now we’re 25. - adobe inc. · medal, while the canberra raiders won the premiership and...
TRANSCRIPT
Now we’re 25.Digital advertising grows up.
Think back to what you were doing in 1994.
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If you’re an ad industry veteran, chances are that you or someone you knew was
camping by the fax machine, spending hours sending out buy orders and waiting
for confirmations. Or perhaps you were mocking up print ads using early versions of PageMaker and saving files on SyQuest
disks. Maybe you were still in school, rushing home so you could return in time for the start of an episode of Mr. Squiggle
or Heartbreak High—or you were watching a worn-out copy on a videocassette
recorder. Some of you might not have even been born yet.
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Headlines during 1994 saw Eastern seaboard bushfires in New South Wales grip the nation, while MP John Newman was shot outside his home in Australia's
first political assassination since 1997. Protests kicked off about Sydney Airport's third runway, and telephone numbers in
Australia began transitioning to eight digits. And Australia took its first Winter Olympics medal, while the Canberra Raiders won the
premiership and Muriel's Wedding hit the big screen.
Global TV events saw Australians glued to their TVs, watching the drama of ice skater
Nancy Kerrigan in the run-up to U.S. Nationals and the slow-motion chase of
O. J. Simpson down the Los Angeles freeways.
In the year digital advertising was born, as reported by American magazine
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The Atlantic, it all started with the very first banner ad—a rectangular image on a new website called HotWired.com that simply
challenged visitors to click “right HERE.” And it led us to this point—an industry entering
a new age of maturity after years of innovation and challenge.
We’re celebrating digital advertising’s quarter-century mark with a compilation
of interviews in this report. As we take a trip down memory lane into the industry’s
formative years, not only can we see how far we have come, but we envision the next
steps for digital advertising in the years to come.
Buckle up as we transport you back in time and take you on an
extraordinary journey through the first 25 years of digital advertising.
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The first banner ad— a star is born.
According to John Battelle, co-founding managing editor of Wired magazine, the
technology publication had merely a single mention of the World Wide Web
(WWW) in the first edition (January 1993). “We were very fortunate that we managed
to squeeze one little notation about it in, because otherwise I think some of our
digital bona fides might have been questioned,” he said.
However, the World Wide Web soon came to dominate Wired’s pages, with editors
and journalists feverishly accessing pages using beta versions of Netscape Navigator
or Marc Andreessen’s browser out of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
It wasn't long before a group of Wired team members decided that they needed to
live up to their beliefs and build an online presence of their own. So they created a
separate company, called HotWired, with an entirely separate team than the
magazine's—all in order to get the site off the ground.
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The first digital banner ad, sold by Wired’s advertising team and placed on HotWired,
broke the fourth wall and asked the audience, “Have you ever clicked right HERE?” It
formed part of AT&T’s “You Will” campaign, which focused on what the company
thought the future would bring to telecommunications.
The ad confidently boasted to users, “You will” click—and they did in droves. Battelle
recalls that almost 70 percent of visitors clicked on the ad, while The Atlantic cites a
figure closer to 44 percent—which is still phenomenal to think about now, when click-
through rates for online ads struggle to reach even single digits.
Lisa Ronson, Chief Marketing Officer at Australian supermarket giant Coles, said
AT&T’s "You Will" marketing campaign was “visionary.”
“It was simple, compelling, and integrated and the results were outstanding—a 44%
click through rate,” Ronson said.
“They didn’t completely lose their minds and treat digital completely separately. They
continued to focus on marketing basics and customer engagement. So many
advertisers in the years following ran blindly and lacked the basics of emotion,
creativity, and engagement into digital. We presumed that consumers were rational
when engaging with them in digital channels. Some got it so very wrong.”
Despite AT&T’s early success, it wasn’t long before what’s known as “banner blindness”
became a common challenge for creatives to overcome. Advertisers resorted to ever
wilder ways to grasp people’s attention. So began a trend of flashing colours and
outrageous animations—who could resist trying their hand at a flashy, clickable
“shoot the duck” game?
According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau Australia (IAB), in 1999 digital ad
revenue in Australia was AU$34 million, sitting at 1 percent of the total ad market
Fast-forward to 2019 and it’s 53 percent of the market, at a cool AU$8.8 billion.
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In tracking advertising back then, there were 300 local sites that took advertising and
about 70 marketers who were brave enough to be buying display advertising,
according to Gai Le Roy, CEO of the IAB.
She added that the lack of early brand investment was noticeable, and the Fast-
Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) space were incredibly slow to embrace digital
advertising.
“It was a really weird mix in the early days,” Le Roy said.
“The obvious ones to embrace digital back then were the banks as they could see that
performance driven angle of digital, as well as the tech companies like Intel, but it
depended on the agency in terms of their appetite for driving investment.”
Le Roy recollects an early digital ad experience that has stuck with her to this day. She
remembers pharmaceutical company Novartis's banner ads for treatments swamping
the internet with an irksome flea hopping across the ads.
“There were banners everywhere for this flea treatment. Again, it was just because it
was a forward-thinking agency who said it's cheap, it's growing, let's try it and we
want to try building banners,” Le Roy said.
“Graphics were pretty simple back in those days and people were basing everything
Lisa Ronson Chief Marketing Officer, Coles
“We presumed that consumers were rational when engaging with them on digital channels.
Some got it so very wrong.”
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on click-through rates, so it was about anything that was very obvious and
garnered attention.”
As much as people talk about the death of the banner — and it's definitely a much
smaller part of the current ecosystem — it's still around, despite everything new
that's come into play.
Le Roy recalls how in those early days, pretty much every banner ad had 'click here'
just to teach consumers on what they were meant to do.
From the push to get people to download ringtones, diverting people to online
'portals', and directories going digital, to moving from a very desktop-focused culture
to broader digital marketing strategies, Le Roy said it’s been “lots of little shifts along
the way” to advance digital advertising.
Mark Frain, Chief Executive Officer at Multi Channel Network (MCN), recalls a
“memorable but certainly quite annoying” Direct Line insurance ad out of the UK
featuring a red phone on wheels that would scoot across the content.
“It was everywhere. I’d be in the middle of reading something and it was that intrusive
that the red phone would go straight across the text. It certainly wasn't
subtle,” Frain said.
“In terms of creative treatment, it wasn't of the highest production value, let's
just say that.”
