IAB Tech Lab’s CEO Anthony Katsur is poised to kick off proceedings with a keynote heralding “the end of the beginning,” a line that harkens to a Churchillian oration that makes for an interesting reference as many label that 1942 speech as a turning point in World War II.

Speaking with Digiday ahead of the two-day event, he discussed some of the industry consortium’s successes and shortcomings of the past decade, plus efforts to grasp the thorny nettle of complying with data privacy regulations. 

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Be it fraud, ID spoofing or shady sites, these tools usually end up shouldering the blame.

So it was no surprise when recent ad tech snafus dragged these companies into the spotlight.

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Chalk it up to a few reasons: Ad budgets are spread thin across channels these days. That means clients aren’t keen on dishing out enough cash for all the ad tech tools, staff time and commissions needed for programmatic buying. 

Plus, they’re already facing challenges with generative AI, burnout from Google’s hurry up and wait (again) cookie deprecation, measurement, inventory and the list goes on.

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At least, that’s the hope for a group of marketers who’ve been hit by one ad tech disaster after another lately.

First, they cringed at Forbes selling ads on a shady site built to game ad spending. Then, they were floored by Colossus misrepresenting traded IDs.

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In this edition of the Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine the challenges marketers are facing within the programmatic ad market, what publishers are saying about diversifying revenue streams and how YouTube refined its pitch ahead of last week’s upfront event, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.

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According to ad transparency startup Adalytics, there were repeated instances of user IDs being misrepresented in its programmatic marketplace. Moreover, the altered ID information consistently mimicked cookie IDs that had attracted high bids from The Trade Desk, the DSP utilized by Adalytics in their analysis.

The implication being that this pattern of behavior looks a lot like fraud. 

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There are the inventory quality issues raised by the recent controversies surrounding made-for-advertising sites, Forbes and Colossus. There’s the brewing measurement mess as third-party cookies eventually go away. And of course, there’s AI, which actually may be among programmatic marketers’ greatest potential allies in dealing with some of the other challenges — though AI poses its own predicaments.

At the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit last week in Palm Springs, California, agency executives participated in closed-door town hall discussions, in which they were granted anonymity for their candor. And they were quite candid about the challenges they are having to confront. Here’s a sample of what was said.

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This has meant updating KPIs and client expectations when it comes to measuring campaign effectiveness, which is exactly why independent boutique agency Exverus Media is reshaping what KPIs look like in streaming, audio and experiential channels that aren’t necessarily direct response channels.

“Where the industry is going, what we’re seeing from all of our marketing clients is that they’re being held to increasingly revenue-focused metrics,” Talia Arnold, managing director at Exverus, said on stage at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in Palm Springs, California, on Wednesday. “How do we set up a measurement plan and KPIs that we can take action against and that go back to proving out a business outcome?”

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This helps to explain why Digitas North America is planning to take a stricter approach to how it sources inventory.

“I’m setting a rule this year that we’re coming off of the open exchange. We’re going to start buying on auction package only. … So basically setting up [private marketplace] deals with suppliers,” Leah Askew, svp and head of precision media at Digitas North America, said on stage at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in Palm Springs, California, on Wednesday.

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In this edition of the Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine how advertisers are approaching spend in the upfront market, what metrics marketers use to gauge ad campaign success on streaming platforms, and how brands, retailers and agencies are investing in programmatic ads, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.

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Shocked by the allegations, several of them are now scrutinizing their ad buys with the ad tech vendor to check if they’ve been misled.

Their concerns stem from a report by ad transparency startup Adalytics, which discovered that Colossus was mislabeling IDs, leading to unintended ad purchases. The repercussions of these erroneous purchases are significant, ranging from targeting the wrong audiences to bombarding them with repeated ads and potentially disrupting conversion tracking models.

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Programmatic marketers are settling in at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, taking place over the next three days in Palm Springs, California.

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Amidst the earnings reports, the prolonged fate of the third-party cookie remained a significant question mark. Every attentive analyst was concerned about the potential impact on each company’s ability to sustain its respective business models.

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The revenue numbers disclosed indicated that some are faring better than others in the industry’s current existential crisis, but overall, all were net-positive. What they did verify is that The Trade Desk continues to be the leader of this sub-sector. Execs there continue to trumpet its UID2 as a vehicle for its path ahead — or “Wall Street narrative” — away from championing the “open web” toward one where “CTV” and “retail media” are used to woo investors.

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A core part of their plan is first-party IDs, which are unique to the digital platforms where they’re set. Essentially, these are IDs issued by a publisher aiming to monetize their audience. They provide a means to run targeted advertising campaigns without third-party cookies, and unlike other alternatives, these IDs are set by the publishers themselves, minimizing the risk of data leakage — an outcome that’s undoubtedly advantageous for people’s privacy and, consequently, less likely to attract regulator scrutiny.

However, there are some clear disadvantages to these IDs as well. With each publisher issuing them, all must be linked with advertisers’ own IDs, making the environment incredibly complex and therefore more difficult to match all those IDs.

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The demand-side platform’s demise was significant on several fronts, with some considering it a line in the sand that demarcated critical changes in the sector that occurred in recent years.  

Firstly, MediaMath’s widely held status as the first DSP in digital media—at one point, it was also valued at $1 billion—indicates that success in the sector is not solely dependent on innovative technology. Canny politicking in go-to-market strategy also plays a role.

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