As digital advertising has evolved, marketers are re-evaluating their DSPs
Kelly MacLean, vice president, engineering, product and science, Amazon Ads
Modern marketers are facing a confluence of rapidly shifting currents — some exciting, and some that are perhaps more unclear. Constant upstream changes in the world of digital advertising keep poking holes in marketers’ boats, forcing them to decide whether to get a bucket and start bailing or get a new boat altogether.
Making this decision requires a hard look at the currents driving all this change. Understanding them may lead to a closer look at the ability of their DSP to perform for present and impending needs. This is a time for marketers to look at things a little differently, building for the long term to develop solutions grounded in what they need now and in the future.
Content viewing trends, brand pressure to deliver outcomes and changes with ad identifiers are three currents of change driving many marketers to reconsider their current DSP.
Industry changes make way for new technology to help marketers connect with modern consumers
Over the last 10 years, consumers’ attention has splintered across devices and reduced in time. As this fragmentation continues, the ability to orchestrate full-funnel campaigns effectively across channels and formats has become more important than ever. Understanding how to achieve relevance and impact through technology will be at the forefront of connecting with the modern consumer.
Money and time, as always, are the two most precious commodities. Marketers continue to do more with less as they stretch budgets across this fragmented landscape and are under greater competitive pressure.
Advancements in technology and the abundance of current signals create an opportunity to uncover insights that can drive exponential outcomes.
Using AI to harness this potential is paramount to aid marketers in outperforming the competition, particularly when dealing with ad identifier changes. A recent eMarketer study found that, in the long term, almost 90% of U.S. browsers could become cookieless. Instead of anchoring on the past, when teams embrace the benefits of probabilistic methods paired with deterministic ones, they will have a clearer path to scale and performance. This is raising the importance of quality audience models that advertisers can control.
Smarter tools enable DSPs to do more for marketers, leading to better audience understanding and campaign planning
While the role of a DSP hasn’t changed for marketers, its ability to simplify the complexities of the new landscape to foster innovation while delivering results will determine its success.
Faster, better and smarter tools that leave marketers unconstrained from the challenges of fragmentation and able to thrive despite seemingly endless workloads will be key to achieving such favorable outcomes. Low-value tasks can be automated with AI to reduce the number of line items or clicks a programmatic trader has to make, while also surfacing interesting insights and trends to fuel optimization decisions in a way that leaves marketers in control.
Once complex tasks are automated, brands can spend more time understanding audience development and insights — critical for planning and measurement.
Marketers need a DSP that delivers results through relevancy and provides a solution that will thrive in a changing landscape while ensuring they can deliver on their objectives now. Securely combining first-party data sets with billions of unique signals, like browsing, shopping and streaming insights from Amazon, helps marketers build better audiences and understand the complex journeys their customers now take that can fuel more impactful strategies.
The saying, “Don’t push the river, it flows by itself,” emulates the current state of ad tech — it will continue to change and could go in a number of different directions, no matter what marketers may want. Future-proofing tools in preparation for whatever might come a team’s way ensures they reach their ultimate goals.
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