In the world of digital media, Generative AI sparks both excitement and concern. This is especially true among publishers and independent content creators.

Last week, creators took a stand in New York City with the launch of Raptive’s ‘Keep It Real’ campaign, an advocacy effort designed to raise awareness about the impact of AI on their livelihoods.

As I sat in the room, listening to stories from food bloggers, designers, and country music aficionados, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between their challenges and the ones publishers face.

Digital media and advertising is grappling with a shifting landscape where AI threatens to commodify human creativity and diminish revenue streams. And if creators are rallying together to protect their work, shouldn’t publishers do the same?

Setting the Stage: The Creator’s Call to Action

ABC News anchor Linsey Davis was the surprise host of the day, opening the event by celebrating creators’ work as the “heart and soul of the internet.” Her words resonated throughout, highlighting the core message: creators — and, by extension, publishers — are the lifeblood of the web, facing challenges that deserve urgent attention.

But creators’ work is now threatened by the rise of generative AI, which scrapes content to deliver quick answers, often at the expense of the nuanced stories they bring to life.

Creators vs. AI: Navigating the SEO Shake-Up

The ‘Keep It Real’ campaign centers on a simple but powerful message: AI should innovate responsibly without exploiting the creators who pour their hearts into their work. Creators shared how generative AI scrapes and repurposes their work without consent or compensation. This issue hits home for publishers who have spent years building quality content to engage audiences.

Scott Messer‘s analysis of the latest SEO challenges for publishers sheds light on how Google’s introduction of AI-generated summaries and features like Search Generative Experience (SGE) alters search engine results pages (SERPs). This shift pushes traditional organic results further down the page, impacting CTRs for top organic positions. For creators, this means that even high-quality, nuanced content risks being overshadowed by generic AI outputs, threatening their visibility and revenue.

Kaitlin Leung of The Woks of Life illustrates the value of discoverable, human-created content: “We slowly but surely started to attract people who were so thankful and grateful to have found us because they were also looking for a similar platform to be able to learn about their heritage more, and cook recipes that kind of were always the domain of their parents or their grandparents or their aunts or their uncles.”

However, with AI-driven search results potentially limiting such discoveries, creators like Kaitlin worry that these meaningful connections between content creators and their audiences may become increasingly rare. It’s clear that AI poses threats, but some publishers are exploring ways to unlock AI opportunities that can preserve revenue and drive growth.

The Economic Impact of AI on Creators

Like creators, publishers rely on nuanced, human-generated content to attract audiences, which opens up the gates to advertising dollars. But with generative AI serving up bland, one-size-fits-all information, creators and publishers risk losing their unique voice — and, ultimately, their revenue.

Michael Sanchez, CEO of Raptive, puts this threat into stark perspective: “Let’s put this in human terms for Raptive creators, this is their livelihood. They do this full-time. It is the primary way they feed their families. There are 1000s of creators across Raptive who earn their living from their content and make less than $100,000 per year for one family, if they lose half of their traffic due to AI replacing their content, they lose half of their income.”

Today, 15% of every dollar advertisers spend on the open web goes through a Raptive site, earning creators over $2.5 billion in revenue. So a 50% reduction in traffic would impact individual creators’ revenue and threaten the broader creator economy, which supports millions of jobs.

Building Communities and Connections

Lindsay and Bjork Ostrom of Pinch of Yum said it best: The internet should continue to be a place where independent voices can thrive. It’s a sentiment publishers know all too well.

Echoing this idea, Tieghan Gerard of Half Baked Harvest, emphasized the importance of community building. “The time I spend on social media is the time I spend interacting with my community and building that community, making that community strong, and making those people feel heard. It’s so important. Nobody feels heard anymore, and we have the power to do that.”

The Role of Advertisers: Supporting Human-Generated Content

The ‘Keep It Real’ campaign calls on advertisers to invest in human-generated content that drives real results and engages audiences on a deeper level. As AI-generated content starts flooding the web, advertisers might be tempted to pour money into platforms that offer quick wins and endless streams of generic content. However, this approach undermines the authenticity that both creators and publishers bring to the table.

Marketers should consider how their media plans and spending align with the campaign’s message. How can the industry ensure that advertising dollars support high-quality, human-centric content?

