What does the future hold for B2B? MOI’s Liz Wood attended the recent Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit to find out. Here are her top five programmatic themes for every marketer to be thinking about for 2024 and beyond.
1. Where we’re going, we don’t need cookies
Are you ready to live in a cookie-less world? Considering that only 5% of brands are truly ready, the chances are, you’ve still got a lot of work to do. That means you need to question anyone who says they have a solution, ask the right questions, and develop a strong POV within your organization on how best you need to prepare. While your agency partners can and should provide guidance, brands need to lead the way as it’s their first-party data that’ll be all-important.
2. Privacy, compliance, safety, visibility
As we head into 2024, we all need to think about and act more carefully on the data you’re collecting. There needs to be a reason why you’re collecting the data you are asking for (make the reasons clear to your audience) and you need to be very aware of how you and your organization are handling such data. Integrity, governance, and interoperability are the keys.
On the ads side of the house, you’ll need a proper fraud strategy and brand safety partner to keep your ads away from places that could damage your reputation and waste ad dollars.
3. Context is everything
Out with cookies, in with contextual advertising (again). That’s right, contextual is about to make a big comeback. So, you need to start testing and embracing the idea of your ad messaging aligning with the content it appears next to. Only this time around, you’ll have more advanced, AI-powered capabilities to give you a helping hand.
4. The rise and rise of audio and video streaming
While it’s not a great strategy for direct response, audio and video are great for making a big brand impact on audiences—and you can also leverage influenced conversions and implement cross-device retargeting to show correlation and influence on lower funnel activity.
5. New formats for overcoming ad blindness
Ad blindness is real, but the industry is coming out with new formats that are enhanced by—no surprise—AI capabilities. We’ve got things like dynamic format optimization, which enables you to give audiences ads in the most engaging format, at scale. And then there’s new ad formats like the “charticle,” which delivers content in a more visual and easily accessible format.
But no matter what the format is, the death of cookies means that content strategy is more important than ever.
