(Some of) What’s Old is New Again: Ad Tactics in 2024
(Some of) What’s Old is New Again: Ad Tactics in 2024
April 15, 2024
Back when digital advertising began in the late ‘90’s, your best option for targeting was to place ads on sites where your audience frequently visited. After a multi-decade journey away from “buying the site” toward the hot new thing—“buy the audience”—the world of advertising is changing again.
Programmatic and demand-side platforms have seen alarming declines in efficacy over the past 5 years. Cookie-blockers, ad blockers, browser do-not-track settings, mobile OS privacy updates, and display ad fraud have put the hurt on “buy the audience”. And while this approach still works well on the closed social ad networks, it’s time to rethink “buy the site”.
Not site-direct buying, mind you. Such an approach is massively over-priced in most cases. But thinking about your audience and the content they consume—the sites they visit. This will pay off in advertising via network-driven site and contextual planning. Expect this tactical shift to accelerate with the upcoming end of third-party cookies later in 2024.