Eyeota 2019 Predictions: Data and the Ecosystem

As we close out a landmark year for audience data, let's take a look at what industry trends and developments we predict we'll see in 2019.

Kevin Tan, CEO and Co-founder

Trend: Market consolidation & New players

“As we enter 2019, we will see the market continue to consolidate. More and more smaller companies will realize the benefits of being part of another platform. Bigger publishers and telcos will build up their own vertical strategies, acquiring their own technologies to compete with the ‘walled gardens.’ We will continue to see new players buying up parts of the ad tech stack including technology and enterprise companies, media buying agencies and management consultancies. There is also a lot of private equity money in the sector as they are backing certain management teams that they feel have been effective in building and leading businesses.

In the wider technology landscape, we will see greater convergence of digital and traditional media.”

Pieter de Zwart, Chief Technology Officer

Trend: Cookies in the current ad tech ecosystem

“The war on cookies is going to come to an inflection point. Browsers vendors, ad tech companies and the publishing community as a whole will need to explore how users are tracked and advertising works online.

Trend: Vertical integration

“Consolidation and vertical integration are going to accelerate. I expect more and more companies built out their in-house resources. This is not only going to increase local optimizations but also the friction of interactions as the industry will require more interconnections between parties and more distributed knowledge and power.”

Jill Orr, COO

Trend: Transparency

“As America, Brazil and Europe (via ePrivacy) lean into more extensive privacy regulation and personal data protection,  we will see a further emphasis on transparency and close strategic partnerships and alliances. After a period of “GDPR test and learn” in Europe, marketers who require more control over how and where data is captured and activated will push for consistency and trading standards across the industry.  This will play well for both data owners and publishers who are capitalizing on the control compliance and transparency tools they can now provide to marketers so that there will be an increased level of confidence in the trade and exchange of data.”

Chris Emme, MD Americas

Trend:Data Wars

“2015-2017 were the 'DSP Wars'; agencies and brands focused considerable time determining which platforms they would elect to activate their programmatic media. 2019 will be the year the 'Data Wars' kick-off; agencies and brands will scrutinize and determine what their data strategy is to be used in the platforms they have elected.”

Aaron Jackson, MD International

Trend: Custom is the new black

“GDPR has forced the market into a clarification point and I think data is going to become cleaner.  We are going to start seeing a range of custom data products that are built for particular brands, in the form of custom segments, private data marketplaces or publisher alliances so advertisers will understand better where the data comes from. 

There is also lot of opportunity around the cleaning and harnessing the data that exists so businesses will need to build out strategies around this.”

Priya Khatri, GM Asia

Trend: Programmatic usage

“There will be a more sophisticated use of programmatic locally as industry education levels rise on both the demand and supply side. Emerging markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and India will experience a spike in data usage as their programmatic buys are moving towards being precision-led whilst e-commerce data and transactions will become more significant in markets like Indonesia & India.”

If you need help with using audience data, making sense of the data you currently have or building data monetization strategies then contact us.