Will smaller ad agencies end up ultimately trampled to death by yottabytes of Facebook and Google data?
Along with being reigning leaders of the tech industry, Google and Facebook run the most prominent advertising networks. The rest of the no-names pale into insignificance compared to the great and terrible Duopoly. Will smaller ad agencies end up ultimately trampled to death by yottabytes of Facebook & Google data?
"Who owns the information, he owns the world." This 300-year old quotation is more relevant today than ever. Like it or not, it is personal data and its quality that defines the success of advertising campaigns. Get the right data about the customer and this customer is likely yours.
Facebook and Google grew from unicorns into giant datavorous raptors that absorb all info about their users. No wonder they account for a combined 60% share of digital advertising in 2019. While such…
Google highlights competition over digital ad monopoly claims, YouTube removes paid ad views from Music Chart counts, Client-side marketing and media professionals have declining trust in agencies, Facebook launching oversite board, Instagram cosmetic surgery post restrictions
Google has sought to fight off claims that it is dominating the digital advertising industry by pointing to other companies in a bid to prove competition, but is this entirely accurate?
YouTube is removing paid ad views from Music Chart videos to focus on organic views only and provide a more honest reflection of artists' popularity.
New research has found that trust in agencies is declining among client-side media and marketing professionals with the increasingly complex media landscape likely being a contributing factor.
Facebook is set to launch an oversight board in 2020, which will review and potentially overrule the platform's decisions on content.
Finally, Instagram is continuing its work toward reducing the negative impacts that social media can…
Most valuable brands across the globe showcased in a new infographic, Facebook has been blocked from using data from other sources in Germany, China stops beauty products making medical claims in advertising and Amazon posts positive fourth-quarter ad revenue results
A new infographic has showcased the most valuable brands in many of the countries across the world, showcasing some stark differences in overall value between different countries.
This week, Germany has also made a landmark ruling that will limit the types of data that Facebook can collect and assign to indvidual users, which has got the platform up in arms.
China is bringing its beauty advertising more in-line with the rest of the world by banning brands from making medical claims when it comes to their cosmetic products.
Amazon has reported some seriously strong growth in terms of ad revenue, taking some of the market away from Google.
Find out more on each of these…
Chart of the Day: After years of global growth, online ad spend outstrips TV spend for the first time
Online ad-spend surpassed TV spend in several mature markets a few years back. But now we have reached the watershed moment where online ad spend is higher than TV spend globally.
This spectacular growth makes it an interesting time to work in digital marketing. But we are seeing the lion's share of this growth to just two providers, creating a 'digital duopoly'. This may create a less competitive market, which could be bad news for advertisers in the long run.
Source: KPCB Internet Trends 2017
Data Source: Zenith Advertising Data Forecast
Recommended Toolkit: Marketing Technology and Innovation
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Adblockers are here to stay. Marketers need to wake up to a new era
Sixty-three percent of users ages 18 to 34 are using ad-blocking software when viewing digital content, and 41 percent of internet users overall block ads. Just last year, PageFair published a report on ad-block rates that provided unprecedented insight into how many users utilize ad-blocking software when they browse the web. For example, ad blocking cost publishers around $22 billion during 2015, and U.S. ad blocking grew by 48 percent to a staggering 45 million active users as of June that same year. This widespread usage of ad-blocking methods has created a demographic that marketers can’t reach with traditional digital marketing strategies.
Especially because advertising is the way content on the web is financially supported, ad blocking can have a negative effect on marketing efforts. “Many of the most popular tools marketers use to measure and…
Chart of the Day: Online spend surges whilst spending on newspaper advertising slumps
GroupM predicts that global marketing spend will reach an impressive $1 trillion dollars this year. But that increase in spend isn't evenly distributed across marketing mediums.
It varies considerably from country to country, so it's worth breaking down the spend across the major economies. Brazil is the only country with digital ad spend falling. This is due to the country being in the grips of the worst recession it has experienced since the 1930s.
Elsewhere the trends are broadly positive, especially for digital. We're seeing large increases across the board, with digital ad spend surging by an impressive 30% in India and a strong 15% in the UK. The USA is by far the largest mature economy with the biggest ad market, and digital spend is still increasing by a healthy 9%. TV ad revenue is also growing, though at a…
A new report shows over half of web traffic comes from bots
Ever year Incapsula release their bot traffic report, and every year I can't help but be shocked by quite how online traffic is comprised of bots. This year was particularly shocking but human traffic fell below the 50% mark, meaning that the majority of web traffic is now comprised of bots. And before you go thinking; 'that just must be wrong, how could there be that many bots?', the report analyzed 6.7 billion web visits across 100,000 randomly selected domains. With a sample size almost as large as the total population of the planet earth, it's likely that this finding is not far off the mark.
Bots aren't necessarily bad, many perform useful functions which the internet would not function properly without. However, the report also analyzed the nature of the bots, dividing them into the 'good bots' which provide useful functions, and 'bad bots'…
One of the biggest trends of 2016 went unnoticed, but it will change advertising this year
Chatbots, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Big Data. These are the hot trends for 2017 that have got marketers excited, and you are probably reading a whole host of blogs repeating endlessly how great Chatbots, VR, AR and Big data will be this year.
They may well be great, but it’s often so difficult to distinguish between the hype and the actual business value delivered by a new technology that they can be impossible to effectively evaluate until some time has passed the hype has begun to die down.
Instead of focusing on the next shiny thing to come over the horizon, I thought it would be valuable to look at a major long-term trend that will have an impact on marketing not just in 2017, but over the next 5-10 years. I speak of the growing politicisation of…
Chart of the day: Online campaigns precisely targeted at a certain demographic often miss the mark.
Digital advertising is sold on the basis of targeting. Whilst everyone watching the super bowl or the X factor gets shown the same TV ad regardless of their age, gender or interests, digital ads can be hyper-targeted to just be seen by the exact demographic you know is most interested in your product. Or rather that's how it works in theory. In practice, the results are often very different. Recent research by Nielson found for certain groups, such as males in the 18-24 age range, only 17% of targeted ads were actually reaching the intended demographic. The rest were being seen by people the advertiser did not intend to target.
This reveals a big flaw in targeted advertising, as across the board about half of views are coming from people the advertiser wasn't paying to target. Whilst there is…
The average marketing budget spends 48% on advertising, but how does it breakdown?
Not too long ago, broadcast and print reigned supreme, taking up a huge quantity of the advertising budgets. Then, along came the internet and began to shake things up.
The ability to accurately measure how adverts were performing was all too enticing and we have now seen a shift in favour of digital, with an average of 64% of the advertising spend.
Percolate, recently conducted a survey of over 300 enterprise U.S. CMOs, VPs, and Marketing Directors, to dig a little deeper into the hidden costs of marketing.
Search Ads
Search Advertising, refers to the adverts that appear on the results page, (usually near the top) when a user types a query into a search engine.
This takes on average 12% of the budget and can be…