Wei Tuck Ng
Feb 16, 2024

APAC trends for 2024: Fragmentation, attention, and AI

What are going to be the top trends in advertising in 2024? Based on DoubleVerify’s analysis, here are some of the top trends that marketers in APAC should keep in mind as they plan for the new year.

Wei Tuck Ng, senior manager of client analytics, APAC, DoubleVerify.
Wei Tuck Ng, senior manager of client analytics, APAC, DoubleVerify.
PARTNER CONTENT
What trends should be top-of-mind for APAC marketers as we enter the new year? DoubleVerify identifies four significant trends that will shape media in the region in 2024 with insights from DV’s Global Insights Report and “Raising the Bar in APAC: How media quality and performance drive outcomes,” a media quality report DV produced in partnership with WARC.
 
Fragmented reality
 
Our digital ecosystem is becoming increasingly fragmented due to shifting consumer behaviours, emerging channels, and global privacy regulation shifts. Regional differences further amplify this complexity, making it impossible to apply a universal strategy for success. Within APAC, it’s also essential to consider region-specific trends such as the evolution of social media from connections to commerce, the growth of retail media, and the continued rise of connected television (CTV) and gaming channels. 
 
Marketers face opportunities and challenges in this fragmented environment, with media quality being crucial, especially in emerging channels like CTV. According to the WARC Marketer’s Toolkit survey, 35% of APAC marketers said audience fragmentation was a top concern — and for good reason. According to DV’s 2023 Global Insights Report, while APAC saw a 2% decrease in brand suitability violations, media quality varied widely from market to market. 
 
For example, brand suitability violations in Australia increased by 22% in 2022, largely due to mobile web usage. Meanwhile, India’s fraud and sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) violation rates remained the lowest in the region despite rising by 7% in 2022, and the market also saw its viewable video ads drop by 6%. With increasing audience fragmentation and variation in media quality across channels and markets, now more than ever, advertisers need a consistent way to measure quality and performance.  
 
Retail media booms in APAC
 
While the global ad industry has slowed in recent years due to macroeconomic instability, APAC is bucking the trend. One channel of increasing focus within the region is retail media networks (RMNs). With the deprecation of third-party cookies causing signal loss on the open web, more and more advertisers are turning to RMNs to tap into first-party data and connect with shoppers at the point of conversion. According to research from IAB, 99% of APAC marketers said they plan to increase their retail media spend over the next 12 months — much higher than other markets like the US, the UK, France, and Germany.
 
Homegrown retail media super apps like Carousell, Grab, Lazada, and Tokopedia are supplanting traditional search-led discovery, giving advertisers new opportunities to get in front of consumers. As the industry pivots away from cookie-based solutions, it’s likely that more companies across different industries — for example, hospitality or telecommunications — will transform their first-party data into media businesses.
 
As with any new channel, it’s important to consider media quality risks. DV’s 2023 Global Insights Report revealed that audience extension in retail media poses a 129% higher brand suitability violation rate than owned-and-operated retail sites. However, ad verification can help marketers identify high-performing inventory, with a 91% higher viewable rate observed on owned-and-operated inventory. 
 
The rise of the attention economy
 
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%.
 
AI: Transforming advertising as we know it
 
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. 
 
To discover more insights, download the full DV x WARC report or the Global Insights Report from DoubleVerify.
 
Wei Tuck Ng is senior manager of client analytics, APAC, at DoubleVerify. 

 

Source:
Campaign Asia

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