DV Predictions for 2019!

1. Brand Safety Will Be a Major Focus Across the Globe in 2019

2019 will be the year of Global Brand Safety as markets across Europe work together to create a European guideline for brand protection and to combat issues like online infringement of intellectual property, otherwise known as Copyright Infringement.

DV recently spoke at the quarterly meeting of the signatories on the EU “Memorandum of Understanding on Online Advertising & Intellectual Property Rights”. During the session, DV provided insight into the challenges of fighting online piracy in an effort to help European lawmakers, the EACA, and key European partners understand the importance of granular and comprehensive protection and the rationale for working with an expert in piracy prevention to reduce the ongoing threat. As we know, piracy is only one component of brand reputation protection. DV will remain at the forefront of combating piracy, helping to contribute to and shape these guidelines to the benefit of both supply and demand partners.

Nicole Priesmeyer, Smooth Operator

2. Fraud Will Continue to Expand in Sophistication – Across Buying Platforms and Devices.

In 2019, fraud sophistication will continue to grow. As bad actors seek to circumvent protections and extend their efforts to new devices and channels, marketers will need to be more vigilant – and more dynamic – in how they detect and protect against emerging fraud schemes.  Hijacked devices will continue to be a prominent way to execute fraud, since this method “blends in” with human traffic better than do pure bots. Also, we expect mobile and CTV fraud to be a big focus in 2019 as spend continues to increase. Be on the lookout as DV releases new reports around fraud detection, and various product and platform innovations to deepen our coverage.

Roy Rosenfeld, Fraud Firefighter

3. 100% Viewability Will be Expected, and New Metrics Beyond Viewability Will Emerge.

Viewability – a critical KPI for marketers – has been and will remain paramount in 2019. We predict that advertiser expectations of 100% viewability will become the new reality. Many of DV’s advertiser partners have confirmed that at a minimum, they plan to set KPI expectations that are higher than standards set by the IAB.  Even the MRC is said to be evaluating 100% viewability as the new standard. Beyond viewability, verification providers are beginning to socialize additional metrics, such as viewable time, as a richer measure of quality. We think this trend will continue, and that demand for metrics around user engagement will deepen. This development will usher a new frontier for performance measurement – helping advertisers define which engagement activities drive performance and, ultimately, real business outcomes.

Saar Paamoni, Viewability Vanguard

4. CTV Will Move Beyond Audience Measurement

eMarketer estimates that over 182 million Americans watched CTV in 2018. With the explosion of CTV viewership, advertising dollars have followed suit –  growing 75% year-on-year. However, traditional TV measurement – focused primarily on audience measurement – is not going to be enough for savvy digital marketers looking to maximize their CTV investment. The need for fraud protection will only grow as bad actors focus on this relatively new channel, characterized by dramatic growth in spend and scarce, premium inventory. In addition, advertisers will demand greater transparency across the CTV landscape – including within established, traditionally closed platforms. In short, CTV will join the media arsenal, subject to the same, consistent requirements around quality and performance verification.

Susan Zemlyakova, Marketing Maven

5. Programmatic Will Expand to New Channels, and The Need for Fraud Protection Will Grow Along With It.

Programmatic budgets will expand, and the DSP will be universally adopted as the primary buying platform. This trend will accelerate as new biddable inventory types, such as CTV/OTT, OOH and addressable audio go mainstream. Buyers will need increased protection and control as fraud and other bad actors follow the money!

Programmatic’s role in helping Marketers manage global reach and frequency is becoming more complex, as the consumer journey becomes increasingly fragmented across devices. We’ve seen DSPs invest heavily to secure new inventory types as well as solutions to manage identity across these environments.  As DSP pipes tap environments that lack transparency, the specter of fraud looms large.  In November 2018, DV identified a botnet attack specifically targeting CTV. As part of this fraud scheme, we saw a 40% spike in CTV traffic, the majority of which was fraudulent.  As programmatic budgets increase in 2019, we expect buyers to put extra emphasis on protection and transparency to fight back against bad actors.