Phil Cowlishaw, head of Adobe Advertising Cloud for Asia and the Pacific, recollects
early conversations with media agency clients, informing them about retargeting.
“It seems crazy today that it was an exciting tactic, but back then brands used to get
so excited about it,” Cowlishaw said.
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“Fast-forward to today and you have savvy consumers that purposely abandon carts
as they know the retailer will retarget them with a better offer to get them
over the line.
“That’s a huge shift, consumers being aware of how brands are behaving and are
effectively manipulating that ecosystem to drive conversations. It's a huge
step change.”
Hugh Jellie, Marketing and Sponsorship Manager at Carlton & United Breweries,
recalls the “going viral” expression really hitting home after they launched the
infamous Carlton Draught "Big Ad” in 2005.
Due to fragmented audiences of traditional media, the brand opted to stream the ad
online two weeks before being broadcast on TV. Within weeks it was downloaded
more than 160,000 times and made its way to more than 132 countries.
“I didn't realise it at the time, but 'going viral' was no longer just the domain of cat
videos. It was now the pursuit of marketers also,” Jellie said.
Highlights from digital advertising's past.
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1996DoubleClick launches.
1994First-ever banner ad launches.
1997Pop-up ads invented by Ethan Zuckerman.
2000Google launches AdWords.
2006 AdBlock add-on is released.YouTube launches.
2012 Adobe acquires Efficient Frontier.
2011 Adobe acquires Demdex.
2018 GDPR goes into effect.
2007 Apple releases first iPhone.
2009 Adobe buys Omniture.
2016 Adobe acquires TubeMogul.
1998 GoTo.com creates first keyword auction.OpenX launches open-source ad exchange.
Highlights from digital advertising's past.
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An obsession with data and analytics.
DoubleClick launched in 1996 and for the first time, an ad server could serve ads
on behalf of an advertiser instead of trafficking individual ads to individual media
companies. It was finally possible to deliver ads at scale. DoubleClick was eventually
acquired by Google for US$3.1 billion 12 years later.
Five years later came Google AdWords and the dawn of search advertising. AdWords
was one of the first links in the chain that created today’s obsession with data
and analytics.
In 1999, Simon White, co-founder of Australian media agency Ikon Communications,
alongside co-founder Gary Hardwick, launched the business with the Commonwealth
Bank as their foundation client.
As one of the fastest-growing media agencies in its first decade, White describes
the agency as having an explosive start as a modern media agency, known for its
employee centric culture “in an industry known for sweatshops.”
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“Before launching my own agency, yes, I placed one of the first few banner ads with
internet service provider OzEmail via independent digital media agency Bertini
Murray, for FAI insurance, in 1995,” White said.
“I remember waiting with the client as we typed in the link and saw our banner ad
materialise like the Tardis—a whopping 1 minute 10 seconds later. The static banner
ad was treated like a poster, with fewer words the better. We then understood what
WWW meant the ‘World Wide 'Wait' back then.”
Gemma Anderson, head of performance and growth at Deakin University, recalls
her first job in digital and quibbling over putting tags on the website to measure what
traffic was coming through.
“I just remember that none of us thought that was important and we couldn't
understand why they were asking for that and what it even actually meant at the
time. We just saw it as ugh, that's a lot of work, that's a little expensive,” Anderson said.
“Looking back, I've never really forgotten that moment because I always look back at
it and go gosh, that was so naive. Of course you would put the tags on your website
these days. We put so much investment and time and effort to make sure that tagging
is correct, the taxonomy makes sense. If a tag drops off one of our assets, that's a
critical moment for us — if a tag is down we've got to fix it, that's the number one
priority to get it back up.
“It was just a very different back then and the level of importance that we put it on it
now, compared to then has just changed so significantly.”
The early 2000s marked rapid shifts in investment to analytics and measurement, as
advertisers needed to find ways to prove the effectiveness of their spend. After all, a
banner featuring a litter of dancing kittens and some ukulele music might sound great
on paper, but the campaign shouldn’t continue if marketers can’t figure out what that
ad actually delivers for their bottom line.
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1995
$150B
$300B
$450B
$600B
1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016 2019
Lorem ipsum
Digital: 22%
Digital: 43%
Digital: 4%
Total: $329B
Total: $413B
Total: $523B
Other: 25.7%
Verizon: 3.4%
Microso�: 4.1%
Amazon: 6.8%
Facebook: 21.8%
Google: 38.2%
Global advertising spending over time.
All figures are in US$. Source: Zenith
After one year of operation, AdWords generated US$70 million in advertising revenue
for Google, according to Statista. Today, Zenith reports that digital global ad
expenditures topped US$230 billion in 2018. This accounts for about 40 percent of all
global ad spend.
As the dotcom bust faded into a mere memory, 2005 brought two game-changing
companies to the digital advertising arena: Facebook and YouTube. These two brands,
which would become internet advertising titans, were founded within just two weeks
of each other and brought never-before-seen formats and opportunities to
digital marketers.
Facebook popularised the news feed, a now-ubiquitous format across the web,
though it wasn’t originally met with fanfare. The day after News Feed launched in
2006, protestors swarmed Facebook’s offices and demanded that the company
reverse the design change, according to Business Insider.
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John BattelleCo-Founder of Wired and CEO of NewCo
“The dotcom bust gave everyone a kick in the pants and made them say, ‘What can we do with this new medium that could actually solve some problems
for advertisers?’”
Users grew used to the news feed, however, and Facebook’s global audience numbers
have continued to grow every year since—although there have been some
indications recently that the Facebook app is beginning to reach a saturation point.
This could explain the US$1 billion purchase of Instagram in 2012 and the US$19
billion WhatsApp deal two years later.
The arrival of YouTube, which Google bought for US$1.65 billion in 2006, took video
advertising to the next level. The video platform blazed the trail for content creation
in the widest and most democratic way ever, with all the pluses and minuses that
come with that. With YouTube, the storytelling methods employed by TV advertising
could be delivered straight to large online audiences for the first time in a highly
targeted way. Their first pre-roll and promoted video ads launched in 2008, and by
the next year, YouTube was clocking up more than one billion video views a day.
In 2007, Ikon was sold to publicly listed STW Group. That same year, according to
White, they ran the communication strategy for Neil Lawrence's renowned "Kevin
07" campaign.
“We dominated the election on digital as the youth were a key to votes. I don’t think
the liberals had heard about the channel,” White said.
