Arity at RampUp 2023: Key themes for the future of programmatic advertising

This year’s RampUp conference in San Francisco was, as always, a great meeting of the digital minds in marketing technology. The event was sold out, with over 2000 digital marketing professionals converging to share ideas on how to tackle challenges, embrace opportunities, and balance making digital marketing more profitable for businesses while also more useful to consumers.

The strongest theme at the show was the need for data collaboration. Scott Howe, LiveRamp’s CEO compared using the right data points to reach the best customers to seeing stars in the night sky coalesce into a beautiful constellation. Without the right partnerships, your customer is just a series of fragmented data points. But with the right data partners, your customer comes to life as a three-dimensional person you can truly connect with at the right place and time.

Marketers must collaborate with lots of different types of data partners to get a truly holistic view of their customer. You can only know so much about your customer using first-party data, so layering in other types of data to fill in gaps about your customers is essential to having a robust data stack.

Without the right partnerships, your customer is just a series of fragmented data points. But with the right data partners, your customer comes to life as a three-dimensional person you can truly connect with at the right place and time.

Some other key themes we heard at RampUp included:

• Retail media platforms: Retailers are increasingly developing their own advertising platforms to monetize online traffic and allow brands to pay for premium space and display ads. With this evolution comes the opportunity to use data for targeting and measurement, but also challenges around consumer data privacy.
• Data clean rooms: As retail media platforms become more prevalent, data clean rooms are required to create a protected space between advertisers, consumers, and retailers. Simply put, a data clean room is a safe and neutral space for data collaboration and partnerships to exist without either party having access to the other’s customer data. It protects user privacy by providing aggregated and anonymized user data to advertisers, enabling advertisers to reach customers based on their shopping and other behaviors. There was much discussion about how clean rooms enable retailers to do this while also protecting consumer privacy.
• Data privacy: As usual with the digital marketing crew, consumer privacy concerns were top of mind – especially with increased legal scrutiny over the past few years. Advertisers and publishers discussed how to modernize their marketing and content strategies to ensure compliance without sacrificing revenue or customer experience.
• The continued rise of connected TV: The TV world is at a pivotal moment with consumer viewing habits shifting rapidly. A number of speakers discussed the challenges advertisers and TV content creators face as they work on merging their TV and CTV plans – and how solutions for seamless measurement and attribution also must catch up.

All in all, RampUp once again reflected the quickly changing face of digital and programmatic advertising, and made for a fast-paced and engaging few days in the Bay Area.

Ready to learn more about how Arity helps marketers use data about how people drive to better understand their customers and connect with them in a meaningful way?

• Watch the recording of our RampUp 2023 panel discussion, “The Modern Data Stack.”
• Visit our website to find out more about Arity’s Marketing and Advertising solutions and how they can solve your marketing challenges.
• Contact us to learn more.