We spoke to 150 professionals from brands and agencies to understand the impact signal loss, as a result of cookie deprecation, is having on their media planning and buying in 2023.
Top findings
- There is an 8% shift from audience to contextual targeting-driven spend year-on-year, from 2022 to 2023 among the largest advertisers. Based on IAB UK latest Ad Spend forecast covering H1 2022, this equates to an estimated increase of £770m during 2023 in contextual spend.
- When asked about trends over the coming year, major advertisers chose cookie deprecation as the number one hot topic informing their marketing needs. This is not a concern equally shared with smaller players, who only list signal loss sixth by order of priority.
- There is a desire across the market to move away from hard-worn, performance-specific metrics towards newer ones like attention – with 63% positive towards this metric, even if 1 in 3 indicated they still lack the tools to measure it effectively.
- When asked about artificial intelligence, the area brands and agencies believed would be most impacted was ad targeting – with more than half (52%) of respondents selecting this option, followed by campaign optimisation and streamlining workflows.
- There is agreement that artificial intelligence will also have an important impact on the development of contextual targeting in particular – 59% agreeing this will be high.
