Although a huge transition in buying and selling is evident, the digital-advertising world is facing numerous challenges. Advertising has its struggles, some of them predominant are lack of know-how and talent, and fraud, while some less predominant ones include ad injectors, ad stacking, and ad view ability.
Different surveys were conducted for some time to identify different challenges that the advertising industry is facing. Let’s look at the responses received from various advertisers and publishers.
1. Fraud activity There is constant deception in programmatic media. It happens because the stakes are high. They fetch much higher rates than banners do. A recent report states that out of 25 ad inventories, 18 were bought by programmatic. 20% of them sold were totally fraud.
2. Creative Usually, there is a lot of tech talk on efficient serving of ads. But are the ads of good quality? Brands need to optimize buying creatives just like they do in their execution. If you are targeting hundreds of different market segments and there are just 3 or 4 creative pieces, you are running an inconsistent programmatic campaign.
3. View ability IAB says an ad is not viewable if it has not appeared for at least a second. Going by that, only fifty percent of ads are actually viewable. Another point is that until the viewer scrolls down, some ads will not be visible. These are called ‘below the fold’ ads. Serving ads in that manner can reduce view ability to zero. IAB maintains that if less than 45% of a display ad is above the fold, it still might fail. Ad blockers could also be the concern for view ability, as ads get loaded late or never, and the user has already moved away from the website.
4. Explaining ad tech to potential clients Programmatic comes with a lot of jargon's. Publishers, however, are saying that this problem will go away with time. Moreover, programmatic does not have a good attribution system. The entire digital industry has complaints about last-click attribution. A new model will give credit to the ads that the user has never clicked on or engaged with. There are plans of raising prices of ads as well. The lack last-click attribution has been stated by many big enterprises like Facebook. They say the system is just too narrow to judge campaign performance.
5. Shortage of quality inventories Quality inventories are rare. This makes quality inventories expensive. Advertisers are continuously requesting for more publishers to put their ads on exchanges as there is a dearth of quality ads. While most advertisers have moderate budgets, the trend of programmatic ad buying might slowly fade, especially unless the direct approach becomes steadily more affordable.
Finally, as Oscar Gaza (Director of Essence Digital) puts it, the hype of programmatic is its biggest threat. The maddening craze of adding programmatic can have no apparent effect. Expert programmatic advertisers work on the fundamental aspects like validating data foundation, proper segmentation of audience, proper analytics, and optimizing the media in an organized manner.
Preethi
