Digital marketing in 2024—how privacy hurdles and signal loss will drive innovation across the industry

Changes in addressability by big tech are about to kick off a powerful innovation cycle across the entire industry. We’ll look back on 2024 as the new beginning for digital advertising, powered by even more machines with probabilistic and near real-time data-driven decisioning based on foggier signals. Here are five ways the digital advertising industry will shift in 2024: Privacy sandbox = panicked scramble Feel free to insert your own “if only we had known cookies would go away someday” joke here, but ... it’s not funny. The industry has been talking about the deprecation of cookies pretty much since they were invented, but at last, here we are. The change will suck the air right out of the room. Many industry stakeholders still don’t understand Chrome’s proposed cookie alternative, the Privacy Sandbox, as well as they think they do. There’s still a general lack of preparedness. This is why the Tech Lab created the Privacy Sandbox Task Force earlier this year and published our fit gap analysis (PDF). It’s important to remember that this is not just about cookie deprecation. The Privacy Sandbox is more significant than specific features in that it moves an ad marketplace and ad server into the browser, resulting in material functional, operational, commercial, and legal implications for media companies and brands. The digital media industry doesn’t expect a 1:1 cookie replacement, but it requires something more functional and less convoluted than what is currently proposed via the Privacy Sandbox. This radical retooling of the digital media ecosystem will consume tremendous focus across the industry, and buyers and publishers alike will need to reset their expectations. Ad Age Leading Women Luncheon Join us Aug. 7 in New York as we recognize this year’s honorees Buy your ticket today Ongoing signal loss will define 2024 For several years, the IAB Tech Lab has discussed that a portfolio approach to addressability will be needed. Anybody who might have missed the heads-up will get the message loud and clear now, and we’ll see the adoption of plenty of alternative identity solutions from RampID to Neustar to UID2 and others. We’ll also see a heavy blend of probabilistic data, data clean rooms, and solutions such as Seller-Defined Audiences. Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, contextual will have a resurgence across the open web in the form of a signaling component or a singular solution—which is good because there will be a need for that in everyone’s portfolio, too. Privacy begins to develop real-world case law I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that a U.S. regulator—maybe in California, maybe in Connecticut, perhaps both—will find a strong privacy case and pursue it with gusto. They’ll make an example of the company that crossed the line. There has already been a shot across the bow in the recent DoorDash settlement. Instead of looking away, the industry should pay close attention. These will be the cases that will be cited in the future. Streaming will experience a watershed year This one’s not the usual prediction that streaming will continue to grow and thrive—that’s like predicting February will follow January this year. Instead, what will make this a watershed year is that we’ll soon begin to see some real unification and normalization of audience IDs and measurement across streaming environments. I predict we will see the early stages of coalescence in the latter half of the year, but it’s coming. See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Creativity Award winners here Fragmentation has been a significant pain point for a long time, and the efforts by the IAB Tech Lab, the Joint Industry Committee, OpenAP, and other groups will begin to pay off. The biggest and most successful streaming players will keep selling as walled gardens for as long as they can. But if the others can get this right, they will start winning more sales. The normalization won’t be perfect—we’ll still deal with many disparate currencies and datasets—but it will improve. The growing Balkanization of the internet Starting this year, it will be hard to refer to the Internet without clarifying whether you mean Apple’s Internet, Google’s Internet, or everyone else’s Internet (aka the open web). Apple has already been obfuscating IP addresses for privacy. Google Chrome is reintroducing its proposal to do the same. This Balkanization will only increase the challenges of signal loss, making first-party data more valuable than ever—especially since very few companies have first-party data at a meaningful scale. The internet will be divided into haves and have-nots, with a few significant players having deterministic first-party data and the rest leaning on a portfolio of probabilistic solutions. This will put considerable pressure on mid- and long-tail publishers. It will also hamper the ability of local businesses to advertise across the open web, further harming the ability of local news publishers to survive. As it is, in the past 15 years, more than a quarter of American newspapers have gone out of business, and financial firms control half of all daily newspapers. Long story short: 2024 promises to be a very interesting—and consequential—year. Buckle up. Sign up for Ad Age newsletters From influencer marketing to agencies, get the latest news and analysis delivered to your inbox Click here

Digital marketing in 2024—how privacy hurdles and signal loss will drive innovation across the industry

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