ATS LONDON 

This was my first time attending ATS London, a gathering of the Ad Tech community to talk through the latest topics and trends. I attended a whopping nine sessions so here is a quick fire overview of the trends and take-away.

Google was the hottest topic of the morning, following the start of their Department Of Justice trial. Will they have to break up, won’t they break up? And what will happen if they do? The general consensus was that if a break up happens, the future is expected to be fairly similar to how it is now, with the majority of people expecting to stick with whatever the equivalent future Google products will be. A few predicted chaos, but what can be worse than the advent of GDPR?

There were two sessions on CTV, and yet we still seem to be struggling with a general consensus of what CTV is (see my last blog if you want our JAA view)! It’s interesting to see how much uncertainty there still is across the industry, however everyone did agree that YouTube does count as CTV.

MIQ also showed off their TVi tool, highlighting trends in linear advertising and how to better manage frequency and find light linear viewers in the CTV space.

Curation was another big topic. The sell side (media owners) are working hard to curate inventory deals that aren’t based on third party cookies to deliver better quality inventory across the open web – something that is much needed. The goal is that, rather than creating even more costs for programmatic media, that this will simplify some of the landscape and add a layer of transparency.

There were also talks on attention, where we got a sneak peek of a Lumen study that shows that attentive time was positively correlated with brand outcomes. While common sense would say this was generally to be expected, what was more interesting was that this was particularly true for lower funnel metrics such as action intent and preference.

The retail media and precision targeting talks were also interesting. On the retail media side there was talk of the need to avoid silos and remove some of the fragmentation in the market, while the precision targeting talk had an open discussion about the way forward for what we’re still expecting to be a cookie-less future. Cookies haven’t worked for a while, but the industry is ready for the next step.

A popular solution was taking a layered approach of different datasets and activating them via postcode data – something we’re already doing a lot of at JAA!

And finally, if there was a word of the day (outside of Google and CTV) it would be fragmentation. And rightly so, fragmentation is a problem in CTV, where everyone is off doing their own thing with their own tech in their own way. And retail media has hundreds of different networks and loads of different retailers that we’re trying to navigate.

Programmatic can absolutely be a way to manage all this however there’s still work to be done on consistency and tech to make this happen.

Georgia was joined at ATS London by JAA Director of Performance Cameron Cumming.