IAB Europe held its annual Interact conference in Milan last week. The event brought together a broad network of European stakeholders to address serious questions about the digital advertising industry with sharp discussions. According to AdEx, the European digital ad sector grew by 11.1% in 2023. IAB Europe’s Chief Economist, Daniel Knapp, provided detailed analysis applying lenses of inflation, consumer price index and the general market conditions. IAB Canada took note of some key highlights from the discussions as they point towards emerging global themes.
- Growth is coming primarily from CTV and Retail Media in Europe as the pipelines continue to develop and inventory become more readily available programmatically.
- Search is shifting from traditional towards social and retail engines which helps to maintain its share of expenditure.
- While advertisers continue to focus their efforts on performance media, the realization of creative dependency for success in these channels is driving the use of AI for the purposes of efficiency.
- On the policy front, the maturing GDPR legislation is now shifting debate from initial compliance to deeper interpretations around ethics. Consent or Pay is an example of the type of discussions that are driving most of the debate.
- Although there is progress being made in cross-media measurement, panelists agreed that the issue would not be solved within the next two years.
- There was some optimism on cookie deprecated addressability but also an important reminder that cookie deprecation was not singularly focused on advertising as a use case – advertisers are encouraged to better understand their entire touch point ecosystem to see which areas are impacted and how.
- Concerns around carbon emissions – the industry continues to move towards measurement, and most have plans in place to cut emissions.
As IAB Canada prepares for State of the Nation, it is critical to take learnings from all IAB markets to provide our community with the latest perspectives and provide some fair warning on emerging issues. With the revenue report being finalized in the coming days, we look forward to providing a fulsome report to the industry.
