For some people September is the first month of autumn, for others, it is the time when students return to their studies, but for marketers and everyone involved in the world of the digital economy it is a time of the great event.
Liz Tokareva (director of in-house products), Nikita Plastomak (senior business development manager), Oleg Tymchyshyn (head of BizDev, SmartyAds White Label Solutions) + 5 more SmartyAds professionals (on the pictures below) visited the conference as a team and brought plenty of interesting insights and impressions to share.
This year, for the first time since the start of the global Covid-19 pandemic, one of Europe's largest trade shows, DMEXCO 2022, was hosted offline. We finally got to see our partners in person and had the opportunity to exchange experiences and new knowledge. We’ve also presented our breakthrough solutions to the world, including our white-label SSP + AdExchange.
We're not going to talk about the cool breakfasts, parties, and other fun activities the organizers and sponsors have prepared to keep conference guests from exploding with an abundance of information, because someone will surely think we're bragging (we are)” says Oleg Tymchyshyn (head of BizDev).
But still let's look in general terms, what the most important and interesting things we learned at the conference.
From the personal to the general
In recent years, one of the main trends and one of the main benefits of programmatic advertising targeting has been that it is hyper-personalized. However, at the conference, more and more experts expressed the view that this strategy is losing its relevance, and it is much more profitable to target larger groups and engage in branding.
Cookie-free advertising is still an issue, as additional security measures will never be superfluous. In addition, Apple and Google continue to update their privacy policy to make it more secure for the user and focused on increasing anonymity online. So cookie-free targeting (contextual and traffic scoring) has also become an important topic of discussion.
In general, companies are now leaning toward transforming the format of the message and paying attention to where it's displayed rather than targeting a specific person. Evan Hills (Dstillery), Melinda Hahn Williams (Dstillery), and Frank Pusher (Speakersdelight) shared their insights on where we're heading next and why contextual targeting will also see a revival.
The New Life of TV Advertising
Jay Prasad from LiveRamp presented an interesting report on the future of TV advertising. As recent years filled with lockdowns and the constant struggle with the Covid-19 epidemic have changed the lifestyles of most people on Earth, television has been given a new boost. With so many people forced to stay in their homes for weeks and months, CTV services began to gain new users very rapidly.
The niche of CTV advertising is still relatively new and has some problems, mainly connected to analytics and targeting. That was the main topic of the report.
Also, let's not forget about the rapidly growing importance of new video platforms like TikTok, which are also great platforms for advertising and reaching digital natives, compared to the usual channels of digital advertising. This was reported by speakers from BBC News, Integral Ad Science, and The Trade Desk.
The challenges of ad tech
Among the topics of presentations and discussions, the most relevant were, of course, the main problems of digital marketing and ways to solve them.
The main topics of discussion were:
- Viewability. It is still a relevant problem when the ads are nominally shown, but often not actually visible to the user. This significantly reduces the effectiveness of advertising and branding in general.
- Environment. Many partners are concerned about how to provide a high-quality advertising environment for their clients. This means that ads shouldn’t be shown on low-quality sites or next to compromised content. The problem of providing a quality advertising environment is still one of the most important topics of discussion.
- Attention. Today, one of the important (or even the most important) tasks for a brand is to capture the attention of the right user. To do so, marketers resort to a variety of creative solutions — discovering attention-grabbing formats, new channels, and new ways of ad messaging.
Conclusions
After learning so many insights at conferences like DMEXCO there is always only one conclusion: we have a lot of work, but we know how to do it! We marked for ourselves the main vectors of development, talked in person with our partners, and got introduced to the new ones. It was a wonderful stimulus to keep developing and moving forward.
The next stop is Web Summit 2022! We hope that this event will be rewarding and inspiring for us and we invite everyone.
