We as advertisers get annoyed by advertising about advertising, but we understand why we were advertised to in the first place. Recently our Account Executive extraordinaire, Riley asked the media team something everyone who's ever used the internet wants to know: "Why am I seeing this ad?"

Her question was more specific to Google showing ads for their advertising services. Ads from an ad server about serving ads. That is a sentence that should never have to be written.

There are two ways this blog can go, so let's get the first and obvious one out of the way:

1. Why was Riley targeted by these ads?  She's in marketing, downloading marketing podcasts and reading marketing blog posts. We at Oodle stay up with our marketing news making it fairly easy for us to be added into a "this is a marketer" targeting bucket.
2. The second way this can go, why is Google choosing the spring of 2021 to run ads on advertising?  We've written about the impending cookie-pocalypse due to come with iOS 14.5 eliminating 3rd party cookies from the iPhone's web browser, preventing advertisers from tracking you around the web. If you haven't picked up on it, Google is worried. So is Facebook. So is literally everyone at this point! We are in a time of uncertainty for advertising servers, and they're advertising to marketers to remind them of all they can do so we keep using them.

Our Senior Digital Media Strategist, Tyler has some great thoughts about how he sees the future state of digital marketing going. He believes the big platforms will come out of this fine. Their entire revenue systems are built upon serving ads. iOS updates, cookies going away, anything privacy can throw at them – they'll find a way to pull through and be winners in terms of where money is funneled. Losses, if any, in this transitional period will land at the feet of advertisers when placements become more expensive.

He continues saying Demand-Side Platforms serving ads will retain targeting accuracy on the extremes of the marketing funnel. However, tracking and targeting that mid-funnel will get turned topsy-turvy while having potential scalability issues.

Riley entered back into our crazy group chat to bring up the elimination of the black hole that is the middle of the funnel and constantly trying to prove out that media mix will eliminate a bunch of headaches for us. And then she brought up an analogy that resonated with us. She borrowed it from Perpetual Traffic - EP302: iOS14 Attribution: Where's Your Money Going? 

"Let's assume it takes 8 touches to convert ... pretend 8 touches are actually 8 beers... after a certain point it gets hard to identify which of the 8 beers truly got you drunk."

We’re drinking up this analogy and sitting on the edge of our seat to see how these recent changes come to life. How is your company managing these impending changes? Let us know how we can help, over a beer of course!