Jay Friedman, partner and COO at Goodway Group, shares his insight into the ad tech future resulting from the explosion caused by header bidding.  His core notion is that the vast number of queries generated by programmatic ad buying are forcing overload on both the supply and demand side of the ad equation.  The quantities are swamping the systems and will inevitably force consolidation.

As an example, Friedman talks of a web page that today generates 120 bid requests for four ad positions as limiting to maybe five, the number of DSP’s with the infrastructure to handle the volume.  Similarly, on the supply side Friedman sees the real need for only “three display, three video, three native and a couple of mobile SSPs.”

The message is that we may be coming to the end of the Wild West stage of programmatic expansion and that we should expect the market to exercise some law and order in the foreseeable future.   Source: eMarketer

Chinese millennials (18-34 year olds) are the country’s most ardent overseas travelers, well out of proportion to patterns in the west.  And it is projected that they will be taking 70% of the trips by 2020. Using data from Phocuswright’s industry tracker, analysis from Bloomberg Intelligence says, “As China’s travel market takes off, all eyes should be on the country’s roughly 400 million millennials, who will drive spending on airfare, hotels, theme parks, casinos and cruises.”

Blatant plug: mPoint recommends that travel-related advertisers reach that audience through our Chinese-oriented networks.  Source: Bloomberg.com

A conversation with Eunice Kim, media planner with Toyota North America revealed an expansive view of programmatic’s evolving future. She sees ever-expanding data targeting as “more measurement points, targeting capabilities and data signals” become available. At the extreme end of the spectrum she imagines emotion-based targeting, that is, targeting based on what is known about a consumer’s “personality traits or their emotional state” as a step beyond mere demographic data. Ultimately, AI enters the targeting sphere.

The possibilities create Minority Report level intensity, but before we get to the outer edges of the programmatic universe, we first must conquer the treacheries of viewability and ad fraud that are restraining our current world.  Source: eMarketer

A survey of 500 British marketers revealed a litany of concerns they have with regard to transparency in the mobile programmatic world. Overlying the direct concerns, as expressed in the table, is the belief among 74% of the respondents that mobile programmatic is either ‘as confusing’ or ‘more confusing’ than programmatic for the desktop. Here’s the kicker: In spite of the all these concerns fully 60% of the respondents said they intended to increase their programmatic mobile ad spend in the next year. Apparently, the power of the market trend toward programmatic ad buying and toward mobile usage is undeniable.  Source: Netimperative.com

Sitting in the west, the dominance of Amazon is felt daily.  The view from China is quite different.  There Tmall by Alibaba and JD.com represent 84.2% of the market while the remainder of the market is made up of more than eight smaller players including Amazon at a measly 0.9%.  It is a example of China’s singularity.  In the biggest digital sectors – search and e-commerce – they separate themselves from the rest of the developed world, which explains the challenges in trying to penetrate that lucrative market.  Sources: eMarketer, International Enfodesk