This could mean reassessing where programmatic buys are directed or prioritizing direct partnerships with publishers who maintain human touchpoints in their content.

Publishers It’s Time to Innovate Responsibly

In creators’ rally for responsible innovation, they want it to be known —  they’re not anti-AI; they’re pro-ethical AI. They want to be part of the conversation, advocating for systems that value their contributions.

Publishers, too, must find ways to leverage AI responsibly while supporting the creator economy, ensuring that both creators and publishers can thrive. That might mean adopting practices that respect the human element of content creation or finding ways to collaborate with creators on shared initiatives that promote authentic, valuable storytelling.

Ad Tech and the Human Connection

Programmatically, ad tech builds a bridge between advertisers and the content that audiences consume. This connector role directly impacts the future of human-generated content online.

It’s time to explore how ad tech can support responsible AI practices that don’t undercut the human connections at the heart of the digital ecosystem.

It’s time to ask: How can ad tech support an internet where independent voices can thrive? It may involve prioritizing ad placements on websites that invest in human-generated stories or encouraging advertisers to value quality over quantity in their content partnerships.

What the Ad Tech Industry Can Do to Keep It Real

• Collaboration: Just as creators are banding together to advocate for their rights, publishers need to engage in collective action. Working with industry bodies to push for fair practices in AI use is a start.
• Support Quality Content: Encourage advertisers to align their spending with websites that offer the depth, nuance, and authenticity AI can’t replicate.
• Advocate for Fair Practices: Push for more transparency in AI’s use of content, ensuring that creators and publishers are fairly compensated when their work is used to train AI models.

The Path Forward: Keeping the Internet Human

At the event, creators emphasized that the fight for fair AI use is only beginning. As they advocate for their rights and the protection of their livelihoods, the entire ad tech ecosystem has a stake in this conversation, especially publishers.

By standing together and championing authentic, human-driven content, you can ensure that the internet remains a place where creativity and community thrive. The road ahead calls for collaboration, innovation, and a shared commitment to keeping it real.

The post Creators vs. AI: Can Keeping It Real Save the Internet? appeared first on AdMonsters.

In 2024, users’ data is under lock and key. Not literally, of course, but with the fall of Chrome’s cookies and stronger privacy regulations popping out of the woodwork, it will be much harder for publishers to reach their desired audience. 

We knew this was coming, but theorizing something and experiencing it are two different beasts. Is the ad tech industry ready to slay this dragon and thrive in a privacy-compliant world?

Optimism exists, but as our contributors warn us below, the industry has its work cut out for it before achieving any success in this new privacy-first world order. 

While reflecting on 2023 and preparing for the uncharted waters ahead, we turned to some of the industry’s leading voices on privacy — from the buy and sell sides, and even in between — to dispense their privacy predictions for 2024.

There are fair warnings ahead — the slow burn to federal privacy laws, the lack of addressaibility, the wait and see mindset. But it’s not all grim — the convergence of ad tech and martech, testing Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), data collaboration, and more.

Another Year, Another Stand Still on Federal Privacy Regulation

“Consumer demand for privacy continues, and targeted advertising is at the top of the list of concerns. However, the US is still unable to get federal privacy regulations across the line. Instead, the patchwork of state legislation continues to grow. Large technology platforms will tighten privacy features, and there will finally be fewer cookies by the end of the year. 

Buyers, sellers, and ad technology providers must invest resources to manage the increased operational overhead required for compliance. Leading publishers will also test new technologies to securely match info on consented users (like clean rooms), require more extensive employee training on compliance, and develop exciting new probabilistic matching solutions. These solutions will use advanced contextual signals, first-party data, and smaller sets of deterministically matched audiences to build new resilient targeting and measurement solutions.” – Maria Breza, VP, Ad Quality Measurement and Audience Data Operations at SXM Media

Rapid Fire: The Rise of PETs and Consented Data 

“The future of PETs. There has been a surplus of chatter about privacy-enhancing technologies for the last few years. Yet, with the rise in restrictions on sensitive data, companies will start to invest more into understanding the viability of PETs to help them reach audiences in a privacy-protection way (rather than engaging in privacy theater). Regulators are also interested in this technology, but we should expect them to look at these solutions with a critical eye. They will employ experts to help them determine whether (from a mathematical perspective) publishers can use them to deliver and measure advertising without revealing individual user data.