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White recalls it being hard work, particularly with how long it took to convince clients
the medium wasn’t just about instant response.
“I always got frustrated as a young media guy with campaigns and not knowing how
much each channel was delivering in terms of sales. Digital gave you more of an
understanding of your audience and one to one,” White said.
“When video came it was most exciting, as advertising could truly show clients what it
could do emotively.”
When Facebook launched, Jellie said it took a lot of businesses a couple of years to
realise its potential with many setting up their own accounts between 2008 and 2010.
However, with social media now being an “integral part of the marketing mix for any
organisation,” he said this has forever changed the marketing landscape.
“In its earliest days, digital advertising was a mere extension of the well-established
TV and print channels. But today, digital channels enable brands to shape their brand
positions and strategies in real time,” Jellie said.
“Brands are now resourced to respond within 24 hours rather than the traditional
six-month creative development and media buying process that once existed.”
Celebrities and politicians alike soon took notice of the growing popularity of video
and social channels and their ability to interact with wide audiences on a more
personal level.
Frain said the whole customer experience around video has come on tremendously.
“We’re seeing brands use video differently, whether that be for longer-form messaging
or five-second stinger ads in between content and this is not just digital publishers,
but traditional publishers investing heavily in premium online video
content,” Frain said.
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Now, what’s known as “influencer marketing” is ubiquitous across all social and video
channels. Celebrities like Kim Kardashian can reportedly pull in around US$300,000
for a single Instagram post, and a whole host of nano-influencers, baby influencers,
and even CGI influencers are opening up their feeds to advertisers. Influencer
marketing is another segment that isn’t without its challenges (think about the
ill-fated Fyre Festival), and marketers have increased their scrutiny of influencers they
believe have bought fake followings or aren’t properly adhering to their briefs.
The launch of the iPhone in 2007 was one of the defining moments in the history
of mobile advertising. Sure, marketers were already placing simple mobile apps on
WAP browsers way back in 1999, but the rapid adoption of smartphones changed
advertising dramatically.
For example, when Facebook filed for their IPO in 2012, they didn’t “directly generate
any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products.” Fast-forward
just a few years, and Facebook generated US$15.5 billion in mobile ad revenue in the
fourth quarter of 2018 alone, according to their official results conference call.
The adtech/martech world boomed around this time, as the drive was on to increase
efficiency and secure better targeting at scale through the power of software. Despite
the creeping encroachment of walled gardens, launch after launch of companies
operating in digital advertising created an environment ripe for mergers and
acquisitions as players fought to build a competitive stack of solutions.
“Until 2009, Adobe was predominantly known for our leadership in delivering
amazing creative and desktop publishing solutions,” said Amy Robson, senior product
manager and evangelist for APAC at Adobe.
However, that all changed when we acquired Omniture — a surprise move into the
digital marketing space. This was the start of Adobe’s efforts to help streamline the
measurement of content and applications and position us as a real player in the
advertising space.
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The drive was on to increase efficiency and secure better targeting at scale through the
power of software.
Robson said that for the first time, advertisers could not only create great advertising
content, they could now execute and measure their advertising efforts under the
umbrella of a single company.
We have continued to invest with acquisitions such as Efficient Frontier (2011),
Demdex (2011), and TubeMogul (2016) – creating a combined offering that acts as the
only independent solution providing agnostic ad-buying, audience activation and
measurement options, that is tightly integrated with marketing technology.
Amazon emerged as another sleeping giant of the ad industry. Quietly, the
e-commerce beast ascended to become the third-largest player in digital advertising
in the U.S., according to the Wall Street Journal. They may have a single-digit
percentage share of the market right now, but their growth shows little sign of slowing
as marketers seek valuable inventory at the exact point when a consumer is likely to
make a purchase.
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Naomi Simson, entrepreneur, co-founder of Big Red Group, and investor on
Network Ten's Shark Tank, said finding customers (and keeping them) has never
been harder or more expensive. As algorithms change on social networks almost
minute-by-minute, and as Google shifts into gear with its advertising offerings, it can
be hard to keep pace.
“It’s difficult at best for the mere mortals among us to stay up to date and on top of
what is required to serve customers what they want, when and where they want
it,” Simson said.
“But with developments like AI marketing technology, this promise of brand building,
serving and acquiring customers via digital advertising, is becoming more and
more a reality.”
We’re just getting started.
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Simson said she looks to the “experience economy” as the future, with the brands
that align with customer values and are authentic and consistent about the customer
experience, winning out.
“Loyalty cannot be bought. It is to be earned by consistently delivering on the
‘experience.’ Retail specifically is becoming all about the experience, and this passion
for experiences is impacting retailers both online and offline—customer journeys are
far more complicated.” Simson said.
Simson argues that AI is an almost essential weapon in this era of marketing as hyper-
personalisation and first-class customer experience expectations rise to the fore.
“At a time when attention is the new currency, brands must offer something of value
every single time they interact with a customer. AI can enable this like never
before,” Simson said.
Digital advertising has had its ups and downs over its formative years, suffering
several setbacks on the way to finding its feet as a mature adult.
Just like the pile of discarded socks at the corner of a teenager’s bedroom, the laundry
list of challenges facing the ad industry began to mount up, and some still linger
today. Those issues range from advertisers unwittingly funding questionable,
offensive, or even illegal content on video platforms to serious concerns around
privacy and the ongoing discussion around viewability.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel. The industry has begun to band together to
address those challenges as the sector looks to better position itself for the next 25
years of growth and success.
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Gemma AndersonHead of Performance and Growth, Deakin University
“The biggest challenges we will have is how do we create compelling assets and creative that is going to resonate with person A and be slightly
different for person B.”
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In the early days of digital advertising, creative was often limited to translating a
print campaign into a digital format, with little alteration. It often didn’t suit the
medium well, but it was the easiest and fastest way to meet the requirements of the time.
Creative success was measured solely by hits—a metric that remains important today.
Yet only when these hits are combined with other measurement metrics can
marketers really determine the true success of their campaigns.
According to many industry leaders we interviewed, big advancements in digital
creative didn’t develop much until the first dotcom bust in the early 2000s. Unlike
traditional channels, there wasn’t yet a widely held perception that digital needed
strong creative to be effective.
One of the first steps in the development of digital creative was the introduction of
animation. Looking back at the clumsy, initial attempts to put animation into practice
may make us smile today, but back then, dancing babies marked a massive leap
toward transforming static images into ones that could actually tell very basic stories.
