Are brands tuned out on the addressability crisis?

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Good morning, Marketers, and is the advertising industry in crisis?

Perhaps more importantly, are brands completely tuned out? Spending time at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in New York City this week, I was impressed with the trade association’s determination to sound the alarm about the pincer movement that is threatening the industry’s future. On one side, the steady deprecation of technological means of tracking users across domains — chiefly the deprecation of third-party cookies — and on the other side, the growing support for eradicating user identity from digital marketing altogether, if necessary through legislation.

The IAB’s objective is to get the entire industry working on a common response to these challenges. But cunning adtech fixes for identity tracking don’t sit easily with calls to use first-party data only. And meantime, one has the impression that marketers are content to carry on using third-party data until doomsday.

One expects agencies and adtech to predominate at an IAB meeting, but I don’t believe I heard from one brand marketer in the audience (they were involved, if at all, as guest speakers). Are brands just waiting for someone else to tell them what their future segmentation and targeting strategies should look like?

P.S. We’re still looking for your help with our marketing salary survey.

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

Shorts 

Quote of the day. “Reminder: your job as a manager is to enable your team by giving them the tools, time and opportunity to SHINE. That’s it. It’s not about you.” Hana Jacover, director of marketing technology, Unreal Digital Group

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.