Let’s see what this week’s numbers say about online advertising, shall we?
- Attribution is a growing challenge for marketers, and it looks like they might be turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to help. In fact, the most rapidly-growing desired feature of a marketing attribution platform is AI for forecasting, per research from Ascend2 and its research partners. While it’s still on the lower tier of features considered most critical for an attribution platform, 29% of respondents this year cited the use of AI for forecasting as being crucial, marking a significant rise from 13% last year and 12% the year prior. Separately, close to 2 in 3 respondents report using AI for marketing attribution. The most common way in which they’re doing so is to predict customer behavior and journey paths (29%). Beyond AI’s use in predicting customer behavior, respondents are also putting this technology to work to analyze large datasets to improve attribution accuracy (27%), identify high-value customer touchpoints (26%) and for real-time attribution reporting (24%). Among those using AI for marketing attribution, some 38% strongly agree that it has significantly improved the accuracy and effectiveness of their attribution efforts, and an additional 48% somewhat agree that that’s the case.
- Top marketers are more likely than laggards to have a marketing structure that is optimized to integrate brand and demand (87% vs. 61%) and to have the partnerships they need for both brand building and demand generation (79% vs. 64%), according to research from Prophet. While studies suggest performance marketing has been getting the upper hand on brand-building, this latest report calls for a stronger relationship between the two, noting that 90% of winning organizations either fully or somewhat integrate brand and demand. Indeed, winning marketers are more than 3 times more likely than lagging marketers to have fully integrated brand and demand functions (39% and 12%, respectively). Notably, relationships aren’t necessarily about budgets: spending patterns between high-performing organizations and lagging ones emerged as being surprisingly similar, with both groups allocating roughly one-third of their marketing budgets to each of brand building, demand generation, and integrated activities.
- The number of video services used by consumers once seemed to be on an inexorable rise. But that may now be over: TiVo’s latest video trends report finds a substantial year-over-year decline in the average number of video sources used by viewers. This latest edition of the report indicates that consumers use an average of 9.1 video sources, down considerably from 10.9 in the year-earlier period of Q2 2023, and from 9.9 in Q2 2022. What’s interesting to see is that while the average number of paid services has dropped (5.7, down from 6.9 last year and 6.7 the year earlier), the average number of non-paid services has also fallen off, from 4.0 last year to 3.4 this year. That’s significant because FASTs had been propping up the market as SVOD penetration declined. This seems to be a trend rather than an isolated blip. Additionally, this latest research indicates that perceptions of quality have taken a dive, which makes it unlikely the trend will reverse anytime soon. Indeed, among respondents who watch various services, the shares rating the service as moderate to very good quality have sunk for ad-supported SVOD (60.8%, down from 74.2% in Q2 2023) and free AVOD/FAST (53.1%, down from 60.4%), among others.
- Google’s long-ballyhooed cookie deprecation eventually didn’t arrive. Well, not quite, as Google essentially punted the decision to consumers, who are likely to opt out anyhow. With many brands still not feeling ready for a cookie-less world, a report from Lotame has found that a substantial portion (32%) of marketers surveyed just before Google’s announcement were planning to be fully reliant on third-party cookies as long as they were available. Agencies surveyed were less likely to keep fully relying on third-party cookies, with only 1 in 5 (21% share) saying this was the case. At the time of the survey, only 3% of marketers and 2% of agencies reported having fully phased out cookies, while close to two-thirds (65%) and more than half (54%), respectively, remained highly dependent, being either 100% reliant or having reduced their reliance to 75%. This was despite 2 in 5 believing that third-party cookies would be fully deprecated. Indeed, 7 in 10 respondents considered it either extremely (30%) or very (40%) urgent for their business to collect and use first-party data to preserve their advertising model in a cookie-less future.