*Note that clean rooms are not PETS; they must leverage PETs to offer a privacy-safe solution.

Experiments in consented data. I have yet to see a widespread effort to get opt-in consent for using sensitive information in the states that require it. Likewise, I haven’t seen companies take advantage of the ability to ask California consumers to opt-in to the “sale” of their data 12 months after opting out. However, the continual tightening of the faucet on data may push companies to have a change of mind. Companies may offer financial incentives or other benefits in exchange for consumer consent. Similar to companies experimenting with the “pay or ok” model in the EU, the shift in regulation will cause companies in the U.S. to think about whether business models here need to shift to weather these changes.” – Jessica B. Lee, Partner, Co-Chair, Privacy, Security & Data Innovations at Loeb & Loeb LLP.

The Era of CDPs

“Given that regulation naturally means fewer options to easily monetize customer data, centralization for storage and coordination of data will require a hub. Ad tech and martech further converge into madtech via the CDP. There are three main areas where this is paramount: 

1. Segment Creation – Today, not enough marketers can leverage their marketing attributes to build segments from 0 and 1PD. Most platforms still require engineering to code the necessary attributes. There will be a requirement to democratize this task so publishers can build custom audience segments they can use more easily. Outside vendors have a greater likelihood of building extensions that handle this function.
2. Data Collaboration – Moving data from platform to platform is complex today. However, there are several technical solutions to make this less burdensome. Building data collection and interactivity infrastructure will become a big business in 2024. The CDP is also at the center of these innovations, insomuch as they’re a required integration partner for this tech.
3. Insight Data – Data and research companies may start to push market and behavior data to the CDP. Today, the data flows in the opposite direction, and brands and agencies send customer data to data and research organizations for monetization. Given the prediction on segmentation and data collaboration capabilities, it would be intuitive for brands to centralize the whole process of insights, segmentation, and transfer in their platform of choice – the CDP.

If the above occurs, we will see even greater adoption of CDP’s, but it’s unlikely that CDP’s will create these mechanisms for collaboration. We may see  vendor extensions into the software that enable these functions.” – Therran Oliphant, SVP, Head of Data & Technology NA at EssenceMediacom

The Decrease in Addressable Users 

“Expect to see the industry truly start to take privacy seriously in 2024. To date, most of the industry is trying to extract as much value out of a shrinking group of addressable users, and in 2024, that number will get so small that it will force many to find new ways to reach audiences.

The group of addressable users will shrink because of the end of cookies and the removal of IP addresses, regulations, and other changes. The industry will need to find replacements for the direct addressability of the past that is privacy-preserving and scalable, and not many current technologies cross that bar. There’s lots of work to do.” – Paul Bannister, Chief Strategy Officer at Raptive

In-App Mobile Advertising Deals With Post-IDFA User Acquisition

“Privacy continues to be top of mind in the mobile advertising ecosystem. Mobile app developers adjusting to post-IDFA user acquisition on iOS must adapt yet again and learn how to run UA campaigns without relying on GAIDs as Google rolls out its Privacy Sandbox. As it adjusts, our industry must find creative ways to navigate the challenges and mitigate the impact on ad revenue. Brand advertisers will also face challenges activating their first-party data, as matching it with supply-side data will become impossible without identifiers.” – Linda Ouyang, VP & GM, Global Supply & Exchange, Digital Turbine

The Plight of Measurement and Addressability

“The cookie is going away. Those who act like it’s already gone are in the best shape. Success boils down to two things – addressability and measurement. Addressability isn’t terribly challenging as identity graphs and clean rooms provide tools to reach desired audiences at scale across partners. The industry is still navigating successful measurement. The result can and will be partially modeled but must pass a CFO and FP&A smell test for believability at the highest levels.” – Jay Friedman, CEO of Goodway Group

A Year of Experimentation and Testing

“As we venture into 2024, the advertising industry is poised to significantly shift toward a ‘Privacy-First’ approach in personalized advertising. This year will consist of constant experimentation and testing, a period where the performance of campaigns may see fluctuations and instability. Marketers will need to adapt swiftly, exploring new methodologies for targeting and measurement.

