As the digital advertising industry enters a new phase of maturity, so does its relationship with data. Going into 2026, marketers’ long-standing obsession with scale is giving way to something more grounded: a push for smarter, actionable, owned data.
According to Emarketer, global ad spending surpassed $1 trillion for the first time ever last year, growing at a rate of 9.5%. That growth is expected to continue in 2025, with digital platforms capturing 72.9% of total ad revenues this year, rising to 76.8% by 2029.
The expected shift away from third-party cookies might have slid from 2024 into 2025. But the shift is reshaping the marketing and advertising industry in ways that matter today. The need for organizations to prioritize addressability has never been greater. Yet many marketers are still struggling with precisely how to rework their data strategies to be sustainable for the long haul.
For the past two decades, B2B marketers have been inundated with messaging telling them they need to “take a page from the B2C playbook.” There’s truth in this advice – but there are faulty assumptions at play, too.
The B2B marketing space has never been as dynamic and powerful as it is today. Much of that power comes from the evolution of the data and tools available to drive precision targeting and messaging at scale. At the center of these evolving capabilities sits audience data, an essential component of today’s successful B2B campaigns.
Having time to prepare for major changes is generally regarded as a good thing, both in life and the digital advertising industry. But when it comes to preparations for a privacy-first, post-cookie world, there’s been far too much talk about preparation and far too little action. This is hurting advertisers’ results today, not just in some theoretical future.
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Inside Track How can I track you? Let me count the … hundreds of thousands of ways. The Markup analyzed a spreadsheet linked to a public page on Microsoft-owned Xandr’s website, and it was quite the trove of audience data. The spreadsheet contains […]
When it comes to targeting, the ad industry is in the process of effectively turning back the clock 20 years.
And that’s not a bad thing.
The simple fact is that the ad industry, on its first run-up to personalized marketing, made a number of missteps. The time has come for a course correction. And while the transition may be rocky at times, we now have the opportunity – and means – of laying a sustainable, data-driven foundation for the future.
By Kristina Prokop, CEO and Co-founder, Eyeota Now that Google has scrapped its plans for Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) in favor of its proposed Topics API, the buzz around “cohorts” is fading. But cohorts remain a powerful path forward for advertisers in a cookieless world. That’s because the strength of cohorts extends well beyond […]
By Rob Armstrong, SVP of Product at Eyeota If you’re a publisher operating in today’s digital ecosystem, you’re probably pretty sick of hearing that you need to get better at capturing permission-based audience data. The future, everyone tells you, belongs to the publishers with the strongest first-party data strategies. While that’s true, it’s not helpful […]
By Aaron Jackson, Chief Growth Officer at Eyeota This article is sponsored by Eyeota. The United States stands alone when it comes to its insistence on a predominantly deterministic approach to data-driven marketing. Because of that, the ongoing shifts in the privacy landscape – from Apple’s IDFA deprecation to Google’s third-party cookie shutdown and beyond […]
This article is sponsored by Eyeota. There’s little doubt that “cohorts” will be topping the list of 2021 marketing buzzwords, and that’s largely because of the ongoing developments around Google’s plans to phase out third-party cookies on Chrome next year. As Google has rolled out new details for its interest-based advertising opportunities, all eyes have […]
Eyeota co-founder Kristina Prokop is returning to lead the data company as CEO. She replaces Kevin Tan, who led the company as CEO for the company’s first decade. He stepped down for an undisclosed reason, but will remain on the board. “There are different talents and types of leadership needed at different stages of the […]
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Pieter de Zwart, chief technology officer at Eyeota. The ad tech industry today is effectively chasing quarters into oncoming traffic. We are taking user concerns like privacy entirely too lightly, or […]
“AdExchanger Politics” is a weekly column tracking developments in the 2016 political campaign cycle. Today’s column is written by Kevin Tan, CEO at Eyeota. With elections season heating up in the US and Australia, political candidates have their eye on the prize. But opinion polls are confusing and occasionally inaccurate – something that we can […]
