Digital media revolutionized advertisers’ targeting capabilities. But regulatory and commercial updates are changing how advertisers can find and reach audiences in digital media. Read on to understand how the ecosystem is dealing with ad targeting trends in 2021.

On today's episode, we discuss why digital subscription growth is slowing, what's happening to publishers' digital ad revenues, and where their non-ad, non-subscription revenues are coming from. We then talk about how ads around print and digital news perform, whether targeting gets too much credit, and Nielsen's plans to cut ties with third-party cookies. Tune in to the discussion with eMarketer senior analyst at Insider Intelligence Audrey Schomer.

Amazon fined under GDPR: The tech giant was fined €746 million for using consumer shopping data for ad targeting without consent—which doesn’t bode well for other Big Tech companies that are facing privacy-related scrutiny.

Consumer card purchases were up 24% in the first half of 2021, according to Commerce Signals’ Consumer Spend Tracker. This presents an opportunity for B2C marketers to tap into card transaction data to gain consumer and competitive insights, perform sales lift measurement, targeting, and more. eMarketer was pleased to moderate a Tech-Talk Webinar featuring Nick Mangiapane, CMO at Commerce Signals, a Verisk business.

LinkedIn had a very strong 2020, during which its total ad revenues grew 31.3%, driven by its Marketing Solutions as B2Bs focused on targeting audiences working from home.

Traditionally, linear TV ad buys have used content as a proxy for audience characteristics. Field Garthwaite, co-founder and CEO at video data firm iris.tv, joins eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin to discuss bringing content signals to video advertising, where typically targeting has been based only on audience characteristics or the context of a webpage—which may not match with the content of the video itself.

India cracks down on ecommerce giants: The country proposed regulations that would ban ecommerce sites from hosting flash sales or listing affiliated entities as sellers on their platforms, which could spell trouble for players like Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart.

For decades, traditional TV advertisers have targeted ad messages at households. Jon Schulz, CMO at programmatic ad firm Viant Technology, joins eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin to discuss why even in the digital era it still makes sense to do so, and why advertiser spend will continue to shift into programmatic connected TV and linear TV.

Latino-focused Fortú rolls out with support from SoFi, LendingClub: Fortú will serve un- and underbanked US Latinos—and it has the opportunity to gain traction by initially targeting underserved consumers within a market of around 60 million Latinos.

Mobile games to stop targeting ads to kids: Some major developers and ad tech companies will need to stop tracking children under 13 after settling a lawsuit, limiting their targeting abilities.

Google's Chrome wasn't the first browser to put the kibosh on third-party cookies. Phil Acton, country manager for the UK, Benelux, and France at end-to-end programmatic platform Adform, joins eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin to discuss how the company has been testing cookieless targeting with publishers in Europe, where Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox have significant market share, as well as the importance of supply path optimization (SPO).

Marketers focused on precision targeting will be implementing paid social strategies to improve ad effectiveness and relevance. However, if advertisers experience declines in performance and are able to tie these drops to ineffective targeting, they may opt to shift spending into less-impacted social platforms or marketing channels. Ad Experience.

It’s no small feat, considering that this is a fundamental shift in how Facebook’s ad targeting has worked until now. “Access to [targeting] data will become more limited over the course of the next couple of years,” Mudd told The Verge. “That’s just a reflection, I think, of peoples’ changing expectations around privacy … we’re embracing and trying to build for that future.”.

Without third-party identifiers to broadly enable one-to-one targeting, contextual or cohort-based targeting approaches may serve to ease some of these consumer frustrations in the mid- to longer term.

That shift means that a growing amount of the TV inventory is digital in nature, offering more refined targeting capabilities as well as the ability to drive and track more specific outcomes than is possible through traditional channels. Consumer Adoption and Time Spent.

As we experience fundamental shifts in the way data is used for marketing purposes, the industry has an opportunity to build a more effective advertising framework that puts consumers and data privacy at the center.

Data insights are one of the most effective ways to connect with consumers and deliver personalized marketing messages, but many marketers are unaware of how to leverage this data to create more successful campaigns.

The tradeoff of precisely targeting ads is that it costs advertisers more on a per viewer basis. In negotiations, media companies and vendors selling targeted advertising—TV or digital—argue that the effective cost of reaching consumers with targeted ads is lower because there is less waste.

One-to-one targeting and retargeting practices will diminish in scale as third-party identifiers are voided from the ecosystem, as marketers instead rely on smaller, more fragmented sets of opted-in first-party data. Likewise, contextual or cohort-based targeting approaches may serve to ease some consumer frustrations in the mid- to long term.

More video viewers turn to ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) and free streaming options.