It’s hard to believe that we are approaching the end of 2021; the past two years really do feel like a blur, and we have emerged out the other end in a significantly altered digital ad sales landscape.
From March 2020, online traffic shot up all over the world, and digital advertising became one of the most effective ways for people to sell things.
It didn’t take long for marketers to notice this, which quickly took its toll on traditional platforms: by the end of 2020, TV, radio, out-of-home, and print ad spend had fallen 15.7%, while in the US advertisers increased their digital ad spend by 14.9%.
As is so often the case, once any area of life becomes more “digital-first”, it is pretty much impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. So the new landscape is here to stay, and media ad sales vendors are going to have to adapt fast to ensure ongoing revenue growth.
This is doubly true thanks to the looming demise of third party cookies and ever-increasing concern for consumer privacy throwing a spanner into the mix.
We have scanned the horizon with our friends at AdMonsters, and identified four main factors influencing how publishers can survive and thrive in the coming years:
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Changing consumer behavior
- Shifts in buyer behavior
- Privacy and identity
