Burning media and advertising questions for 2024

From cookies to TikTok to that election

Who’s going to CES next week? Let’s hang!

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2024 is here. The ad economy looks strong, despite the fact that this year promises chaos, in the form of the end of third party cookies and potentially the end of the US. It’s time for some burning questions about the year ahead.

Seriously, how bad does the Cookiepocalypse get?

I had Adweek’s terrific platform reporter Catherine Perloff on my podcast this week. She’s heard real worry in the market - particularly among publishers on the open web..

“A lot of folks have told me is with cookie deprecation, a lot of money is going to I think a lot of brands are just going to spend less in programmatic and open web programmatic,” she said. The question is, “how will the industryrespond, how will it try to win back any of those dollars if it can?”

I wonder how many marketers will take a wait-and-see approach, planning to come back to the open web when the cookie crumbs settle - and then never bother to come back.

Just how bonkers and ugly is the election going to get?

Remember when we thought 2016, with fake news and Cambridge Analytica and all that stuff, was a digital ads nightmare? Well, let’s look at how this year unfolds, with polarization worse than ever and AI coming into its own. 2016 may end up seeming quaint. You can easily imagine it - candidates pushing misinformation. Brands sponsoring misinformation. Platforms having to fight with campaigns about misinformation. Can’t wait.

On another note, when does one of the presidential candidates partner with Mr. Beast?

Is there anyone more influential among Gen Z right now?

How big do Trump and Biden go on TikTok?

How much more ad share will TikTok gain, in spite of all of its lingering controversies?

The Information’s Sahil Patel reported right before the holidays that TikTok was pushing for 50% spending hikes from some of the biggest brands an agencies. Those requests are just a tad bit aggressive, but if anyone has a right to go big this year its the Bytdance-owned mega app.

“It is becoming like kind of the third platform,” said Perloff.

Does anyone actually get fined by one of these state privacy laws?

I wrote last year about how - with all these new state privacy laws going into effect, that it might be a rough summer for digital advertising. Then basically nothing happened. Will this year be different?

Will any more TV networks shut down? This is something Matthew Belloni and Lucas Shaw recently discussed on The Town in light of the chatter around Paramount being for sale. It was once unimaginable, but now makes tons of sense.

In the meantime, would the big five TV companies ever pool together automated ad sales?

In terms of advertising, does AI end up having a bigger impact on media buying than in creative production?

This is something Perloff is watching closely, give all the recent mishaps in programmatic advertising regarding the lack of transparency and control - and the push to adopt more machine-driven ad buying.\

“Generally marketers are going to do things that are like easy and they're not going to take the extra steps,” she said. But with products like Google’s Perfomance Max and Facebook’s Advantage Plus, “I think there's just less control over where the ads run, but that's always been the problem or virtue of programmatic depending on how you frame it….There’s gonna be sort of like a swath of buyers who question it…but only so many buyers are going to be willing to do that kind of thing.”

Who gets the NBA streaming rights?

This is based on zero reporting, but I think YouTube makes a move here.

Does Retail Media keep getting more crowded? Or do some smaller players look to outsource ad sales. “I'm just curious who else tries to become an ad network and if we see some sort of culling of some of these eventually,” said Perloff.

Will Mike eventually get back to real writing, instead of endless year-and lists?

Not sure.