AdExchanger.com Predictions for 2011: Data

AdExchanger.com 2011 Predictions: Data AdExchanger.com reached out to executives in the data tech space for their predictions about the digital advertising ecosystem in 2011.

Click a name below to begin, or scroll:

Sam Barnett, CEO, Struq

2011: Display growth rate to double and at least a third of all display advertising will be personalised.
Measurable performance where display can act as a cost of sale and new technologies that enable display to be a real-time communications channel – which is more effective than Search and as immediate as social media – will lead to new marketing dollars flowing into this channel at an unprecedented rate.

Dan Beltramo, CEO, Vizu

Online video will begin to achieve strategic parity with TV advertising in terms of media planning in 2011. Online video will also become a serious testing ground for TV creative and will eventually drive creative development for broadcast TV to the point where TV commercials routinely become re-purposed online video assets rather than the other way around.

Paul Cook, CEO, TagMan

Companies will be forced to allow consumers to opt-out out at a ‘tag level’ in response to to new EU privacy legislation and others.
Wider uptake of attribution reporting/understanding sees dollars move away from brand paid search terms towards organic search display retargeting/extension.
Someone needs to ‘manage’ all these predictions on Adexchanger as the industry evolves: Agnostic, boutique agencies will win back direct-to-vendor dollars and handle more supplier review processes/paperwork/analysis etc.
Terry Kawaja will release a Monopoly Board which pivots into a DSP

Sam Cox, CEO, Milabra

Data and targeting combinations will be key for 2011, as campaigns will layer more data for implementation and analysis pushing the capabilities of both the supply and demand side. This will lead to three things 1) new premium advertising opportunities that will be bought in a non-guaranteed marketplace; 2) bring on ops and analysis infrastructure as companies try and tie more data together from point multiple point solutions on an adhoc basis. 3) Corporate consolidation as bigger companies need to incorporate technology solutions across their media.

John Donahue, CTO, BuzzLogic

Procurement at the brands begin paying attention to how agencies are making money on the trading desks and the squeeze begins.
The mass consolidation of ad networks begins in order to shore up and protect the assets that they have built and invested in.
A major agency loses an entire piece of digital buying business to the non-agency trading desk solutions (DSPs).

Andy Ellenthal, CEO, Peer39

In 2010 exchange markets were dominated by direct response and performance-based campaigns. There’s one more big hurdle to get the large brand spenders into the exchanges. 2011 will be the year we get better at identifying high quality inventory and start to see bigger brand budgets and an influx of new advertisers. There’s just too much efficiency for them to ignore.

Konrad Feldman, CEO, Quantcast

Truly scalable, audience-based, media strategies require algorithmic sophistication far in excess of today’s status quo and 2011 will test the computational mettle of those seeking to combine media, data and advanced bidding strategies to deliver performance at scale. As RTB utilization gathers steam, many market participants will discover that their dominant strategy – retargeting – only scales so far, and beyond that limit performance drops off quickly.
RTB won’t get all the audience attention. Leading publishers and media sellers will find increasing advantage in the application of audience data to create compelling impression level media packages, accessing new revenue streams, offering superior performance for their advertisers and creating greater relevance for their consumers.

Russell Glass, CEO, Bizo

Privacy issues get resolved by industry and codified by government
Online data management will be the next frontier where large advertisers and publishers will be managing their first party data, and augmenting at scale with third party data
Direct response spend continues to rapidly move to RTB, forcing consolidation to begin in earnest in ad network space.
Brand spend stays largely in premium publishers direct and within ad networks, and continues to grow substantially online as offline spend shifts to online to chase media consumption.
First easy attribution measurement solutions begin to roll out to broadly prove value of display as part of marketing mix.

Florian Kahlert, SVP, KN Dimestore

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My prediction is that the need to move more Brand dollars online will drive the next changes across the industry.
Ad Networks will be forced to further redefine/refine their value propositions if they want to stay relevant in a world that is less driven by clicks/conversions
Mobile is still a training ground and will get another revenue boost as the brands try out different approaches (but it will take at least until 2012 before solid models emerge)
Technology will emerge/adapt to cater to the brand’s needs and deliver successful campaigns that have metrics other than clicks and conversions.

Scott Meyer, CEO, Better Advertising

Meaningful Transparency Technology Displaces Conversations about Privacy – By the end of 2011, every creative unit in every behavioral campaign served online will bear the Advertising Option Icon. Consumers and advocates no longer will be able to claim that our industry is hiding anything about data collection, and anyone who thinks self-regulation can’t possible work for our industry will find their views relegated to the same trash bin of history as the views of haters back in the early 1970s, when the Better Business Bureau introduced self-regulation for the advertising industry as a whole after numerous complaints Agency buying platforms and large ad budgets in mobile will both become far more prevalent than in 2010. But, 2011 will go down as the year that our industry learned to self-regulate effectively.