Back to the drawing board.
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The Shareability factor.
The advent of mobile unlocked more creative opportunities for digital advertising.
And we’re not just talking QR codes. Marketers can utilise the features of the phone—
like the gyroscope—letting users control the action of an ad by waving their device
around or making the user’s phone vibrate to highlight certain moments, like the
revving of a car engine.
Snapchat pioneered the use of phone cameras in advertising—ads that people not
only engage with, but actively share across their networks—a marketer’s dream.
Maxibon in Australia was one of the first to tap Snapchat’s branded lens offering in
2017, and within 24 hours of launching, the ‘Bon lens’ delivered a unique reach of 2.17
million people, in which 1.4 million people interacted with the filter, turning
themselves and their friends into a ‘Bon-head’.
Cuong Lam, Group Marketing Manager at Maxibon's parent company Peters Ice
Cream, oversees brand planning, strategy, and execution across key brands, including
Drumstick and Maxibon.
Lam said digital advertising strategies that serve to “put the consumer first” are
responsible for pushing the medium to the next level.
“It used to be that brands wanted consumers to click on their banners, but we know
that doesn’t happen, so integrating e-commerce, video, or gaming into display
banners has created a whole new level of convenience, making it far easier to meet
consumers’ needs,” Lam said.
“In addition, the digitalisation and delivery of must-see content to consumers
wherever and whenever they are consuming content has made it more convenient.”
Today, advertisers understand that creative in digital is vital to campaign success and
that they can also monitor, change, and adjust creative assets in real time. If an ad isn’t
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working, they can update the ad with different creative based on first- and third-party
data inputs that are tailored to the desires and needs of the target consumer—and
assets can be delivered by an advertising platform that gets that ad in front of viewers
within seconds.
Cuong Lam Group Marketing Manager, Peters Ice Cream
“Integrating e-commerce, video or gaming into display banners has created a whole new
level of convenience.”
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Lam explained how digital advertising has been the perfect and effective interface
for consumers to engage with Maxibon as it allows the brand’s “cheeky and
irreverent personality” to come out.
“Digital advertising allows for brands to be nimble and respond in real time to
competitive or cultural events, which is a key driver of brand relevancy,” he said.
Building iconic brands in digital advertising alone is a reality, but there’s a huge onus
on the creative to become iconic itself, Anderson said.
“Not enough brands invest time and energy, both from a strategy perspective but also
from a creative strategy perspective, in terms of making their digital advertising
impactful,” she said.
We can see clearly now.
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“For a lot of brands trying to cut through in what's a very cluttered and noisy
advertising space, digital might be their only way to do it. There are alot of brands out
there that don't have the budget for TV, so they're going to have to do it anyway.”
In another 25 years’ time we won’t still be saying the word ‘digital’, with Anderson
firmly believing it should be phased out now.
“I don't understand why we still call it digital advertising because it is just advertising,”
Anderson said.
Deakin University no longer has a digital marketing department as this only served
to create a very siloed approach since everyone buys or manages some type of
digital channel, Anderson explained.
“You're also starting to see that internally in a lot of marketing organisations the word
'digital' in those roles is fading out,” she said.
“The same will happen when it comes to advertising—it's just a matter of time.”
The Aus factor.
Anderson said there are certainly some unique challenges about how Australia’s
population is dispersed, meaning that you have to be smarter in terms of the
channels you use and buy.
Without the ability to hire a specialist in every channel, Anderson said people work
across a multitude of channels which means they can better understand how things
fit together.
“We don't have a big population like the U.S. We have to learn how to do a lot
more—meaning that we have had to be more efficient and do a lot more with a lot
less,” she said.
“That creates a bit of pressure on us, but I think we've all risen to the occasion as well.”
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Cowlishaw added that Australia is fortunate to have some of the most sophisticated
advertisers in the world.
“I've worked on three continents and I can safely say some of our advertisers that
we work with today are far and away more ahead in their thinking, in their data
regulation, in the way they treat their customers and in the way they create
sustainable growth for their business,” he said.
“You have to give a lot of credit to brands in Australia for really driving those initiatives.”
Asking the right questions.
It wasn’t until around 2011 and 2012 that viewability—a measure of whether an ad
has the opportunity to be seen by a real human—became a key industry topic.
Viewability was a response to help people understand that just because you were
buying cheap, it didn’t mean that you were buying real human engagement. An
impression and a click were totally different to someone actually watching the video.
At the same time, some unscrupulous publishers were also creating inventory that
played video below the fold, or somewhere ridiculous like inside a tiny banner,
which was obviously not effective for the advertiser.
To combat the issue, TubeMogul coined the phrase “fake pre-roll”—the name given
to ads that play at the beginning of a video—and launched a site to call out bad
players in 2011.
While 100 percent viewability is still sometimes trumpeted as a metric to aim for,
most practitioners believe it is a false metric.
Today, viewability continues to be one of the metrics that advertisers use to optimize
their campaigns. In less than a decade, it has shifted the game from one that looked
purely in terms of CPMs to one that values viewable CPMs.
Viewability isn’t perfect. Advertisers need to be aware of the subtle change in the
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language when defining the metric. It doesn’t guarantee a view, only that there was
an opportunity for the consumer to view the ad. Customers can still open up another
tab or scroll away. That has nothing to do with the publisher—just as a viewer
deciding to visit the restroom during a TV ad break has nothing to do with a network.
Today, demand-side platforms (DSPs) advise advertisers to use technology in order
to establish a baseline viewability figure. They can then improve that metric over
time through constant testing. Metrics will always vary depending on target
consumers and inventory bought—but DSPs (alongside independent, third-party
verification and viewability analysis firms) can guide advertisers along the right path.
Cowlishaw said that brands wanting to get their heads around inventory and
measurement shows a clear intent that the industry is really advancing.
“When you think about why they're doing this, it's because there's a realisation of the
importance of the role digital has to play in this marketplace in driving really great
experiences for brands—giving them longer lasting relationships with their
customers,” Cowlishaw said.
“It's also fundamentally driven by a need for advertisers to have control. Everything
they're focused on is how do they get better control of their brand and greater
knowledge of the data that they're generating in advertising to help them improve
the experiences that they're delivering.”
