In the world of marketing, data is king. Marketers use an abundance of user data to gather leads, increase sales, and personalize the customer experience. These data-first strategies have proven highly successful at converting customers, which is exactly why data is king. Data-driven personalized marketing allows brands to target their campaigns at precise individuals rather than splash their messaging to random mass audiences. But with increasing awareness around data privacy recently, ad personalization has encountered a few road blocks, forcing marketers to change how they collect and/or personalize consumer data in the age of digital privacy.

It’s a new year with a whole new–and bright–outlook on fraud prevention in the programmatic landscape. The pandemic of 2020 dramatically accelerated digital business efforts, and while some have speculated this could potentially make the digital supply chain more vulnerable to fraud, new research has shown that a good portion of fraud is already being effectively prevented. The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) is a global program composed of several digital supply chain contributors and ad tech companies–including Genius Monkey–that have banded together in a combined effort to fight fraudulent activity and promote brand safety within digital advertising.

Over the top TV (OTT) or Connected TV (CTV) have pretty much made their mark on the advertising landscape — enough to stake their claim as a mainstay in the advertiser’s official bag of tricks! Currently, there are more than 130 CTV applications1 available to viewers, and that number is growing rapidly; like a new city popping up in the middle of the desert. But, with any new city comes new bad guys.

We’re excited to announce our latest article published on Forbes! Genius Monkey’s CRO, Jeremy Hudgens, is a proud member of Forbes Business Council, and as such, we have the privilege of publishing articles through Forbes every month or so. Our previously-featured Forbes article, titled Don’t Be a Statistic: Preparing for Ad Life After Lockdown, we covered the significant effect COVID-19 lockdowns have had on the ad industry. In our featured Forbes article this month, titled 2020: A Rough Year for Pay TV we discuss with recent pandemic uncertainty, people have looked at alternatives to traditional cable TV more than ever, and that trend is continuing as more and more consumers are cutting back on costs where they can.

The unforeseen upheaval of 2020 has been hard on all industries, but colleges and higher education institutions have taken a particularly rough hit since social distancing and stay-at-home mandates went into place. Without the opportunity to make personal connections, foot traffic has greatly decreased on campus, while many prospective students are now hesitant to enroll in any higher learning programs due to economic uncertainties. With so many unknowns still up in the air, educational institutions have been forced to shift their marketing strategies and re-evaluate their advertising message.

How long do advertisers have to make an impression when they engage an audience online? Not as long as you might think. Marketers typically assume people will watch all of their 15 or 30 second spots or all of their rotating banner ads. But when looking at the data, it seems that’s not always the case. In fact, it rarely ever is. The IAB Digital Video Glossary says a video ad is considered “viewable” if at least 50% of the ad is viewed for two consecutive seconds.

While banks are an important part of our economy, they’re not the only component of the financial sector. Also included are real estate firms, insurance companies, and investment firms. Advertising for financial institutions can be challenging, as it’s always changing and very fast-paced. In fact, 51% of financial institutions report that their biggest challenge is keeping up with new digital marketing techniques. As technology evolves and customer habits change, the marketing strategies must change with them.

The year of 2020 has been a wild ride and it’s still going strong. This year has thrown marketers from every industry for a loop when it comes to customer patterns and advertising predictability, and while much of what we’ve learned this year has come at a high cost, we’ve learned a plethora of lessons involving consumer behavior, trends and overall ad effectiveness–and savvy marketers are continuing to adapt their campaign strategies accordingly.

With the release of iOS 14, Apple is making yet another big privacy-focused upgrade to iOS. One where users can choose to hide their device’s ID from apps so it can’t be tracked. Something many advertisers, particularly Facebook, aren’t happy about. But despite the uproar of Facebook and a handful of other social giants, there are certain programmatic advertising platforms who aren’t bothered by the privacy news at all. Why?

Genius Monkey is proud to announce that our programmatic platform has been listed among the top 1% of all ad vendors with The Media Trust, according to their recently released IAB Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF) report. As a global leader in digital third-party risk management, The Media Trust provides real-time security, data privacy, performance management and quality assurance solutions that help safeguard, monetize and optimize the user experience over devices.