Cookies—or rather, the lack of cookies—loomed large over the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s 2024 Leadership Meeting, which traditionally marks the official kickoff of the year for the advertising industry.
Several of Start.io’s senior leaders attended the Annual Leadership Meeting, which was held in late January in Florida. Here are their big takeaways from the conference.
Advertisers aren’t prepared for the end of third-party cookies
In early 2024, Google permanently turned off third-party cookies for an estimated 30 million people—roughly equivalent to the population of Texas. The company says it plans to turn off third-party cookies on Chrome for everyone by the end of the year.
IAB, which serves as the leading trade association for the advertising industry, has repeatedly warned Google that advertisers aren’t ready for the death of third-party cookies.
At the Annual Leadership Meeting, IAB gave Google an early look at a gap analysis report containing dozens of real-world examples from advertisers who had tested Google’s Privacy Sandbox and found it didn’t support critical advertising functions they use today.
IAB has since published a 106-page draft of the report and will gather comments on the report until March 22.
“In its current form, the Privacy Sandbox may limit the industry’s ability to deliver relevant, effective advertising, placing smaller media companies and brands at a significant competitive disadvantage,” the report reads. “The stringent requirements could throttle their ability to compete, ultimately impacting the industry’s growth.”
At IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting, Google organized an event focused on Privacy Sandbox and the deprecation of cookies in the browser, and mobile advertising IDs on Android.
We attended that event and spoke to Google representatives who assured us that the company is working on a solution that won’t hurt the mobile advertising ecosystem, while supporting users and their private data on Android.
Related: Read our thoughts on how Privacy Sandbox will impact Android app developers.
AI and ML are rapidly reshaping the ad industry, with unanswered ethical questions
Artificial intelligence has already revolutionized how hundreds of millions of digital ads are bought and sold every day. In 2023, artificial intelligence began moving up the creative stack, and we saw early experiments in generative AI capable of creating ads on its own.
This remains a huge gray area for the advertising industry. We had thought-provoking conversations with our peers about the ethics around automated content creation and hyper-personalization in ads.
As generative AI gets better, it may begin pushing out creatives at ad agencies, particularly at the lower end of the billing range.
Artificial intelligence promises to generate personalized ads at scale—delivering retail product recommendations with pinpoint accuracy, or tailoring brand messages to match a consumer’s current mood. This too, remains an ethical gray area.
Diversity in ad targeting
There is a certain amount of trust that brands place in the hands of the adtech industry, which promises that their ad targeting capabilities will help them reach specific audiences.
We attended thought-provoking sessions around diversity and inclusivity, where brands wondered whether they can really reach the audiences they want, or whether adtech companies are manipulating programmatic ad campaign execution around diverse reach.
Finally, CTV
Connected TV promises to deliver the reach of cable TV with the personalization of digital ads. It seems like every major streaming app has already launched (or plans to launch) a cheaper, ad-supported subscription tier, opening the door for millions of new CTV ads.
In 2024, brands are no longer happy with the “spray and pray” approach they took with linear TV and want precision targeting. The reality is that measurement, attribution, and targeting remain big hurdles to solve with CTV.
What were your big takeaways from IAB ALM 2024? Tag us on LinkedIn and include the hashtag #iabalm
