The Australian digital advertising market is experiencing its strongest growth since 2016, with digital spend reaching $13 billion AUD in 2021. By 2024, Magna expects Australian digital advertising expenditure to achieve a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.5%, making it the seventh leading global programmatic market.
Changes in digital consumption habits, shifting consumer demand for content, and the growth of video have accelerated digital ad spend. As ad revenues soar to new heights, and consumers place more importance on trust in the digital world, media owners and buyers alike are facing headwinds.
Regulatory scrutiny on the digital industry, coupled with consumers’ demand for personalised yet privacy-centric digital experiences across all screens, is causing governments to focus on building legislation that supports enhanced consumer privacy. As a result, media owners and buyers face the meteoric task of delivering a connected experience, providing flexible buying options, operational efficiency, and enhanced targeting options—whilst maintaining consumer privacy.
Media owners and buyers must overcome these challenges in order to continue accelerating programmatic adoption, and deliver the high-quality content experiences that consumers crave.
Adapting new privacy standards to deliver addressable campaigns across channels
The privacy revolution has descended upon us. Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of their digital footprint, and are demanding more transparency and control from platforms over the use of their data.
Government bodies like the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), are quick to respond and are working on a regulatory overhaul that bolsters consumer rights around data protection. Tighter governmental regulations, and the response of platforms to move away from third-party cookies, is forcing technology providers to rethink the status quo, and build solutions that maintain user privacy, and trust at their core.
Some of these solutions include efforts around The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0, and LiveRamp’s RampID. But in order to scale and continue to fuel programmatic growth, these solutions require a common identifier that works to connect users from app to app, and channel to channel.
Capitalising on CTV with the right infrastructure
Connected TV (CTV) was born in the era of digitisation as a fully addressable extension of linear TV. Australia has established a new baseline for CTV viewership with the growth of broadcaster video-on-demand (BVOD) content. The reason? Australia has a unique makeup of premium TV broadcasters that develop high-quality BVOD content that both consumers and media buyers favour.
Australians consume more than 1.6 million hours of BVOD content every week, and ad revenue mirrors consumption, reaching $278 million AUD in 2021.
Australia is one of the most advanced markets when it comes to CTV. With market growth continuing to trend upward, there’s an increasing focus to align the user experience of these newer digital environments to the traditional TV experience, creating a seamless stream of content and ads together.
The legacy ad serving infrastructure, which consists of the pre-header bidding setup, isn’t well equipped to deliver the experience consumers crave. The lack of a true identifier across devices causes slow load times, limits frequency capping, and interferes with the overall consumer experience.
Eliminating ad fraud and improving transparency also remain core challenges in CTV environments. In order for programmatic advertising to showcase its efficiency, the industry must focus on efforts to preserve attribution, and protect the supply chain. Whilst the Australian CTV marketplace transacts primarily through deals, which see a lower fraud rate, it’s crucial to define standards that allow safe transactions across the board.
Taking advantage of the programmatic opportunity
Change is afoot, and with change comes innovation. Programmatic is poised to help solve these pressing challenges in addressability and CTV, and deliver more value to media owners and buyers than ever before.
CTV is already established in Australia, but it requires a dynamic marketplace that can replace inefficient inventory reserves, increase transparency, and drive transaction costs down. Premium TV broadcasters and media buyers can use the power of programmatic to close the gap between legacy technology, and turn to future-proofed infrastructure that meets the needs of growing consumer demand.
While the official death of the third-party cookie won’t arrive until 2023, the industry has already set its sights on a number of addressable solutions that range from first-party data, probabilistic approaches, and contextual targeting.
Once media owners and buyers adopt a common identifier and implement these solutions, the ability to deliver privacy-first experiences that live up to consumer expectations across every screen, and every channel will be possible—all through programmatic pipes.
Sources:
- IAB Australia, Online Advertising Expenditure Report CY21 & December Quarter 2021
- Magna Global Advertising Forecasts June 2021
