Digital marketing trends 2013 for publishers

by Andries de Jonge

1. Balance will return between premium and remnant revenue. There will be a shift in balance from an obsession with volume to a focus on value, with emphasis placed on maximising the value of premium inventory rather than a fixation on low-value remnant inventory, which, at the end of the day, has little real impact on profitability.

2. Remnant inventory will be replaced by direct deals. 'New RTB' is about having the extension to identify not only the buyer clearly, not just the advertiser, but the order ID as well.

3. Rise of private exchanges, publishers will be the owner of the relationship with the advertisers.

4. Service will make the difference; clients will need more in-depth reporting that shows visibility, context and time visible for digital ads.

5. Processes will be more automated. Programmatic buying is going to play a major role in helping publishers to deliver to advertisers, for premium as well as remnant.

6. Publishers are entering the online media landscape being advertisers via audience extension. They will generate more premium revenue by leveraging their audiences across the web. Publishers need to treat their audience like an asset.

7. Protection of ePrivacy and data. The fact is, we need, as far as possible, a simple and uniform way of addressing e-privacy.

8. An increase of contextual buying due to the cookie legislation. The possibility to track customers belongs to the past.

9. Importance of logged-in relationships. The biggest challenge is enabling advertisers to reach audiences on a variety of devices. The two big ones are the state of cookies on mobile devices and the increasing device fragmentation of a given user across phone, tablet, laptop, work computer and soon online television. Having logged-in relationships with users helps solve some of the complexities of managing a cross-device relationship with your users.

10. Cross platform and device real time selling from a single dashboard.