Blis, the leading privacy-first, location-powered advertising partner, announces the launch of its new research-based e-guide, “The insider report: by media planners, for media planners”. The e-guide is designed to ensure media planners are better informed and prepared for a more productive 2022, outlining a range of best practices to optimize the media planning cycle with privacy-first in mind.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Kristi Flores, VP of Global Marketing at Tektronix

The study reveals that most (56%) US media planners are seeing privacy-first solutions as a key priority during 2022. In fact, US planners are the only group in the survey treating privacy-first as seriously as they should. In the UK for example, just 40% of UK media planners are seeing privacy-first solutions as a key priority this year.

American media planners seem to be more confident than their peers in the UK and Australia when it comes to the available solutions to reach audiences without relying on cookies. In the UK, 41% of in-house media planners accept that there is still no good solution on the market today that allows them to reach their audiences accurately. In Australia, this number is even higher as 50% of them feel the same way, compared to just 26% of the US in-house media planners.

The report also addresses how media planners feel about the current privacy-first solutions in the market. Almost half (43%) of media planners are considering a mixture of contextual targeting, UID 2.0 and FloC. In-house planners seem to be a bit more skeptical, with 1 in 5 of them still saying they wouldn’t consider any of the current solutions as ideal to overcome privacy concerns.

The study also reveals how media planners expect to spend their budgets in the next five years. According to the findings, CTV gained planners’ attention during the pandemic and will continue to do so in 2022, with 53% of media agency planners expecting to spend more than 50% of their overall digital media campaigns on CTV. However, just 36% of in-house planners expect to do the same, a much lower, but still significant part of their budgets.

As consumers get back to their lives and restrictions continue to lift, media planners are also preparing to increase in-app advertising budgets. According to the survey, in-app advertising is set to account for 59% of digital media budgets by 2026 in the US.

Marketing Technology News: Nativo’s Culture of Innovation Fueled by a Diverse-Led Organization

Aaron McKee, CTO at Blis comments: “This new piece of research highlights some key areas that media planners, and the industry as a whole, need to be aware of and plan for, if they’re not already. Many media planners are already missing half their web audience and 80% of their most valuable in-app audience, and challenges around reach, relevance and measurement will only get worse with the Chrome third-party cookie changes coming shortly. This is the year to try new approaches to reaching wide audiences in a way that demonstrably performs. The approaches that stand the test of time will be rooted in privacy and respect for personal data. Finding trusted privacy-first partners will help make their lives much easier – and their campaigns more effective – in the long run.”

The e-guide is available for download and reinforces Blis’ commitment to offering privacy-first solutions to enable brands and agencies to target audiences at scale based on real-life behavior.