5 Digital Media Buying Trends for 2017

In light of varying accounts of digital advertising fraud from misguided digital media buying, our top-down understanding reflects that digital account managers will start to focus their attention on the individual end customer conversion rate optimization more than they will on the overall campaign.

For this reason, we believe that five trends will envelop the neocortex that rationalizes the decision making behind the procurement of digital media

Fraud Detection Or Else

It's a billion dollar problem and companies like Adjust as solving it. From bots to routed traffic, fake impressions have done a number on the industry's credibility. Thankfully, planners as a community responded quickly to work with their clients in creating fraud detection and prevention tools and frameworks. Expect publishers to comply with the preferred detection company of its agency partner and vice versa.

Video for Customer Mindshare

To tap into the semantic neocortex of its customer, the advertiser has accepted the new reality of video and so must the publisher. In a classic cat and mouse scenario, publishers will be expected to have digital video ad formats, beyond YouTube hosted.

Publishers Offering Premium Visitors

In a world that has adopted adblocking in droves, publishers will turn toward native advertising as an additional revenue channel. They will also position themselves as a premium destination for a niche in-market segment as identified by analytic's. By recognizing their in-market segments visiting their sites and reading their content, publishers will segment their media kits to reflect what advertisers want in quality inventory. Digital media buyers will be happy to point towards this data when assessing the validity behind purchasing said inventory.

Maturing Marketing Automation

We created C2 to help our clients segment users beyond demographics, deriving actionable data to sift them by behavior and psychography as well. We believe programmatic tools will further evolve to minimize human interaction with them. Today's segments are spread across designated market area's (DMA's). Programmatic tools will be able to buy inventory in advance prior to any new campaign so long as all the data is fed such as preferred price, ideal impressions and DMA's.

Mobile, Mobile and Then Mobile

The mobile customer is well, mobile. They are not confined to a purchase when home in front of their desktop. This means they can be reached throughout their customer journey, even in store. Your product may be complementary to them, your in-market segment may come one step before another e.g. car ownership before mechanics. Digital media buying will be preferred for publishers that have evergreen content (like Quora) with a primarily mobile base.