The domain of digital marketing is a constantly changing field. This is no surprise. After all, the tech world offers new advancements almost every single day. Gadgets get cheaper. The global reach of the Internet continues to expand. People and companies have more money to spend.
Under such conditions, the industry cannot help growing (according to eMarketer, digital advertising will make 83 billion USD in the US alone this year growing by 15,9%). On the other hand, the industry is concurrently becoming more sophisticated, heterogeneous and competitive.
Against this background, any team has to adapt to a complex business environment to secure its share. At the same time, it is impossible to simultaneously adjust to all the trends in their entirety. Such attempts to seize the 'unseizable' may be successful only for the giants. Thus, most companies have to identify a range of the most important requirements and potential advantages to concentrate on.
Galaksion is no exception in this respect.
This post highlights the most crucial factors that define the future of online advertising, as Galaksion sees them, in conformity with our policy. In other words, we took those factors as our major guidelines while working on the upcoming release intended to propel both our company and the entire industry to the next level. We would be happy to share them right now, before we launch our new product, in order to make our vision and goals more articulated for future customers.
Transparency
Online advertisers, publishers and affiliates are understandably preoccupied with openness, clarity and honesty as preconditions for efficiency. Adequate spending on ads and workable traffic management are their main priorities. However, right now these aims seem to be unreachable for the overwhelming majority of market players.
As of 2017, according to the World Federation of Advertisers, 62% of marketers are reported to be dissatisfied with 'measurement standards in online ads'. At the same time, publishers also suffer from some shortcomings. For example, as the Advertising Transparency & Trust Forum stresses, ad fraud 'is taking billions of dollars away from... responsible publishers" and "hobbling the total marketplace'.
Initially, the issue of transparency was caused by the fact that, at the very start, advertising networks used to act as brokers working between publishers and advertisers. As such, they had the opportunity to function solely at their own discretion revealing a limited amount of information. In fact, most of them continue to function in this very manner.
One may argue in this regard that the market has diversified to some extent. In spite of this fact, as the Association of National Advertisers puts it in its recent report, the 'rapid adoption of programmatic media' has made the entire 'supply chain' extremely complicated. Now it may include 'agencies, trading desks, demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, data management platforms, exchanges, and publishers'. As a result, many players have to face chaos, deal with the mess and cope with uncertainty.
For the time being, the situation looks like a 'black box' in most cases, for all the parties involved. Generally, there is no transparency regarding pricing and implementation of advertising campaigns. That is why we suppose that the best possible solution for this problem nowadays is to give advertisers access to data sheets with deep traffic analysis. As for publishers, they should be granted the capacity to tune their feeds.
Adaptability
This is also a problem. Digital advertising has become incredibly popular due to its presumed flexibility. At the same time, despite the fact that advanced targeting is certainly a major advantage of online advertising, participants' influence on their campaigns still remains limited. If one continues to use the metaphor of a black box, the current situation may be compared with the Mac vs. PC dilemma.
Most advertising networks nowadays resemble the Mac systems, closed and unchangeable. Customers rely on such networks with their campaigns and traffic. Networks, in turn, perform a bit of magic by producing money for publishers and results for advertisers. The problem now, however, is that both parties are willing to participate in this process more proactively, with their own hands, in a comprehensible and convenient manner.
Automated Expertise
In spite of the fact that advertisers, publishers and affiliates want to make their own decisions, the level of complexity has become incredibly high. Correspondingly, it is often problematic for them to take adequate actions since the data one relies on is extremely heterogeneous and disembodied. Thus, the automated generation of detailed, usable and comprehensible statistics is what marketers need most.
The ideal situation, in view of recent developments and our own experience, looks this way. Each advertiser must have a selection of presets and recommendations regarding what should be linked with their offers. In addition, advertisers must be able to automatically see which of their offers are most valuable at any particular moment. More than that, in order to succeed, one should also know which offers – and which types of sources – promise good conversion rates.
We very much hope that our new release will significantly improve our customers' performance in the light of the three requirements already mentioned. That is to say, we are sure that the future of the market will be determined by advertising self-service platforms featuring transparency, adaptability and automated sources of expertise and insights. Our team expects that our upcoming SSP will completely resolve all of your problems within these dimensions.
After all, Galaksion has invested its experience and knowledge in this new in-house developed solution. In later posts Galaksion's team are going to describe all the significant individual features in order to familiarise you with the new opportunities. We are planning to publish a series of detailed guides and useful instructions so that you can maximise your future benefits. So, as usual, stay tuned!