Data-Driven Thinking Archives - Page 2 of 8

The Race To The Bottom Is Over. Advertisers Care About Quality Again

Digital advertising has long promised precision and efficiency. But our obsession with “following the audience” has allowed low-quality sites and vanity metrics to thrive while brand integrity suffers. This singular focus on targeting audiences and measuring their impact through typically non-incremental attribution, rather than evaluating media quality, has steered us off course. The digital landscape […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Politics Have Changed. Here’s How Political Advertisers Can Adapt

Reflection a couple of weeks after election day is inevitable. But planning for what’s next is where the real impact lies. Political ad strategies evolved quickly this year, as campaigns moved beyond exclusivity, focusing on flexibility and reach. Here’s what this cycle taught us and how it will guide our business in the medium term.

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Data-Driven Thinking

Marketing Has Made Great Progress, But Media Is Still A Minimum Viable Product

This December, Sequent Partners will say farewell to the advertising and media industries. After 21 years of devising innovative ways to improve the effectiveness of advertising investments, we’ve decided it’s time. Freedom and the open road beckon. We will be retiring from media consulting. And while we will continue to provide assistance to the industry […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

From Banners To Generative AI: How Two Digital Revolutions Redefined The Future Of Marketing

On October 27, 1994, I watched history unfold as the first-ever digital banner ads ran on HotWired.com. Roughly a dozen ads went live that day, catapulting the world of advertising into a new era. As we mark the 30th anniversary of that monumental milestone, I can’t help but draw parallels between that moment and the […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Balancing Accuracy, Richness And Scale For Effective Audience Targeting

Digital advertisers should be able to agree that there are about 345 million people in the US, making up about 133 million households. But, historically, media buying has been all about scale, even if it meant outrageously false population counts on audience segments. More recently, advertisers have started to accept that there is a correlation […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Advertisers, Brace Yourselves: The Era Of Paid, Ad-Free Social Media Is Here

Ad-free subscriptions are coming to social media. Snapchat was actually one of the first social platforms to offer a monthly subscription, starting in 2022. Its $3.99 Snapchat+ plan provides subscribers with exclusive, experimental and prerelease features (but still features ads). Snapchat+ had 11 million subscribers in August 2024, an increase of 6 million since September […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

CAPI Isn’t A Band-Aid For Cookie Deprecation. It’s An Essential Solution

With Google’s recent U-turn around third-party cookie deprecation, it’s easy to think there’s no rush to adopt alternative data strategies like conversion API (CAPI). But that’s a dangerous assumption. CAPI is a tool developed by platforms such as Meta, LinkedIn and Snap to help businesses track customer interactions and conversions directly from their server, bypassing […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

The Industry Pullback From Cookie-Based Tech Proves Cookies Are Already Dead

The cookie is already gone. The budgets have shifted. All the howlers screaming about Chrome’s road map for deprecation are akin to the last soldiers standing on the battlefield clinging to the flag of a fallen nation. In short, it’s over. But we can’t measure the downfall of cookies by looking at the bidstream. There […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Google Antitrust Drama: Why YouTube Will Thrive No Matter The Verdict

In its antitrust suit against Google, the US Department of Justice is portraying the company as a monopolistic giant, but the reality of Google’s ad tech business – and its future – is far more complex and evolutionary. The courtroom drama is drawing attention away from the real changes already reshaping the industry. These shifts […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

How To Make Google’s Network Business A Force For Good

For all the fireworks and detailed coverage of US v. Google – including financial disclosures that thrilled our analyst hearts – no one has yet suggested a sensible way to unpick the hideously complex “spaghetti football” of the world’s largest ad tech business. Closing arguments in the case aren’t until the end of November, but […]

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