The fast rise of advertising-supported streaming video combined with the depreciation of third-party data cookies means new challenges and new opportunities for media companies and ad-tech giants and other businesses alike. How will the growing demand for digital advertising effect the future for TV advertising? Dentons discussed this with C-level executives of leading media and entertainment companies, cable TV and broadband providers, SVoD (subscription video on demand) platforms, content producers and advertising sales companies in its C-suite Power Virtual Lunch on June 10, 2021.
“Advertising is going to be increasingly about identity in the future and how this is managed will be key to attracting and retaining customer loyalty. The apps that allow people to give permissions about how their data is used could be the next big thing,” one executive commented.
We have summarized below some of the key takeaways from this insightful discussion, zooming in on the privacy aspects of digital advertising.
- Executives predict that in the next three to five years, measurement of audiences is going to be turned upside down. Platforms, content makers and agencies all want this to happen. Collaboration in sharing data will be required in order to move the business forward, but the market is not there yet. However, the move has started already: consortia are popping up everywhere to work on aligning business approaches and technology exchanges. “Erstwhile bitter competitors are now forced to work together,” one executive comments.
- At the moment, the AdTech market is still considered to be the “wild west” in several ways including in the legal and reputational sense. However, several executives have noticed a shift towards more focus on data privacy.
- Privacy is interesting because is it really about the custody of data, whereby the customer’s data stays within a walled garden set up by the media company that collected the data. If platforms, content makers and agencies want to work together, the privacy aspects need to be tackled first.
- One step up from data custody is data ownership. Several attendees could foresee a model where end users would be in control of their data, determining which companies would get access to their data and which not, and under which conditions. This could include a form of compensation for the use of their data by companies. In view of this, an important new market player could be around the corner: a service provider focusing solely on giving customers a platform to control how they want to share their data with companies. In Dentons’ experience, a number of companies are working towards developing such solutions for use in AdTech ecosystems. The fast-paced developments in digital self-sovereign identity solutions could help accelerate this development.
- With regulatory scrutiny over AdTech resuming in the UK and EU and the reform of the EU e-privacy legal regime (that, among other things, sets the rules concerning online tracking) expected imminently, privacy compliance in relation to targeted advertising will remain a challenging area. However, content platforms that move from simply thinking about privacy as dry compliance with regulations, and start approaching it as a strategic business differentiator or advantage may have the competitive edge.
