What is ad tech and why should publishers care?

The popularity of digital advertising has been growing in leaps and bounds over the last few years. It is now estimated that digital advertising accounts for over 60% of advertising spend. This growth has pushed businesses to demand higher returns from their advertising spends, eventually resulting in significant investments being made in advertising technology, or ad tech for short, to optimize revenue while driving efficiency and scale. According to Grand View Research, the global ad tech market size was valued at USD 886.19 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.7% from 2023 to 2030. This would mean that the market size would be valued at USD 2,422.35 billion by 2030. Clearly, ad tech is here to stay and businesses that aren’t paying attention will be left behind.

Ad tech refers to the tools, platforms, and technologies used by advertisers, publishers or businesses to enhance their digital advertising operations to ultimately help maximize their revenue potential. Ad tech is leveraged to cover a whole host of activities including automation of ad inventory management, delivering actionable insights to enhance targeting and brand suitability, superior data collection and management and much more. The ad tech space is evolving at a rapid pace with new tools and companies emerging very frequently.

Companies like Google, Adobe, Salesforce, and others offer a gamut of ad tech tools to automate and optimize the digital advertising process. For example, Google offers a comprehensive suite of offerings to cover ad serving and monetization, as well as tools for advanced tracking and analyzing ad performance. Adobe's ad tech solution seamlessly integrates ad purchasing, creative optimization, and campaign management functionalities. It also offers advanced targeting mechanisms and robust analytics features to enhance campaign performance and insights. The examples are endless.

The natural question for most publishers would be ‘what’s in this for me?’ Ad tech will play a key role in enhancing both ad-buying efficiency as well as ad-targeting efficiency. With Apple having completely phased out cookies and Google expected to phase the same out by 2023, businesses have turned toward leveraging contextual advertising to optimize targeting efficiency. Although contextual advertising is not a fresh concept, recent advancements in machine learning, AI and natural language processing (NLP) have unlocked fresh possibilities in this field.

Besides improving audience segmentation, ad tech tools help analyze the context and meaning of the content for webpages and dynamically tailor the ad creative elements based on the contextual environment. This helps enhance ad-targeting by serving ads that not only align with the interests and intent of the audience consuming that specific content, but also delivering ads that are visually and thematically aligned with the customer seeing them, enhancing engagement and relevance.

Ad tech platforms also streamline digital inventory management by automating the ad buying process and enabling dynamic ad buying. Businesses and publishers can use algorithms and real-time bidding on ad tech platforms to automate their ad buying process and efficiently purchase ad inventory across multiple digital channels. This automation helps save time and reduces manual efforts to help free up businesses to focus on other tasks, such as creating and optimizing their ad campaigns.

A study conducted by Forrester Research just when ad tech was picking up revealed that ad tech has the potential to automate approximately 80% of the digital inventory management process. Surprisingly, the study also discovered that only 20% of businesses currently leverage ad tech for automating their inventory management. Ad tech platforms also drive dynamic ad buying by allowing businesses to bid on and purchase ad impressions in real time, which has proven to ensure optimal use of ad budgets and maximize opportunities for reaching the target audience.

Personalized ads are an indispensable part of the customer journey that help brands reach their target audience more effectively and improve their return on investment (ROI). However, to ensure that personalized ads resonate with audiences, brands must rely on ad tech that delivers actionable insights and subsequently drives key advertising processes.

The ad tech space is evolving at a rapid pace and incorporating new technologies, updating privacy compliance capabilities, enhancing data consolidation functionalities and more to ultimately enable businesses to get their money’s worth from digital advertising spending. Seedtag is best placed to help enterprises like yours make sense of the vast ad tech market and help prioritize which tech works best for your business requirements. Get in touch with us at Seedtag not only to help integrate the relevant ad tech but to also subsequently build a comprehensive  digital advertising strategy to maximize returns.