Oren Netzer, CEO, DoubleVerify

There will be widespread adoption of the DAA’s Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising, which provides consumers with a notification icon for behaviorally targeted ads and a clear choice to opt-out. This proactive initiative to protect consumer privacy will satisfy the FTC’s suggestions for doing so and will prevent a ‘do not track’ list from being implemented.
The majority of online inventory (display, rich media and video included) will go through some sort of verification and all players will be held accountable in some way. Increased accountability will lead to increased trust, which will lead to more brand dollars online for everyone.

Ari Paparo, EVP, Nielsen

2011 will be the year that brand advertisers go “all-in” to web and mobile display advertising, driven by engaging new formats and audience-based reporting.

Paul Pellman, CEO, Click Forensics

Online display advertising will continue to look a lot more like search advertising through the aggressive use of data and the rapid adoption of RTB. In other news, the sun will rise in the east almost every day.
Brand safety will fade as a concern for advertisers when the supply-side publishers and ad nets embrace the need for greater transparency and accountability. Brand safety vendors will find new business models to pursue.
The adoption of RTB and the use of ad exchanges will finally bring about the consolidation in the ad network world that has been predicted every year for the past 5 years. (Please save this prediction to re-use next year. And the year after.)
The industry will finally put to bed the use of CTRs and last-view/last-click conversion as measures of online display advertising effectiveness.

Chris Scoggins, SVP and GM, DataLogix

Two primary drivers of an accelerated Brand $ shift to Digital: 1) Quality online video inventory has reached sufficient scale and 2) new analytical offerings in the market allow for brands to measure the offline impact of digital advertising (~85% of consumer spending still occurs offline) across multiple verticals.
Advertisers and Agencies begin to “de-silo” their marketing efforts: It’s becoming less and less relevant to label a marketer as “digital” vs. “traditional”. These worlds are colliding at blinding speed and for “always-connected” consumers the distinction is meaningless. The marketers that focus on the interplay of these environments will be the ones that win.
Rise of the Data Management Platform: Advertisers, Agencies and Publishers are struggling with how to synthesize and rationalize all of their data sources and data sets. DMPs will play a valuable role this process, thus driving further data adoption by the ecosystem.

Josh Shatkin-Margolis, CEO, Magnetic

2011 will be the perfect storm against search engine marketing and in favor of display advertising:

There will be an almost doubling of targeted display buys enabled by data exchanges, ad exchanges and demand-side platforms.
Search engine marketing spend will be flat and display spend will grow as offline dollars that move online predominately move to display.
Attribution model becomes major focus as people realize search has been given too much credit and display has been given too little.

Omar Tawakol, CEO, BlueKai

Data is king and in 2010, we saw an increased adoption and acquisition of valuable third party data for true audience targeting anywhere on the Internet. In 2011, continued success from data-centric targeting will urge marketers to become more sophisticated about how they target AND just as importantly, how they can bring their own first party data to the table. This is the year that marketers take control of their own data by seeking tools and technologies to better understand their ideal prospect and to achieve more efficient audience targeting. In figuring out their data strategy, marketers will also become more cognizant of consumer data sensitivities. Early adopters will start to experiment with innovative ways to deliver on the promise of consumer transparency including 1) in-ad disclosures, 2) non-legalese verbiage on websites that clearly explains data collection and usage in plain English and 3) more advanced consumer tools and registries that shows exactly what data is being collected.

Kirby Winfield, CRO, AdXpose

2011 is the year buyers will stop paying for unseen ads. Blind ad networks will become transparent. Ad servers will buy or partner with analytics companies to augment their offerings. And display impressions will get the SEM treatment of algorithmic bidding based user engagement as a proxy action for downstream conversion at a defined rate, driving efficient media valuation and increased spend.

Meir Zohar, CEO, eXelate

Publishers and 3rd party data sellers will become more sophisticated in their data handling capabilities and will look to do more direct, transparent selling of their data as opposed to letting data exchanges do all the selling for them.
Data “theft” will decline as tools (like the one we’re releasing very
soon) begin to shed light on “non kosher” practices, which will single out a few “bad players” among the ad networks and forcing a more direct approach to acquiring data (i.e. paying for it!).
Enriched data will become the “must have” advertising accessory, as online data leaders build real analytics abilities resulting in proprietary, branded data sets mimicking the process of the offline data world.

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