AudienceScience Research: CMOs turn to technology, not media agencies, to ensure digital advertising success

New research results revealed by global advertising technology and services company AudienceScience® show that only 27% of advertisers feel that having the most talented media agency will contribute to the success of their digital advertising campaigns, while 46% of overall advertisers and 56% of Mega advertisers (spend £40m+) believe that a deeper in-house knowledge of digital advertising technology will be the most important factor in bringing them digital advertising success.

Indeed, 43% of advertisers plan on bringing more responsibility in-house for digital planning within the next 12 months.

These new insights into digital advertising come from a survey AudienceScience carried out with BSB Media and The Vision Network as an exclusive part of the second annual International Media Image Survey (I-MIS) – run in conjunction with the International Advertising Association, Warc and M&M Global.

Mark Connolly, Chief Revenue Officer and VP International at AudienceScience, comments, “Global digital advertising is nearly a $140 billion industry and advertisers continue to spend more and more in digital. Our research shows that although the way advertisers buy media is changing, opacity and complexity of media trading remain a major problem for the industry.  Advertisers are starting to respond to this lack of transparency by taking ownership of their digital advertising away from media agencies and by adopting enterprise technology that ensures transparency and control in-house.” 

The lack of transparency in media trading still remains a huge issue for advertisers: 69% of advertisers feel that media trading transparency across the industry has stayed the same or declined, reflecting the general feeling that the lack of transparency into all costs associated with digital advertising is the biggest problem with digital advertising today. Moreover, 43% of advertisers believe that there are still too many vendors and middlemen associated with buying digital advertising space.

Individually targeted ad campaigns make the most marketing impact: with an increasing proportion (50%) of senior marketers reporting that they plan to invest more in the digital ecosystem in 2015, advertisers are looking at better targeted ad campaigns based on granular audience data in order to optimise the impact of their digital ads. In fact, 60% of brands feel that improvements in the targeting of paid digital media is where the application of audience data has the greatest potential for making a positive marketing impact.  Also, 62% of advertisers see sophisticated analytics as an essential element in creating digital advertising success through enhanced targeting and the ability to create customised messaging.

Marketers are shifting away from contextual buying: While a number of advertisers still allocate a percentage of their digital advertising budget towards contextual buys with specific publishers, the vast majority, 82%, are moving this money away towards audience-targeted buys. Similarly, with the majority of advertisers planning on buying more media via real-time bidding (RTB), the shift to audience-targeted buying is inevitable.

Advertisers are starting to target consumers across devices: As many consumers have more than one digital device, with many having three or four, advertisers are realising the importance of identifying a user across all devices in order to better control frequency and messaging of their ads. Indeed, the vast majority (76%) of brands will plan and buy media across digital screens in order to target people across all their devices.

The survey results have been used to create an in-depth AudienceScience whitepaper on the international digital advertising marketplace which can be downloaded for free here.

Interviews were conducted by InSites Consulting in Spring 2014 with over 795 responders globally including 486 working in agencies, 82 senior advertisers, 189 at media/tech companies and 38 consultants/academics in the media industry.