2024 Outlook: How to avoid wastage in a year with even more advertising opportunities

What were the most significant changes to the media industry in 2023?

Paul Barnard: Outside of Twitter’s renaming and ownership, it is definitely the explosion of the consumer and commercial offerings around digitally delivered TV.

Martin Giraud: Amazon’s push on Freevee (Amazon’s AVOD offering) in 2023 is one of the more prominent and portentous changes in the streaming landscape. At the same time, other major platforms are also launching or announcing ad-supported offerings, including Disney+ and Netflix. These new offerings have created much interest from advertisers who want to learn about the potential benefits these new content and audience destinations can bring to their marketing investments.

Martyn Bentley: Not only are there new audience and content opportunities entering the ecosystem, but there is also an interesting evolution in the type of data that has become applicable in these TV-like environments. Either the platforms have unique first-party data that can be used for targeting strategies, or content providers are enabling advertisers to bring their own data through the growth of clean rooms. Advertisers are excited about the potential this brings, and we have seen significant advances in this capability from the ‘traditional’ broadcasters within their BVOD environments.

Paul Barnard: Another significant change is the continuous deprecation of identifiers, including the third-party cookie, which, in our opinion, has benefitted both consumer privacy and industry innovation, giving rise to many new targeting and measurement capabilities. Consequently, we see a trend – which will continue into 2024 – of marketers choosing their measurement ‘weapons’ to build hybrid measurement models that enable them to make sense of this changing and fragmented landscape.

Martyn Bentley: From recent measurement work with marketers, we have experienced the concept of ‘layering’, utilising multiple technology-driven measurements – from reach to attention to attribution – it can be challenging for advertisers to decide what to measure when and with whom. The concept of ‘layering’ seems to work best when paired with a clear hypothesis of what the measurement data should help with. Some of our customers use cross-media reach measurement as a ‘foundation layer’ and then utilise an attention measurement vendor to further calibrate the value of different reach types. The next layer may then depend on whether the campaign is brand or performance-orientated, where a sales lift study can be added to the mix for a more performance-oriented one.

Markiyan Caseley: The ever-evolving industry and proliferation of new advertising channels are exciting but will require more agility. Marketing strategies should not be rigid, and as more channels emerge, it’s going to be more important than ever to be flexible and open-minded when running campaigns. Additionally, marketers will need to understand the true value of these emerging channels in terms of incremental reach and frequency on top of existing channels like YouTube, Meta and linear TV to maximise their investments.

What are your expectations for 2024?

Paul Barnard: Besides continuous changes, mostly involving the deprecation of identifiers and the growth in offerings in the streaming landscape, we expect to see shifting marketing budgets – from open web, social media and linear TV into new CTV platforms. Advertisers will need reliable data to make an optimal budget allocation across channels. This is why understanding how each channel compares and complements one another will be more critical than ever. Advertisers need insights to answer fundamental questions about their campaigns and media mix:

• How many people am I reaching within my target audience?
• How frequently do I reach them?
• Which channels are most efficient at reaching my target audience?

Martyn Bentley: Without traditional identifiers, this will be the fundamental bedrock to which one can layer complementing metrics while testing and learning to understand the impact of each channel and the channels’ collective impact on the marketing mix. 2024 may begin by inheriting some ‘rollover’ industry challenges from 2023 around identity, a plethora of media choices, concerns about AI and so on, but overall, it will be a fascinating year and hopefully one of growth with two major elections, slowing inflation, a Europe-wide football competition, and even more major AVOD launches (e.g. Amazon Prime) on the horizon.

Martin Giraud: We look forward to seeing how all these new channels will affect the marketplace regarding ad spend distribution. Marketers will have many more choices, so it will be interesting to see which channels come on top:

• Which channels will be most effective at driving reach?
• Which channels will contribute most to incremental reach on top of linear TV?
• Which channels will be most accurate at reaching specific target audiences?

Markiyan Caseley: We are in a really exciting time where advertisers have more and more options when planning their activities. This fragmentation, combined with pressure to prove the effectiveness of campaigns, often with less budget, means that a cross-media measurement solution is a must. I have experienced how leading brands benefit from our data, and I am very excited to help even more advertisers bring clarity as they look to make their brand campaigns more effective in 2024.

Martyn Bentley: In summary, I believe measurement will continue to help marketers tackle these challenges and likely remain centre stage at industry events for another year. As the ‘layers’ of measurement continue to evolve, so should the insight and business value that is their promise.

Get started

Are you interested in starting your measurement journey? Please fill out the form below, and we will help you get started.

Wishing everyone a peaceful and prosperous 2024.