Companies will increasingly tap into AI and machine learning, creating hyper-personalized content that respects user privacy. This involves leveraging aggregated and anonymized data to serve relevant ads, ensuring individual privacy remains intact.

Additionally, 2024 will witness a surge in transparency tools, empowering consumers to monitor and control how brands utilize their data. This will cultivate a deeper sense of trust and compliance.

In this era of experimentation, the advertising world will strive to meet privacy norms and seek to enrich the user experience. To adapt to these changes, the advertising industry must be nimble, ready to embrace new ways of targeting and measuring, ensuring advertising remains effective and respectful in an increasingly privacy-conscious world.” – Angelina Eng, VP of Measurement, Addressability, and Data Center at IAB. 

The post Lock and Key: AdMonsters 2024 Privacy Predictions appeared first on AdMonsters.

For better or worse, Publishers are always left bearing the brunt of industry shifts. With addressability shifting into something different, many wonder how we will continue to target and reach our audiences.

The cookie phase-out process is here, and word on the street is that Chrome will be obfuscating the IP address (the cookie of CTV) real soon.

During a panel titled “The Future of Addressability: The Portfolio View,” Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, sat down with Shobha Doshi, SVP of Programmatic Strategy & Operations at Raptive, Ryan McConville EVP of Ad Platforms & Operations at NBCUniversal, and Mike Nuzzo, SVP of Hearst Data Solutions at Hearst Magazines. Each panelist outlined how they are approaching addressability today.

One thing we all know to be true is that there is no one solution; publishers should instead consider the “patchwork quilt” of solutions that are at their fingertips. With a catalog of over 5,000 publishers, Doshi highlighted that Raptive is currently in the test iterative stage. She encourages publishers to continue testing and exploring to see what works and what doesn’t.

At NBCU, they are rebuilding their signaling around first-party identity. With Peacock and their other digital endpoints totaling around 300, they had to find a way to coordinate those varying identities across everything. Having recently launched the NBC Unified identity platform, their strategy is to elevate it to live primarily on first-party identity signals.

When asked how Hearst thinks about the future of addressability, Nuzzo kept it simple. “We’re doing a lot of testing, learning, and just making sure we’re following the law,” he shared. From his perspective, the onus has been on publishers to solve for innovation. Innovation and identity are increasingly challenging because, again, there is no one solution.

Future-Proofing Alongside Hefty Privacy Constraints

Privacy regulations are evolving in Europe, and while a handful of states with state-led privacy regulations are already in place, three more states will be enforcing privacy sanctions next year: Montana, Oregon, and Texas. India also just passed a privacy law. 

What alternative solutions are publishers seeking to maintain an addressable ecosystem while complying with privacy regulations? 

“I think it’s hard, and that’s why I said the legal piece earlier,” Nuzzo explained. “Consent management platforms are in a good place right now, we need them contextually.” At Hearst, the focus is on understanding common taxonomies and how they apply that to their audiences algorithmically. Gen AI is also something they are pushing towards. 

For McConvile and NBCU, the product team is essential to maneuvering the privacy landmine. Media and entertainment companies have privacy product managers who enforce all privacy regulations. Rather than creating nuances for each state’s privacy laws, they look to the states with the most conservative ones and use those as a baseline.

Privacy and big tech are the two big bad wolves of the industry, but which one is scarier? 

It’s no surprise that Nuzzo from Hearst says it’s the legal side. No publisher wants to come out of pocket and pay off the government for not having the right privacy policy. McConnvile went with big tech, considering the different platform policies that publishers must abide by. 

“Operating system policies like Apple’s override our terms and conditions, so if you sign up for Peacock on an Apple device and agree to NBCU’s terms and then opt out of Apple, it overrides our terms and conditions completely. I don’t think users actually understand that they’re making that choice,” McConvile explained. 

The IP Address Is the Cookie of CTV

While CTV doesn’t operate on cookies, it does use IP addresses for audience targeting. This makes IP addresses the cookies of CTV. One or both will put a velvet rope around the web and obfuscate the IP address.

What will happen next as the IP address becomes effectively deprecated by big tech?

Doshi, SVP of Programmatic Strategy & Operations at Raptive, thinks the IP address signal loss would reduce graph strength for everyone. “It makes regulatory compliance hard, especially if there are different state-by-state regulations that may conflict,” she explained. “There are no good solutions right away, and solutions will differ per environment since regulations differ per environment. We may see some advantages on desktop, but the long road ahead is to figure out how to make it work.”