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Just as the industry thought it was tackling the viewability issue, ad fraud reared its
ugly head in a big way. Irregular and suspicious patterns began appearing in the
ecosystem, such as unheard-of single web domains suddenly generating massive
amounts of traffic. DSPs also began noticing single IP addresses (which the industry
associates with a single user) having the ability to watch hundreds of videos in
mere seconds.
As with viewability, new companies were formed to combat and protect advertisers
from non-human traffic generated by ad fraud scammers who often set up elaborate
schemes including “botnets” of infected consumer devices to siphon ad dollars off
for themselves.
Clear and present danger in ad fraud.
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There are some signs that industry initiatives like these are working. A report from the
Association of National Advertisers and ad fraud detection firm White Ops, cited by
the Wall Street Journal, estimated that the money advertisers lost to ad fraud would
be reduced from US$7.2 billion in 2016 to US$6.5 billion in 2017.
Recently, also reported by the Wall Street Journal, companies including White Ops,
Google, Facebook, Verizon, and Oath joined in an effort to unravel the work of
scammers, which led to the U.S. Department of Justice charging eight people with
operating alleged ad fraud schemes in 2018.
As advertisers realise that the adage that “you get what you pay for” does ring true, premium
publishers are positioning themselves to meet the growing need for quality inventory.
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Despite the demand by advertisers for an ecosystem that is open and transparent,
some large publishers are continuing to build walls to shift ad dollars into
their greenery.
The walled gardens of the ecosystem restrict access to certain inventory from
third-party players, often adding sweeteners to the pot in order to encourage direct
purchase by advertisers. And, while they do offer data, technology providers warn of a
lack of transparency over how those assets are compiled—and whether marketers’
campaign goals really are being reached. Top marketers like Unilever’s Keith Weed
and Procter & Gamble’s Marc Pritchard have previously compared this issue to those
platforms “grading their own homework,” as reported by Campaign.
We're going to need a bigger ladder.
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Independent, third-party verification is recommended (whether working with a
walled garden or not), as the inventory available at the beginning of the month when
you ink a deal may not necessarily be the same as what’s floating around at the end.
Georgia Brammer, Country Director at Australian independent ad server Flashtalking,
said as large players such as Google and Facebook continually strengthen their walled
gardens, advertisers are faced with a decision to reduce their reliance on these
ecosystems or to accept the lack of transparency and interoperability that comes with
these closed stack offerings.
“It is becoming increasingly difficult to leverage and incorporate independent third
parties for a number of critical functions,” she said.
“These include simple tasks like verifying delivery, reach, and frequency at the user
level; analysing cross-channel engagement or performing multi-touch attribution
outside the player's own tools; or even incorporating offline sales data and third party
device graphs for cross device analysis.”
Brammer said using Google’s integrated stack as an example, while it offers ease and
convenience, it comes at a “huge cost” of data transparency, objectivity, and
independence.
She said for advertisers who value control of their own data, or who believe in checks
and balances and wish to separate media sales from delivery and measurement,
there are alternatives.
“Leading DMPs, DSPs, and ad-serving platforms are more and more interoperable
with open, integrated ad stacks that minimise friction and eliminate conflicts of
interest,” she said.
“By joining forces, these service providers enable advertisers to realise the promise of
data-driven marketing, while maintaining flexibility, independence and ownership
of their data.”
32
1995
$150B
$300B
$450B
$600B
1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016 2019
Lorem ipsum
Digital: 22%
Digital: 43%
Digital: 4%
Total: $329B
Total: $413B
Total: $523B
Other: 25.7%
Verizon: 3.4%
Microso�: 4.1%
Amazon: 6.8%
Facebook: 21.8%
Google: 38.2%
Percent of total digital ad spending.
Source: eMarketer
Global CEO of WPP, Mark Read, also has concerns about the excessive power
of the big two.
“I think Facebook and Google get a disproportionate share of the advertising dollars in
part because the platforms work, in part because it’s simpler for clients to spend
money with them—through companies like our own—than it is to spend it more
broadly,” Read said.
He added that another part of the reason is a lack of trust in other parts of the online
ad ecosystem.
“I think those are things that we need to fix,” he said.
33
Taking back control in privacy.
It’s not just concerns about the volume of publishers that advertisers will have to
work with—worries about data ownership and ad frequency also come into play
when ad buyers have to spread funds across multiple siloed publishers.
Ideally, an independent DSP should prove to be the type of single-platform solution
that advertisers turn to to cut through the barriers as this offers no threat to
publishers, since it doesn't own any of its own inventory.
But as major e-commerce players like Amazon make aggressive ad moves, such
as with their recent acquisition of Sizmek's ad server business and dynamic content
optimisation solution, this sees even more walled gardens bed in.
Only time will tell if this solution is realised and embraced.
Even before the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data-breach scandal exploded on
front pages in 2018, concerns surrounding data privacy had been growing steadily
since 2001. And this became especially concerning as more and more companies
were being hacked.
It’s now becoming even clearer that data security is more important than ever as
consumers find out that something as private as their menstrual cycle timing may
have been shared without their knowledge, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Privacy regulation has been top of mind for almost every corporation since the
introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)—the European
Union’s sometimes vague, often misinterpreted regulation to put the power of data
ownership back into the hands of the people. GDPR, which came into force in May
2018, is designed to restrict personal data access only to companies and individuals
who have clearly and transparently asked for it—and who have received consent
from the individuals whose data is being requested.
34
“We have been around 25 years, which can sometimes seem like a really short time or a long
time, depending on who you are, but that challenge to keep making that consumer experience better
and get the creative guys more excited about what they can do.”
Gai Le Roy IAB Australia CEO
Le Roy said major industry shake-ups, such as GDPR’s impact in market and changes
in tracking, give the opportunity to step back and look at how we're going to build
something even better that consumers understand.
“When I was trying to flog in digital and trying to explain that you need to think about
the strategy across platform, when it was 1 percent of the market, the EPs at Channel
Nine were not having a bar of it."
“So we've just got to keep an open mind on the future and I guess be cynical at times
but open to new opportunities."
Still, some advertising practitioners complain that while they understand the
principles behind GDPR, the actual wording is confusing and hard to put into practice.
Many believe that the main challenge of the policy is that there isn’t a deep enough
understanding and clarity around what people mean by the word “consent.”
35
This in turn opens up gray areas that certain industries, technology companies, or
websites will attempt to capitalise on in order to serve ads and use people’s data
until a broader consensus is reached.
