5 Trends to Monitor on the Gartner Hype Cycle for Digital Advertising, 2020

Ad blocking — the use of software to remove or filter the delivery of content identified as advertising from material published on the internet — has gained significant traction over the past few years. Most recently, major providers of browser software (including Google) fortified their native ad-blocking features and either implemented or announced plans to disallow all third-party cookies.

The attention and hysteria surrounding ad blocking have been recently eclipsed by concerns about the demise of third-party cookies and the chilling impact of COVID-19 on the digital ad market. Underlying issues with ad blocking are still very much unresolved and unlikely to stabilize within the next two years. In the meantime, marketers must look to better balance customer choice and engagement with increasing demands for transparency.

IDR holds great promise for marketers as they shift their sights to customer retention goals, do more with a stagnant or cut budget and apply first-party data to marketing programs. Targeting, measurement and attribution of ad campaigns, customer journey analytics and personalization all depend heavily on IDR. 

The technology is among the most active battlegrounds, however, in a volatile power struggle among business interests, privacy regulators and the largest digital platform providers — with consumers caught somewhere in the middle. Privacy obstacles put tremendous pressure on IDR practices, leading to its position on this year’s Hype Cycle — the Trough of Disillusionment.

The future of IDR depends heavily on standardization, or supporting a universal user token compliant with consent requirements, which has been a rocky road. Marketers who altogether abandon efforts at using IDR to understand and communicate with customers, and those that rely on weak enforcement or sketchy privacy workarounds to obtain personal data, all risk negative impact.

Brand safety has a renewed focus of late, as marketers pay more attention to the context in which their ads appear. Previously included in the profile for ad verification, brand safety is now a distinct attribute based on its unique requirements and trajectory, and is measured and managed separately from fraud and viewability. 

As publishers evolve their ability to filter content, marketers will have a more reliable and direct way to manage their ad buys. But as influencer marketing gains more investments, marketers will need to scrutinize the process of influencer selection more closely and look to technology to provide an efficient and reliable way to manage campaigns.

Ad verification and viewability, a fraud-prevention technology that verifies that humans and not bots are the source of impressions and clicks, ensures ads are visible and contract terms fulfilled. This technology has emerged from the Trough of Disillusionment into the Slope of Enlightenment due to the recent trend of provider acquisitions by strategic buyers. Many marketers look to third-party, unbiased vendors to evaluate whether ads get views from real people consistent with contractual terms, as they have a great deal to lose from ad fraud and viewability violations. 

Verification will be a necessary part of the settlement systems of buyers and sellers as the category moves toward maturity. Marketers will need to institute an approach to ad verification and viewability to ensure they can take full advantage of it and have confidence in the investment.

Some Gartner clients can learn more in Hype Cycle for Digital Advertising, 2020 and to keep up to date with the latest research on this subject can visit the Digital Marketing Strategy and Execution Initiative.