APAC trends for 2024: Fragmentation, attention, and AI

While some pandemic-related trends have disappeared, APAC's increasing appetite for content is here to stay. The challenge now is understanding what content and advertisements are cutting through the noise to capture consumer attention.  

 

How can we measure meaningful attention? While 98% of marketers are using some attention measurement, according to DV’s media quality report in partnership with WARC, there still isn’t an industry consensus on which metrics are most valuable. What is clear is that traditional metrics won’t cut it anymore. Traditional KPIs, such as viewability and clicks, fall short in gauging an ad's impact on viewers, and regulatory changes, including third-party cookie deprecation, limit the effectiveness of dated legacy tools. 

 

We’re already seeing how optimising for attention drives real outcomes for our clients — since working with DV, Mondelēz International increased its brand consideration by 9%, its purchase intent by 8%, and its purchase intention among primary audiences by 8%.

 

Last but not least, the adoption of AI is poised to transform marketing and advertising as we know it. We are on the precipice of a revolution in the industry, akin to the invention of the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, and, more recently, the invention of the internet. 

 

AI poses massive opportunities to streamline workflows and drastically reduce the time and effort required to drive business growth. But, just like programmatic before it, the adoption of AI has to come with careful consideration of its impact on media quality. With generative AI, potential challenges include harmful content, such as misinformation, deep fakes, and the creation of unsafe and unsuitable content.

 

At the same time, the development of AI will have wide-ranging impacts on advertising. In particular, the predictive ability of machine learning to optimise ad performance poses a huge opportunity for marketers to analyse large quantities of data and improve campaign performance in an automated and efficient way.

 

But AI isn’t just something that will affect us in the future. Many companies, DV included, are already using AI every day. We pair machine learning with human oversight to enable the rapid detection of fraud at scale; machine learning also powers our content classification for video and other forms of media, with human oversight acting as a guardrail for accuracy. Finally, we use machine learning to examine the content of our clients’ ads — which, combined with the data from our content classification model, helps us drive campaign optimisation, performance, and cost management for our clients.

 

These are just examples of how AI will be a significant force of change in media and advertising. With its powerful predictive abilities, AI-powered solutions will be employed in myriad ways to help advertisers drive better business outcomes.