How New Age Technologies Are Changing the Ad-Tech Industry CMOs worldwide had experimented with all these new age technologies and much ahead of Indian markets in adopting to these new age technologies.
By Ashish Shah
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Ad-tech is an ever-evolving industry and has seen many transformations over the years. With advanced tracking technologies available, brands can have niche level targeting options like hyper-local targeting, audience & contextual targeting and demographic targeting, among others. Infusion of technologies like machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI), coupled with Creative Personalization and Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) provide extreme personalization in advertising and help to increase the conversion rates and thus, improve the ROAS (Return On Ad Spends). On the publisher side, programmatic techniques such as Header Bidding are helping Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) to improve the revenues as compared to the traditional waterfall model.
Header Bidding is an advanced programmatic technique used by publishers to offer their inventory to multiple ad exchanges simultaneously before making calls to their ad server. This enables publishers to increase their yield and make more money by letting multiple demand sources bid on the same inventory at the same time. Waterfall model is a model, which allows publishers to move their inventory from one market (ad network) to the next to optimize their revenue.
CMOs worldwide had experimented with all these new age technologies and much ahead of Indian markets in adopting to these new age technologies. All these new age technologies are billion dollar businesses in USA, Europe, Japan and China.
India has been gearing up for these technologies in the last couple of years and the speed at which Indian market adoption is growing is phenomenal.
Different New Age Technologies
Increased data speeds:
The data speeds have accelerated in the past decade and their competitive pricing is a cherry on the cake. This has almost eliminated video buffers. Mobile devices compatible with this technology have made their way into the markets. Coupling these two technologies, users can now consume online video content seamlessly. This has been a boon for the ad-tech industry, with the markets for digital video ads soaring high. This has crafted a new media landscape in the ad-tech industry.
Cloud computing:
Clouds are the key to managing Big Data. It is difficult to keep up with today's gigantic volumes using the traditional data architectures. Advertisers face real-time scaling demands, which change in an instant and these can strain the traditional infrastructure. Scalable infrastructures like cloud help to manage such dynamic scaling needs, helping to serve ads better.
Programmatic Advertising:
Prior to programmatic advertising, it was difficult to imagine media buying without the human intervention. But, it is a reality today, thanks to the programmatic revolution, which is a fusion of advertising and technology. Programmatic advertising eliminates the human errors and gets the best deal for both advertisers and publishers. It brings in the possibilities of getting to know the ad viewers and serving customized ads to each user as per the user attributes.
Big data:
Big-data is basically the technology used to collect, process and analyze the huge volumes of structured and unstructured data available today. This has dramatic implications for the ad-tech sector. Big-Data is used for user behaviour analytics, gaining customer insights, behaviour profiling, and targeting, among others. It helps brands to deliver more personalized and targeted ads. Hyper-local advertising has increased the conversion rates for brands.
AI and machine learning:
Programmatic Ad buying powered by AI and machine learning is probably the most notable change in the ad-tech industry today. Buying or selling of the ad inventory is carried out through an exchange, which includes DSPs, SSPs, and DMPs. The process is completely automated and uses algorithms to connect advertisers to the relevant publishers.
Blockchain Technology:
As the ad industry grows, so do the possibilities of ad frauds. Recently, ad frauds have surfaced quite frequently, breaching brands' trust in programmatic advertising. It is the need of the hour to combat this and provide trustworthy ad-tech solutions. Blockchain technology provides transparent ledger of all records and transactions, thus reducing the possibilities of frauds. All record entries and be traced back, bringing in more accountability for the intermediaries involved.
Connected TV
Connected TV is becoming the new choice for digital viewers. Brands have to keep up with the pace and reach out to their users through Connected TV ads. They blend the precision of digital with the impact of TV. It allows advertisers to target, measure, and retarget TV-viewing audiences. Connected TV ads provide a leaned-back, full-screen user experience that cannot be skipped. Connected TV ads give brands high completion rates.
Virtual-Reality:
VR is still in its nascent stages, but it is the next big thing for the ad-tech industry. Using VR, brands can get their story through in the most immersive manner. By providing an almost real-life experience to their customers, brands can have deeper levels of engagement. Brands can include VR activities in their larger digital campaigns, in order to tell immersive stories and gain the undivided attention of their potential customers, which will reflect well in the sales figures!
All these transformations opening the floodgates of possibilities for brands and their customers have been majorly driven by the rise of mobile devices combined with the rise of social networks. This combination has led the users to consume great volumes of data in the form of audio, video and text content. In turn, they generate equal or even greater volumes of fresh data, which drives the ad-tech. Social networks play a vital role in this data revolution. They hold vital data, which is essential for forming user profiles and data analyses.
The new age technologies have transformed the ad-tech industry into an amalgamation of advertising, technology, creativity, and innovation. This calls for a new marketing team, which is a mixture of technologists, creative art directors, and content producers and marketing specialists. With such exciting new-age technologies, the future of the ad-tech industry looks quite promising.
However, with the ever-changing nature of the technology, even the nature of problems has changed. With the advent of AI and robotics, there has arisen a problem of fake traffic, also known as non-human traffic or bot traffic. Marketers lost around $7.2 billion to digital ad fraud in 2016. Such fake traffic wipes out the advertisers' budgets and creates lack of trust. However, in order to mitigate this issue, fraud detection companies have stepped up their game by deploying new technologies and employing new techniques. This has remedied the problem to a certain extent.
