Each week, NDA Editor Justin Pearse will be casting his eye over some of the week’s more important industry stories and highlights must-read articles you may have missed.
Effective media measurement across the vast proliferation of different media and devices used by people today has long dogged the industry, making it incredibly difficult to allocate budgets in the most profitable manner. So Campaign’s story that “WFA says it has cracked cross-media measurement”, was particularly welcome.
The organisation has spent the last year and a half working with the likes of Google and Facebook and has developed a cross-media framework and solution with advertisers’ best interests at heart. As the story outlines in detail, the work was incredibly wide-ranging featuring seriously impressive cross-industry collaboration with a who’s who of brands and associations.
More relatively cheerful news this week on ad spend forecasts, with a story in Adexchanger reporting that digital ad sales were up 5.7% in the first half of year, according to a new Magna forecast.
What’s particularly interesting in the story is the rise in digital spending by small businesses, as local businesses embraced the lifeline, a behavioural shift that is likely to become established. Yet another example of the potential positive impact of the pandemic in demonstrating the power of digital media and commerce to new businesses and sectors. As the article states, “rather than cutting, SMBs embraced digital as a lifeline during the lockdowns. Many local businesses that previously hadn’t prioritized ecommerce started to do so in a big way, and you can expect that trend to continue.”
At The Drum, Rebecca Stuart wrote a great piece on crisis comms in the age of the social media backlash, The new crisis PR: what should brands do when they’re ‘cancelled’?. A great read for anyone with responsibility for helping brand navigate the often treacherous social media landscape.
With the death of the third-party cookie now of course very much soon to be reality, Lara O’Reilly takes a fascinating look at what Vice is doing to get ready, finding out how its “first-party data strategy aims to improve its registration process and double down on contextual ads.”
The pandemic has unleashed many strange new behaviours and, to those of following the struggles of new technologies to tip over into mainstream acceptance, the rise of the QR code has to be one of these. The humble QR code has quickly become a standard new everyday behaviour for most of us. As a useful article on this subject in Marketing Week sums up, “In the fast-moving world of pandemic protocols and etiquette, the QR code – studiously ignored by most western consumers since it was designed in 1994 – might finally be showing its worth.”
Finally, with no ATS London this year, Exchangewire’s put together a very entertaining video of highlights of the last ten years of the essential adtech jamboree. Which, along with Ciaran’s always unique latest predictions piece, makes the site the perfect end to your week.