Nuzzo had an opposite opinion, “I think the IP address for us opens up an opportunity that we haven’t explored as publishers,” he said. Also, stating that there are actually a lot of good use cases for the deprecation of the IP address that we haven’t thought of. “I hope the industry allows us to explore that before they cut off at the knees,” he said. 

The IP address powers a lot of how performance TV works since viewers don’t click on their televisions to buy something. The IP address connects the devices in your household. “You have a smart TV that lives on an IP address, and you have a mobile phone that lives on that IP address,” McConville explained. “So if you see an ad on Peacock on your smart TV, you can buy the sneakers from that ad on your mobile phone.”

The industry will have many holes to fill if the IP address is deprecated because, aside from targeting, the IP address is crucial for cross-device measurement. There is also some interesting work on an Internet service provider level to future-proof the ability to tie IP signals to a deterministic household in a privacy-compliant way.

From a fraud vector perspective, the IP address is used for many fraud detection and data security issues as you start to proxy through a single IP address or VPN on the web. This opens up many fraud and data security issues for advertising and health, tech, finance, and national defense implications. 

In short, IP addresses have many uses in the advertising ecosystem beyond targeting. Many publishers will have to think through and plan for the many implications.

Is First-Party Data the New Oil in Our Industry?

When it comes to first-party data, we are somewhat in a world of the haves and have-nots. The walled gardens have had identity for many years, but everyone outside of them had an alternative architecture through cookies they could function on. 

 Publishers and brands have to create a value exchange to get the data. There are tons of data-rich companies, like Amazon, for example. You are unable to use any Amazon entity without logging in. Publishers need to make sure that their consumer product teams are creating a system for authenticating users and communicating the value exchange to garner more logins. 

Now is the time, more than ever, for companies that have not traditionally collected first-party identity signals to figure out smart ways of doing it. “On the cohorting side over at NBCUniversal, they have done some really interesting tests with seed data using AI and content. 

“We fed our content into an AI engine, scanned all the contextual metadata for all the content, and then created lookalike models using that more granular data set. By using this AI deep contextual metadata, which is also our first-party data, we found that the segments performed much better,” said McConville. 

At Hearst, there are tiers of data assets at their disposal, so it doesn’t have to be explicit logins. They collect 4 trillion data points on their users monthly, which is precious data. Recently, they conducted a study and saw a 140% increase in click-through rate when they applied both contextual and behavioral into one segment for the advertiser. 

“We’ve lived on this behavioral journey for so long, where the mentality was just follow the consumer around, and they’ll buy my shoes,” Nuzzo said. “This may be true, but when you serve 5000 impressions to them versus if you serve them the right content, you’ll have to do far less of that, and the interaction rate will improve.”

Where Do We Go From Here?

As an industry, we have a nasty habit of waiting until the last minute before we react to changes. We have built a solid muscle on the third-party cookie, so is there a sense of urgency in Q1 of 2024? Probably not. 

Patrick McCann, SVP of Research at Raptive, also led a main-stage discussion highlighting how more publishers need to start testing the Privacy Sandbox. Raptive hopes that we will discuss how the buy side is ingesting and understanding some of that data next year. 

Clean rooms were also discussed, and McConville predicts that we will see some real commercial action coming out of Clean Room integrations because there was a long time when they weren’t being utilized. With Amazon and Google PAIR, we see real commercial examples of bringing first-party data service into these data clouds.

Nuzzo thinks we will talk about gen AI in the spring of 2024 and finally have some real learnings from it. We will finally have some metrics to see what works, and what doesn’t work. 

The post Addressing the Future: Publisher Perspectives on Data, Privacy, and the Road Ahead appeared first on AdMonsters.

In August 2022, the IAB Tech Lab released a set of video ad standards that changed the definition of instream and outstream video. 

The updated guidelines defined instream video as sound on and playing before, during, or after streaming video content that the user requested, delivering within a player, monetizing content the publisher provided, and including linear and nonlinear ads, which didn’t need to be videos.