In Europe—and increasingly in the United States with the emergence of California’s
new data privacy law that is set to take effect in 2020—advertisers are sensing that
a single, clear, and global framework would actually benefit the entire industry, rather
than a tapestry of different regulations across the globe.
GDPR and data protection will only become bigger priorities this year and beyond
as the industry moves away from a period of wiggle room and into a zone where
companies face fines and legislative issues.
Earlier this year, Google became the first major company to be hit with a big GDPR
penalty after France’s data protection authority ordered the advertising giant to pay a
US$57 million fine. The ruling was a sign that the big players are firmly in the sights of
regulators—with others sensing more action is to come.
36
There's a better way to get personal.
Ronson said marketers were no doubt “completely dazzled” by digital and the
ability to measure and became far too rational.
“We assumed that humans started to behave rationally when the internet was born.
We were so wrong, and the growth and omnipresence of social media demonstrates
that,” Ronson said.
“Digital, at the end of the day, is the channel—not the message. We need to use it as
part of an integrated and compelling campaign to change consumer behaviour.”
White agrees that the industry has come a long way, especially with data, but the
issue is data overload—and the danger is clients can have all this information but
37
don’t know how to treat it and what to do with it all.
“We can go a long way with AI but perhaps we need to think more or do more
research with humans before creating tech that makes money first and doesn't
consider social implications or knock on effects,” he said.
Anderson said "sometimes there's no value in going too granular with data and
research, but there's a huge opportunity in terms of the depths of strategies in
personalisation."
“The biggest challenges we will have is creating compelling assets and creative that is
going to resonate with person A and be slightly different for person B and be slightly
different for person C,” Anderson said.
“We've got so much opportunity now to become a lot more targeted and relevant, but
in terms of how we develop our strategies, a lot of creative strategies still only talk
about one or two audiences. But our ability these days is to target 1,000 different
audiences."
Cowlishaw said brands have done a fantastic job of hiring the right people into their
businesses, but he agreed that the industry can be guilty of overcomplicating the
realities of digital advertising.
“We talk a lot about data, programmatic, and real-time bidding, but the reality of what
we're trying to do is connect a brand to a consumer. This means delivering a great
experience to the person we want to turn into a customer, who we want to turn into a
loyalist,” he said.
“That hasn't changed since the birth of advertising and it’s how brands grow, simply
connecting and having good relationships and growing those relationships.”
In the early days, audience targeting was a pretty basic proposition with companies
like Sensis and BlueSkyFrog making making headway.
38
“Money has flowed into the big global players and the walled-garden approach
hasn't allowed anyone really to start linking that directly to other media
investments and other measurements.”Mark FrainCEO, MCN
Someone who wanted to target home buyers would think, REA Group, and would
buy inventory on that site. But REA only had a certain amount of inventory available,
and that marketer was bound to be competing for those ads against hundreds, if not
thousands, of other brands.
This is where the importance of audience targeting comes into its own—it’s what you
do in order to guarantee reach to your desired customer without blowing the bank or
being disappointed every time you launch a campaign. It also opens up undervalued
inventory that you might not have thought of before but that still gets into the eyes of
the people you are trying to engage with. This, obviously, has benefits to both the
advertiser and the publisher, who can finally monetise inventory they may have
struggled to sell in times past.
In the past, ad networks were the first step toward broadening inventory in order to
target specific audiences. Ad networks did this by packaging bundles of similar titles
or publishers that targeted specific audiences. For example, advertisers could
purchase sports publisher packages or packages appealing to technology lovers.
While this was a step in the right direction, it still wasn’t as granular as
advertisers needed.
39
Today, audiences can be targeted in many different ways. They can be purchased on
contextual elements. They can be targeted based on age, gender, location, purchase
intent, or past purchase behavior. Depending on the different partners used, targeting
can be based on whether a consumer is in the market for a product like a new car or
if they’re ready to renew their insurance. Such data can be anonymized, aggregated,
and provided in bulk for an advertiser to use in their advertising campaigns.
There are a variety of different tools to measure and confirm the effectiveness of
audience targeting. A partner such as Nielsen can validate whether the age and
gender matches you targeted correspond to what you’ve been told about the
audience. There are also ways to match targeting against offline sales data. Partners
like Quantium and Data Republic can provide matching and overlap reports to see if
you really were reaching intended loan purchasers or insurance shoppers.
Topic, or contextual, targeting is another way you can reach audiences, often used
around premium, non-specific inventory (such as the News.com.au, Nine.com.au,
Daily Mail Australia). This format uses technology to understand the text content of
the page around the ad and then serves a relevant message to users. For example, if
an advertiser wants to target a user that has shown signals as a travel intender, they
may serve an ad on a page in the travel section of the Sydney Morning Herald website
that’s talking about airlines, flights, ferries, hotels, or car rentals.
40
With more platforms becoming connected, there are more ways to measure
how ads are performing as consumers switch across devices. That presents a
plethora of opportunities—and challenges.
“There are too many metrics that don’t actually correlate to desired outcomes,”
said Cowlishaw.
To determine effectiveness, advertisers need to start thinking more in line with how
their overall advertising plans are impacting lift in various areas. Is digital advertising
helping to drive incremental customers to particular websites? Is it able to drive
net-new customers through concepts such as retargeting? Is it having a positive
impact on the perception of my brand?
Measurement is getting better.
41
Simple measures like impressions, clicks, and conversions are still incredibly
important, but capabilities are now in place to go deeper. But how much is too much?
And when does measurement start getting performed just for the sake of it—and for
the benefit of the measurement provider?
In a video environment, for example, an advertiser may be adamant that they have
two goals for every campaign—a high click-through rate and a high completion rate.
It’s possible to measure both of these metrics, but if you have a high click-through
rate, your completion rate is actually going to be quite low. When an ad is clicked
on—usually considered a strong indicator of campaign success and intelligent
targeting—the consumer is unlikely to return to the ad just to ensure they watch it all
the way through.
Frain said the level of data and analytics that clients can get from digital campaigns
has helped drive the growth of digital. He said data and justification are important,
but part of the digital measurement has actually become overwhelming for clients.
“This has fuelled growth, but the biggest challenge and therefore the biggest
opportunity is connecting that digital measurement to other parts of the media
campaign or advertising campaign that you're running,” Frain said.
42
“Money has flowed into the big global players and the walled-garden approach hasn't
allowed anyone really to start linking that directly to other media investments and
other measurements.
