If you are running an Ad Tech agency, you are in an “upgrade or die” situation. The Ad Tech industry is undergoing major changes:
Adios Cookies: goodbye tracking pixels and third-party data. Those first-party data channels managing social identities (Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon) will become the only targeting reliable option. As an ad agency, you will have no choice but to integrate with them.
User privacy first: if you are collecting PII data, you better are one-way encrypting it and only using aggregated audience-level data for optimization purposes.
Relationship-based performance: the next big thing in Ad Tech is Graph databases. They have been around for more than a decade. Now with the cloud infinite storage and processing power, the A.I./machine learning low-cost options, you can take your campaigns’ performance to the next level by using relationship data.
How do you turn this into an engineering upgrade plan?
1) Audit your data: make sure you are protecting users PII, and your data is secure and encrypted.
2) API integrations: you need a low-cost strategy to connect with new ad channels (Ads APIs) and make sure your existing integrations don’t break (breaking changes.)
3) Store relationships: especially crucial if your revenue depends on your campaigns’ performance. Make sure you are translating your dimensions/metrics data into a graph model. Then you can use machine learning techniques to identify cohorts (subnetworks) and predict links between data.
Time to roll up your sleeves and take a deep look at your tech stack. As in many other industries, if you innovate, you stay in the game.
