This automated method of trading display ad inventory was particularly prone to the “GDPR effect,” given its reliance on data for ad placement. However, the numbers kept rising through 2019.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), responsible to policing GDPR infringements in the UK, has begun to get tough on ad tech, though. In June, it published a detailed report into ad tech and real-time bidding (RTB), giving the industry until the end of the year to snuff out the questionable practices employed in the programmatic space.
Next year, GDPR may finally affect the industry, but we've seen a subtle shift away from those methods of transacting that will come under increasing scrutiny. This year, the majority of programmatic display inventory—£3.81 billion ($5.07 billion)—will be transacted via programmatic direct deals, accounting for 65.5% of the programmatic total. The RTB portion—the bit that the ICO is concerned about—while still growing, shrank proportionally in 2019. And within RTB, the amount of spend going to open markets, where data sharing is hardest to track, is diminishing proportionally, too.
Marketers, it seems, are already steeling themselves for what’s to come. 2019 wasn’t all bad for the ad industry in the UK. Things could have been better, and the twin specters of Brexit and GDPR caused a great deal of uncertainty, but no cities were razed and the ad industry didn’t collapse into a heap of self-loathing.