Mark Gorman shares his insights with Manouk Akopyan in the latest A List Daily article "5 Major Shifts Marketers Can Expect in 2018".
When Forrester predicted a year of reckoning for marketers in 2018, it said CMOs needed to pursue adtech trends and data in order to survive.
With new parameters for digital ad transparency put in place, the looming General Data Privacy Regulation, heightened emphasis on programmatic spending and martech and adtech continuing to converge, executives must track both the trends and the rules of their regulatory forces.
Key Insights from Mark:
Mark Gorman, CEO of software company Matrix Solutions, said ads.txt is an important development for publishers and an opportunity to recapture some revenue and profit lost to the likes of Google and Facebook.
“Brands and agencies love buying digital because they believe they are getting direct impressions to the audience they want,” said Gorman. “Numbers give comfort, whether those numbers are really true or reliable. Now brands and agencies are beginning to realize that maybe what they thought they were buying wasn’t so hot.”
With transparency and reliability set to improve, Gorman wondered if the cost of digital ad placement will rise as well.
“One could argue that the current price includes slippage for fraud,” said Gorman. “We know today that buyers pretty much buy Google and Facebook. They do this because ‘big’ means better and safer in their minds. As ads.txt brings more reliability across the field, will that ‘bigger is better’ mentality go away when buyers realize smaller, more targeted publishers may offer more dedicated eyeballs?”
By blending adtech and martech, Gorman said marketers can better see a more streamlined ecosystem that is designed to cohesively work together, as opposed to a mashed-up ecosystem of forced compatibility across systems.
“It can help make more informed, strategic decisions,” he said. “A collection of legacy systems can cause a ton of confusion based on inconsistent data, and it can make transparency into what types of campaigns are moving the needle nearly impossible to measure.