What’s In & Out: Gartner’s Hype Cycle
Gartner reports that 75% of CMO’s face pressure to cut technology spending, even as marketing teams drown in data.
This week I caught Digiday’s SWOT analysis of Gartner’s 2024 digital ad hype cycle. “What is a hype cycle?” you may ask. Similar to fads in fashion or celebrity influencers, some of ad tech’s shiny new objects glow, and others tarnish. Here’s the latest:
Programmatic Segment-Based Advertising: PSBA (we need our acronyms) is a fancy way of explaining advertising audiences that are not identifier-based. E.g. contextual. PSBA struggles with low market penetration, between 1%-5%.
Generative AI: Adoption is growing rapidly. Almost everyone is a bit wary of the future. CMOs are wrangling with its true cost, when considering support, training & governance.
Consumer Data Platforms: Who needs a CDP when you have AI? Marketing teams that want to calibrate AI.
Retail Media Networks: So much promise; insufficient buyer-seller alignment and organization. Gartner warns this hype is headed to the “trough of disillusionment,” which I think I saw in “Game of Thrones.”
Data Clean Rooms: Besides a work-around for identity resolution, there are other developing use-cases – like reach/frequency measurement across walled gardens.
Look For Netflix Inventory Available DMA-based
This week “basic” Netflix subscribers in the US and France started receiving emails that their “basic” plan is sunset, automatically enrolling them into ad-supported plans. Reddit is abuzz. Netflix is apparently forecasting a substantial increase in ad inventory, because we are finally seeing several digital ad networks and DSPs announce DMA-based inventory availability in Q1 2025.
The New Brand Hype is LIT
”In the 2010s, millennials took over the internet with picture-perfect lives, championing muted pink and Target-friendly living rooms. But in the past few years, Gen Z flipped the script by celebrating the messy, the unkept, the real. This was an expression of authenticity in a life lived online, but now, authenticity is becoming less about mess and more about the bold,” – Lilly Smith of Fast Company