The same was true until recently for over-the-top or connected TV advertising. Not anymore.

These two excellent tactics are now fully within reach of average and even small advertising budgets. At CODAVATE, we never want you to spend more on a campaign than is absolutely necessary to achieve the objective. We frequently run geofenced ads (as part of overall campaign tactics) in a spend range as low as $300 to $600! Sometimes that’s all it takes to saturate a small number of physical places with your message.

Likewise, running TV ads isn’t exorbitantly expensive anymore. As the cord-cutting revolt led to everyone streaming their entertainment, gone are the days of buying GRPs and paying rack rates with a broadcaster. The smart money now buys TV ads through digital platforms. And we use CPM pricing blended with data-driven targeting for more effective delivery. TV advertising has become digital advertising! It was just a matter of time.

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.

It was done in haste back in 2023. Most organizations waited until the last minute of June to make the switch from GA3—a robust, seasoned, full-featured, time-tested analytics tool—to the new flavor.

GA4 is… still not ready. As we approach the one-year anniversary of the cutover, users haven’t warmed up to this platform. It looks alien, compared to GA3. The stock reports are hard to use. Realtime measurement is useless. Event tracking is twice as hard as it should be. Meaningful reports have to be custom-built as ‘explorations’. And it only holds 14 months of data.

What are organizations doing? Many are starting to dabble with first-party analytics. After all, why give your data away to a third party that will exhaustively monetize it? First-party tracking may not be done in a day. But once it’s setup on your organization’s site, you can do a lot more with it (in addition to owning it). Interested? Let’s talk.

Programming apps, designing inspiring sites, producing mind-changing videos, reaching hundreds of millions of people with billions of responsibly-targeted impressions. That’s what we’ve been up to.

We love our work because we love the clients we support. They say you’ll never work a day in your life if you love your job. Consider us smitten. Digital is our oxygen. And we’re lucky to practice it for some of the best corporations, trade associations, and nonprofits in America.

You know who you are ;-) and we thank you for trusting us with your online reputation for seven exciting years. Here’s to seven more.