Three data-driven ad trends for 2015

Identity is imperative

Advertisers and digital providers will adopt identity solutions. Major industry players like Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo and Google that own PII and niche players that specialise in ‘cross-device’ will debate the scale, accuracy and privacy compliance of their IDs and ultimately budgets will shift to players with sound identity solutions.

CRM meets Prospect Relationship Management

More brands will use their customer relationship management (CRM) data assets to inform their anonymous marketing. While some brands have been using CRM onboarding (bringing anonymous and aggregated CRM data and appending it to a cookie or mobile ID), friction in the market, limited training and fear of privacy compliance has limited marketers ability to take action with the data. The increase in available data (both third-party and onboarded first-party data) will take customer profiling into real-time implementations.

Programmatic goes vertical

Over the past three years the ad tech industry has built the infrastructure needed for programmatic buying to develop, starting with open auction real-time bidding (RTB). Now, more sophisticated approaches to programmatic can be developed. In the next 12 months, custom solutions for specific verticals, for example, CPG, B2B and Financial Services will emerge. Applying data to content strategies that go beyond traditional ‘advertising’ can help change customer behaviour and eventually encourage buying behaviour.

Pierre Naggar, managing director EMEA, Turn said: “Ad industry thinking changed dramatically in 2014. Video advertising is no longer considered a separate ‘channel’ and brands are beginning to think about the creative for TV and online video in the same way, now focusing more on the audience they are targeting. We can expect more innovation in programmatic over the next 12 months; marketers will have a better indication of their target audience’s behaviours, both ahead of time through CRM systems, and across numerous touchpoints using cross-device identity solutions.”