Steven Mougis, Programmatic Fanatic

6. There Will Be a (R)evolution in the Formats and Types of Mobile Ad Content.

Mobile devices are maturing. Their form factors, features, and market share are all well-established. But as we’ve grown past limitations around battery life, processing power, and screen and camera resolution, we’re just starting to understand the best types of software, experiences, and content that work well on these devices. The current crop of apps and websites – and even operating system paradigms, were designed primarily to onboard users and transition them from desktop to mobile experiences. We’re going to see the boundaries of mobile app and web experiences pushed both by market incumbents as well as upcoming mobile upstarts. New forms of content and experiences will represent huge opportunities for advertisers – with the potential for huge risk of exposure to off-brand and off-message content.

John Van Antwerp, Mobile Mastermind

7. Connecting the Data Dots in a Post-GDPR World Will Revolutionize the Way We Target, Optimize and Derive Client Insights.

Unique, granular ways to join datasets together, such as at the impression-level, will become increasingly important as GDPR and other regulations restrict the data that advertisers can collect and use for targeting, optimization and analysis. Since GDPR went into effect in 2018, there have been countless industry challenges to comply with this unprecedented regulation – particularly in ensuring our industry is able to use advanced analytics, AI and machine learning. These advanced data strategies all require big data at granular levels, even down to the log level. Advanced analytics have commonly used multiple siloed systems to identify log-level users, including ad servers, DMPs, attribution systems, and even individual partners. And each of these systems typically tracks its own user IDs. Because the user ID is precisely what’s most vulnerable from a privacy perspective, and the ability to tie all this data together is invaluable, marketers are increasingly shifting to stitching data together using non-personal data – such as impression or bid data. Doing so allows advertisers to identify the user once, in a fully compliant system, and then ingest other impression- and bid-level data from multiple sources to ensure granularity while adhering to privacy regulations. This data is ultimately even more granular than user-level, and will allow for interesting and actionable analyses of variables throughout the value exchange.

Collette Spagnolo, Analytics Unicorn

8. Supply-chain Consolidation Will Accelerate.

Sectors go through cycles – from nascent explosions to commoditized capabilities and, eventually, consolidation. Digital advertising – specifically ad-tech – has entered the consolidation phase. This cycle is being driven for a variety of reasons: the digital advertising supply chain is full of intermediaries that charge a “tech tax” for purported value-add. There’s also ambiguity around take rates and margin erosion that is causing advertisers to demand greater transparency of their partners downstream. Initiatives like blockchain and header bidding are making it easier respectively to track revenue share across players and also to short circuit the chain and transact more efficiently. Expect continued horizontal integration in 2019 – the landscape of the future will be characterized by fewer, better integrated players that are able to demonstrate material value-add.

Dan Slivjanovski, Marketing Merlin

9. The Impact of Ad Verification on Media Transparency and Performance Will Rise to New Levels.

New standards for marketing performance will rapidly emerge in 2019 – from measuring the quality of ad presentation to evaluating the impact of digital media on consumer engagement. User-initiated engagement metrics will encompass rich insights into how consumers interact with online promotion. The correlation of these metrics with conversion data will inform predictive models of users’ likelihood to transact – leading to targeting solutions that will drive campaign performance and, ultimately, real business outcomes for brands.

Wayne Gattinella, MVP

10. Bitcoin Will Become the Ad Currency of Choice.

This is only so obviously natural that it hardly counts as a prediction, Clearly, as the industry evolves towards the use of the magical-solve-every-problem-in -digital-advertising technology called blockchain everywhere, we will need to update our payment models. In fact, the new currency being created is ViewCoin which is a special form of bitcoin that is exactly one CPM worth of viewable inventory. Of course at DV we cannot adopt ViewCoin since it is so singular in nature and have come up with AuthentiCoin. Clearly, this does not need any explanation!!

Mark Pearlstein, The Joker