“I think the big challenge is how we take all the industry bodies, the IAB, Think TV,
and the out-of-home industry and knit all of those together. Then you'd start to get
robust digital measurement across many more media types than just digital as per
the definition it is today.”
It’s not just about what you measure, but how long you measure it for. With digital
advertising, advertisers have tended to focus more on optimising the short-term
performance of their campaigns.
Longer measurement frameworks are starting to gain popularity. Longer-term
measurement windows take into account the impact of campaigns promoting
high-consideration but lower-frequency purchases. Instead of thinking in short,
month-by-month cycles, it forces the marketer to understand and orchestrate a
campaign that drips through 18 or 24 months—which matches the length of time
someone might spend researching a big-ticket purchase like a car or kitchen
refurbishment.
Still, for many online advertisers, the shorter term–focused click-through rate still
reigns supreme as the measurement metric of choice. Cowlishaw traces the
popularity of clicks back to the dawn of paid search.
“In the early days of paid search campaigns, I would talk to Pizza Hut about buying the
word ‘pizza’ on Google. We could then take their budget and tell them exactly how
many clicks they were going to receive and project the number of pizzas sold for their
budget. No other medium had ever been this accountable before,”Cowlishaw said.
Marketers were hooked on this new ability to measure and monetise. But they were
missing something—paid search was the end result of all the hard work marketers
had been doing to build the brands.
43
Stephanie TullyQantas CMO
“The extension of customer direct marketing via programmatic into digital channels was a significant milestone for
Qantas.”
“Paid search is the success metric that tells you whether all of your advertising” and
not just the search budget delivered, Cowlishaw said. “Because of this, I think of clicks
and click-through rates as a highly overinflated metric to base off of.”
Stephanie Tully, executive manager group brand and marketing at Qantas, said it’s
vital for the airline to be present where its current and future customers are.
Given the digitisation of the consumer landscape, Tully describes the channel as
“critical for Qantas as a brand,” explaining that as a marketer she’s excited to see the
continued evolution of digital advertising in a rapidly changing digital ecosystem.
“Digital advertising has progressed enormously since its introduction in the early 1990s
and no doubt will continue to evolve,” Tully said.
“The extension of customer direct marketing via programmatic into digital channels
was a significant milestone for Qantas in how we engage with our customers,
particularly given the strength of our loyalty program.”
44
Stephanie Tully, executive manager group brand and marketing at Qantas, said
it’s vital for the airline to be present where its current and future customers are.
Given the digitisation of the consumer landscape, Tully describes the channel as
“critical for Qantas as a brand,” and said as a marketer she’s excited to see the
continued evolution of digital advertising in a rapidly changing digital ecosystem.
“Digital advertising has progressed enormously since its introduction in the early
1990s and no doubt will continue to evolve,” Tully said.
“The extension of customer direct marketing via programmatic into digital channels
was a significant milestone for Qantas in how we engage with our customers,
particularly given the strength of our loyalty program.”
The next level.
45
Marketers are doing it themselves.
In-housing is a movement that’s getting a lot of attention. Especially in recent years as
more advertisers create internal teams for traditionally outsourced functions like
media buying and creative development. But what most brands really want is greater
control over data and decisions on marketing spend—a point often missed in the
industry literature. Most brands don't have the budget or talent to cultivate expertise in
the wide array of what the agency ecosystem has to offer, be it strategy, creative,
content, attribution, contracts, or more.
Programmatic functions are one area where brands prefer greater transparency and
control over data and spend, and they’re either fully or partially bringing that in-house.
For example, Foxtel, CommBank, CUB and L’Oréal have taken the ad-buying function
in-house or are currently doing so.
46
The trend towards brands bringing their media investments in-house is driven by a
demand for more control. This is particularly evident when you look at the average
DSPs used by advertisers. According to eMarketer, this has gone from more than seven
in April 2016, to four in 2018.
Brands typically choose one of two different ways to take in-house control of their
digital advertising spend. Some opt to bring everything in-house, wanting complete
control over their digital advertising spend and execution. Others sign deals directly with
their tech suppliers, instructing agencies on exactly how to use the tech. That way, the
advertiser can benefit from the deep knowledge and industry relationships owned by
the agency while also maintaining the transparency and agnostic buying power of the
technology provider.
The biggest challenge to both scenarios is talent. There is now a huge talent gap as
demands from technology providers, brands, agencies, and competing companies like
Google and Facebook go after an ever-diminishing pond of experienced programmatic
minnows and fish. On the surface, bringing everything in-house might sound appealing,
but you’ll either have to throw a lot of worms into the water or paddle furiously if you
want to land and retain your talent catches.
Meanwhile, the client-agency relationship is far from dead. As CEO of the world’s largest
agency network (WPP), Mark Read says a growing number of his agencies are putting
their staff onsite within their clients’ companies: “I think that agencies can uniquely bring
creativity, technology, and people who understand how to help clients grow and
prepare it for the future. That’s what we mean when we talk about being a creative
transformation company. I think clients are much better served working with their
agency partners or working with WPP to put our people on the client premises.”
47
“Agencies can uniquely bring creativity, technology, and people
who understand how to help clients grow and prepare it for the future.”
Mark ReadCEO, WPP
48
The next 25 years.
49
We’re now on the final leg of our whistle-stop tour through the last quarter-
century of digital advertising. But what does the future hold? By 2044, outside
the industry we may finally see marvels like fusion power nearing commercial
availability, virtual telepathy becoming the preferred way to communicate, and
China’s space program rivaling NASA's.
While there’s much speculation about what advertising will look like between now
and then, the next couple of years will be pivotal. And all signs point to an
evolution spurt.
The industry will need to come together to overcome challenges over privacy, how
data gets used, and what it will take to make changes that put consumers first. We’ll
need to find workarounds for legacy, walled data gardens that make it difficult for
marketers and advertisers to know if their work is resonating with customers.
Jellie describes the potential of digital advertising as being “unlimited.”
“It is evolving and will adapt to regulation, media fragmentation, and any other
challenges that are laid down,” he said.
White said we still cannot underestimate the role of adblockers as generation upon
generation get used to no ad breaks on platforms such as Netflix and Stan.
“In general, the majority of ads are boring, predictable, skippable, and a waste of
money that won’t deliver sales that the CFO wants. Clients need to wake up, stop
ticking boxes, and roll the dice more to get rewarded,” White said.