Unfortunately, those updates created a challenging video ad landscape for publishers, especially smaller ones. About 90% of what used to be considered instream inventory was now labeled outstream. In addition, it restricted plenty of quality inventory from being labeled as instream, thus wounding both publishers’ and advertisers’ capabilities. 

To remedy this mistake, the IAB Tech Lab has further amended their 2022 video ad updates to redefine the meaning of instream and outstream video inventory. 

Jenn Chen, President and CRO, Connatix 

Andrew Byrd: Can you walk me through, more specifically, exactly how publishers were struggling with the previous standards?

Jenn Chen: The industry had standards to define instream, but they needed to explain it more clearly. Part of the new definition puts the onus on the publisher to amend how their videos are showing. The video will either have audio or have a bunch of other things to oversimplify it. 

The challenge was a surprise because tons of publishers have excellent video content. For years, they intentionally showed video content without audio, even if there was an abysmal experience because it’s very interruptive for the user. Consequently, most of what they want to convert will take time and investment. 

Even if they don’t want to convert to audio, they have to make highly relevant videos and create something from scratch that matches the article exactly, or they have to change their entire page layout to conform to some of these other requirements. It began a slippery slope where the industry struggled to monetize the video inventory. It has implications for their business model and how advertisers perceive their website’s quality. It also created a new way of pricing a marketplace and a much more rigorous and calculated approach to defining video.

Luca Bozzo, Associate Director Programmatic Partnerships, Connatix

Andrew Byrd: The recent video ad updates were to help rectify the challenges the initial standards created. What are the more recent updates? 

Luca Bozzo: The working group set out to solve some of these issues by slightly expanding the definition of instream to the root of its meaning. The heart of instream is simply video that the consumer requested and consumed. For example, if a consumer searches YouTube for a video and clicks on it, that is instream content. 

But there are other ways to signal intent other than sound on. Sound on is one way, but if a consumer clicks to start the video experience, that can infer intent to consume. Suppose they go to the video section of a website. In that case, there’s nothing else to watch other than video content, so even if it starts witj sound off, it technically still would be content that the consumer requested and hence instream. The main goal at first was to broaden that definition. 

Chris Kane, Founder, Jounce Media

Andrew Byrd: You have a very well-rounded overview of the state of the internet and the supply chain. How do you think the struggle to define instream vs. outstream affects the supply chain overall? 

Chris Kane: Every ad tech company, The Trade Desk, Google, Magnite, and PubMatic, has inventory quality standards, which tend to be extensive sprawling documents. It is impossible to enforce those policies comprehensively. The goals are aspirational. This is how we would like to run our ad tech platform, recognizing that we will never achieve 100% compliance with these policies, but we’re striving to get as close to 100% as possible.

There was some ambiguity in the definition of instream versus outstream. It was hard for DSPs to enforce an ambiguous standard, and the video supply landscape got sloppy over the last five years. That’s the backdrop for why IAB Tech Lab, Connatix, The Trade Desk, and others are trying to get organized on video standards.

AB: The next step is to establish these new guidelines as an industry standard, and the Trade Desk announced that they would start implementing the new measures. Will this help move the needle along? 

CK: I’m more pessimistic about this than I was a couple of weeks ago. The first step that needs to happen in the industry is that the IAB tech lab needs to build consensus around a standard, and they’ve done that. They struck out the first go-round, but now there’s a consensus around this new set of criteria. Now some powerful ad tech company needs to go and enforce those standards. Nobody needs to comply until a giant buyer says you must comply, or I’m not spending money.

That means that The Trade Desk or Google must start enforcing the standards. If they required accurate video inventory labeling, that would push the industry in a good direction.

Paul Bannister, Chief Strategy Officer, Raptive

Andrew Byrd: The end goal for the updates is to create industry-wide standards. Is this something the ad tech industry needs to work on? 

Paul Bannister: Standardization benefits every advertising medium — CTV, video display, mobile, etc. The more we can standardize and increase transparency, the more we can make it so buyers know what they’re buying and feel they can trust who they’re buying from. Sign us up all day to make those standards happen and push those things forward — a cleaner, more transparent, and more well-lit industry creates more opportunities for publishers, advertisers, and creators to win.

The post IAB Tech Lab’s Video Ad Guidelines: The Journey to Industry-Wide Implementation appeared first on AdMonsters.