'Programmatic advertising will witness boom in cookie-less eraâ€™

In this interview with Adgully, Rohit Arora, Vice President - Tech and Strategic Initiatives, Xapads Media, dwells at length on the growing importance of programmatic advertising, personalisation, cookie-less future, and brand safety. Excerpts from the interview:

Programmatic advertising is growing and evolving. What are the trends, innovations, etc.?

Every major technological shift is preceded by new trends and products and the current shift involves the programmatic and cookieless world. We expect the following new products to shine in the near future:

Rise in AdTech Platforms having innovative engaging rich media ads
A surge in connected TV Inventory
Programmatic audio
Contextual advertising
Adoption of Unified ID 2.0
Maturity of digital out-of-home ads

What are the advantages of programmatic advertising as against the traditional mode?

Every industry in the computer era has benefited from the automated process as compared to the traditional manual process. Likewise, programmatic advertising has solved many pain points, including slowness, and manual errors, along with allowing adequate control at both ends, ad slot seller and ultimate ad slot buyer.

Why should brands invest in programmatic advertising? How programmatic advertising connects brands with the right audience?

Programmatic advertising has evolved so nicely that it even solved supply-and-demand partner-personal slot preferences via advanced methodologies like programmatic guaranteed deals and private marketplace deals. Targeting capabilities like zip code and UID2.0 can target the right audience, even in the upcoming no-cookie era.

What are the key growth drivers such as increase in smartphone penetration, etc.?

Connected TV
Smartphone penetration
Interoperability and open source UID2.0
Industry standardisation via Open RTB guidelines.

Despite all the advantages, programmatic advertising has also brought several questions related to brand safety. And personalisation often can trespass into unchartered personal territory. How can brands draw that important line when it comes to personalisation?

The best way to tackle this is via user inputs and user rights and this approach is followed by tech giant Google as it looks quite promising. In User Inputs, user can share feedback not to see the ad again and with user rights, they can turn off personalisation, thereby, all existing collected data will be wiped.

Instead of brands, the ad exchanges or tech giant Google have the capacity to solve personalisation and above is how they have done this.

How will machine learning, AI, etc., shape up the future areas such as contextual targeting, personalisation, etc.?

For effective machine learning and AI to work, the initial setup must be exceptionally insightful. With the right setup, we can identify which keywords in contextual programmatic targeting are driving economic acquisition results. Following the same, AI rules can be used for the scaling process.

Are marketers able to break their cookie addiction and figure out alternatives to third-party cookies before Chrome’s 2024 deadline? How can marketers consider their platform partners and focus on those that can deliver results without cookies?

The short answer is yes, since there is no other option as Google has already given enough extension to the industry for planning, implementation and testing processes.

With the world moving towards regulations like GDPR (The General Data Protection Regulation) and enhanced user privacy, are we heading towards a world of cookie-less advertising?

Yes, it will be a third-party cookie-less world. However, first-party data management solutions will flourish and hence, marketers need to focus on the same.