Alongside the inevitable rise of adblockers, Cowlishaw said there will be a greater
respect for consumers as the pay-off between receiving an ad experience and, for
The next couple of years will be pivotal. And all signs point to an evolution spurt.
50
example, being able to read free content on the internet, is something people are
becoming more comfortable with.
“The reality is we may see less advertising space, but we're going to require a higher
level of accountability that exists behind that advertising space because every ad
impression is going to count,” Cowlishaw said.
“Every ad impression is going to matter, so how you treat and deliver that impression,
potentially still through display, is going to be increasingly more important in terms of
how you deliver against brand goals.”
Anderson sees a very connected future for digital advertising, with the next frontier
focused on getting the traditional channels in line with what digital is doing as it’s “so
much more sophisticated.”
“We still have a long way to go when it comes to treating TV buying in the same way
we treat digital advertising buying, but we’re starting to make significant advances
around connected TV,” Anderson said.
“Now it's a case of all of those traditional above-the-line channels and platforms
starting to catch up to be capable of doing the same things that digital can do.
“We need to bring that type of thinking, strategy, targeting, personalisation, and
connection with attribution to those more traditional channels so that we can buy
them with more confidence.”
New growth is also being predicted in formats such as audio. The emergence of
popular podcasts, combined with high-quality inventory options on streaming
platforms like Spotify, has driven the consumer demand for audio platforms and
opened up new creative territory for advertisers.
Looking to the future of digital advertising, Frain, who said premium digital content
from local publishers will continue to grow exponentially, sees the increased
commercialisation opportunity as an exciting next step.
51
“It's always been the case with digital and with media consumption changing ahead of
the ad product capability,” Frain explained.
“We are always steps behind the consumer and as we catch up, we start to monetise
that audience. One of the most exciting things is we're never going to catch up, but
the quantum of gap that we've been behind is now starting to shorten so we're able
to monetise those movements way, way faster.”
Frain said a surefire pattern for years to come will be digital having a much bigger
impact on some of the established media channels, therefore making them arguably
more powerful than they've been in the past.
Frain said the nature of the client relationship will change most in the next 25 years,
with that relationship taking more of “business partners–style” shape.
From interpreting consumer trends to optimising customer touchpoints, to creating
better customer service bots, Simson believes AI can and will be applied to a
staggering breadth of marketing activities.
“That wide range of applications is a testament to AI’s remarkable ability to break
down longstanding departmental silos and drive true omnichannel campaigns,
aggregating customer data from countless channels spanning the entire digital
ecosystem,” Simson said.
“This is something simply not achievable by humans at the pace required in an
economy where customer attention is the new currency.
“Beyond all the talk, discussion, and ideas — we must find a better way to reduce the
cost of finding customers, audiences, and prospects.”
From talking about sustainable food credentials or everyday value to timely recipes
and the “what am I going to cook” moments, Ronson said for Coles, digital advertising
is important as it helps it serve up relevant content in a timely manner to help
its customers.
52
In terms of what she’s most looking forward to in the years ahead, Ronson said to see
brands continue to push the boundaries and be brave.
“To emotionally engage, to change behaviour, to sell products and experiences or
positively impact society,” she said.
“That's not just restricted to digital, it’s across all marketing. Which is the way to look
at digital—as part of an integrated approach.”
From digital out-of-home and addressable TV to radio streaming, Le Roy agreed,
adding that the digitalisation of other media channels will continue to ramp up, as
well as the impact of voice-demand systems.
“Now, with connected TV and voice, the advancements and opportunities are not
going to stop—which is why I think most people who are still in the industry are
because it keeps evolving and the expenditure keeps going up because there
are new formats.
“The really blunt facts are that digital is where consumers are spending their
time,” Le Roy said.
“That is where the brands of the future are going to be built because that's where
consumers are, consuming messages and interacting.”
53
Here's to 25 more incredible years of digital evolution. We can't wait to see
what the future has in store.
Learn more about
Adobe Advertising Cloud
on Adobe.com.
54
Sources
Adrienne LaFrance, “The First-Ever Banner Ad on the Web,” The Atlantic, April 21, 2017.
"Advertising Expenditure Forecasts," Zenith, December 2018
“Advertising Revenue of Google from 2001 to 2018 (in Billion U.S. Dollars),” Statista, 2019.
Alexandra Bruell, “Ad Fraud Declines Offer Hope as Marketers Fight Sophisticated Bots,” Wall Street Journal, May 24, 2017.
Amy Robson, personal interview with Pippa Chambers, May 2019.
“Average Number of DSPs Used by US Advertisers, Jan 2016–April 2018,” eMarketer, May 2018.
"ig Ad hits one millionth viewer," AdNews, July 2005.
Cuong Lam, personal interview with Pippa Chambers, May 2019.
“Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2018 Results Conference Call,” Facebook, January 30, 2019.
Gai Le Roy, personal interview with Pippa Chambers, May 2019.
Gemma Anderson, personal interview with Pippa Chambers, May 2019.
Georgia Brammer, personal interview with Pippa Chambers, May 2019.
Hugh Jellie, personal interview with Pippa Chambers, May 2019.
I-Hsien Sherwood, ”Too Much ‘Complexity’ and ‘Crap’ Hinders Agency-Brand Relationships, Says P&G CMO,” Campaign, April 4, 2017.
Jillian D’Onfro, “10 Years Ago Facebook Had ‘The Most Inglorious Launch Moment in History’ but It Changed Everything,” Business Insider, September 6, 2016.
John Battelle, personal interview with Ryan Levitt, February 2019.
Lara O’Reilly and Laura Stevens, “Amazon, With Little Fanfare, Emerges as an Advertising Giant,” Wall Street Journal, November 27, 2018.
Lisa Ronson, personal interview with Pippa Chambers, May 2019.
Mark Frain, personal interview with Pippa Chambers, May 2019.
Mark Read, personal interview with Ryan Levitt, February 2019.
Naomi Simson, personal interview with Pippa Chambers, May 2019.
Phil Cowlishaw, personal interview with Ryan Levitt, February 2019, and Pippa Chambers, May 2019.
Rob Barry and Suzanne Vranica, “U.S. Charges Eight With Online-Ad Fraud,” Wall Street Journal, November 27, 2018.
Sam Schechner and Mark Secada, “You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2019.
Simon White, personal interview with Pippa Chambers, May 2019.
Stephanie Tully, personal interview with Pippa Chambers, May 2019.
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