It’s not your imagination: good men (and women) are hard to find. The World Federation of Advertisers found that 77% of marketers said there’s a talent shortage in their organization. In bad news for English majors everywhere, data and analytics skills top the list while creative and social media roles are at the bottom.
Marketers have made less progress with measurement than personalization. Measured reports that more than 80% of direct-to-consumer marketers rely on click-based data from websites and media platforms, even though they know it’s unreliable. Near-infinitesimal fractions use gold standard methods such as incrementality experiments (4.7%) or multi-touch attribution (2.5%). Speaking of which, start-up Incrmntal just raised $4.1 million to make incremental measurement easier.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Google is extending its support of third party cookies in Chrome. They now “intend to begin phasing out” the cookies “in the second half of 2024”, which is a far-from-ironclad commitment. The official reason is to give developers more time to adjust to the Privacy Sandbox APIs, but business and political considerations are also surely at play.
This IAB study finds that connected TV and paid search are expected to be the fastest-growing ad channels next year, while linear TV and other traditional media continue to shrink. More intriguing: marketers are focusing more investment on foundational tools like measurement and first party data, and less on specific ad channels. Download for deep dives into retail media networks and the metaverse.