
Brands can consider not only who they are reaching, but how they are reaching them. It’s not worth personalizing a message to a bot, but when the majority of your audiences are real, suddenly the value of personalization becomes much greater. Similarly, testing AI-driven contextual advertising on CTV is worth the time when the context is highly compelling and real people are deeply engaged with it.
This move towards quality has additional ripple effects. I have spoken with many advertisers who are shifting towards “real” metrics over proxy metrics. Rather than looking at share of voice, clicks and impressions, they are focused on tying their advertising to sales and looking at where the highest value audiences are online. This makes it easier for media buyers to decide what technology to test – based on how they can improve the user experience and ultimately drive sales. Serving ads through streaming technology delivers richer, more beautiful experiences that drive better outcomes. Using AI to reach unique audiences helps advertisers move away from generic profiles to capture truly valuable new customers.
Another example of this shift is the focus on attention over viewability. Viewability was created when ad fraud was rampant. Now that advertisers are past that issue, they would prefer to focus on a metric that shows them how much a viewer engaged with an ad. When people like an ad, and that ad is relevant, it is a win-win experience.
The more we shift our focus, the more we will also embrace new technologies and innovations that push towards these deeper goals and metrics. Let’s hope that this positive change in the US becomes the driving force for the next era in advertising.
