2024: A Year of Quality in Advertising’s Outcomes Era

Last week, I wrote about digital advertising being in an Outcomes Era. But within every near-hegemonic ideological period, there are countervailing trends. We’ve seen this counter-cultural anxiety manifest in 2024, which, I’d argue, has been a Year of Quality, punctuated by concerns about the dominant assumptions of the Outcomes Era.

The Outcomes Era’s spirit is best embodied by Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+, products premised on the philosophy, “Tell us what outcomes you want, and let us worry about how to make them happen.” Overall, marketers accept this philosophy, which is dominant for a reason. To put it a bit indelicately, it’s hard to get fired if you’re plugging ad dollars into universally recognizable systems that claim to drive business outcomes: $1 in, $3 out.

However, it’s also natural that Google and Meta’s increasing control over the entire advertising process would give some marketers pause. Curious minds may inquire, “How do I trust a system that owns the inventory as well as the ad buying tools and is grading its own homework? Are the returns Google and Meta supposedly drive really incremental? Am I running on trustworthy and brand-safe inventory? How do I know this is the most efficient way to reach my audience?” AI will only exacerbate the dynamics of the Outcomes Era as automation’s scope increases, likely exacerbating concerns about a lack of control and transparency, too.

Hence 2024: the year of urgent concern about made-for-advertising sites, The Trade Desk’s shift from the open internet to the premium internet (including its launch of SP500+), and the rise of curation. The dawn of programmatic, much like that of the internet itself, promised a sprawling universe of opportunity and technologies that would automatically help advertisers seize it. But the industry is now ambivalent toward that very ethos. As a result, adtech is making adjustments to accommodate nervous brands and agencies who still want their outcomes above all else — but with some assurances of control, transparency, and controversy mitigation, too. 

Consider the messaging and positioning of DV, the current market leader in what we might broadly call the media quality space, as reflected in its Nov 6 earnings call:

“Over the last few years, we've been evolving DV from a company known for protection to one that drives both protection and performance, a shift reflected in our focus on delivering new performance solutions like DV Authentic Attention and Scibids AI. … This year, the industry's shift toward outcome-driven platforms, especially those in social media, has accelerated the demand for performance-based solutions. Make no mistake: real performance starts with protection.”

This is smart positioning (or, if you like, spin) in that DV is accurately capturing the major trends of the industry and positioning itself as aligned with them, which makes its continued success seem more likely. But DV is telling the industry story of outcomes and quality (or, as it says, performance and protection) backwards. There hasn’t been a very recent shift to outcomes in contrast to a historical focus on “protection” or quality (though it might seem that way from the vantage point of a media quality company). Rather, the dominant paradigm of this era of digital advertising is and has been the pursuit of outcomes, and as a quality company, DV is just catching up (hence its emphasis on the Scibids acquisition). 

Methinks DV CEO Mark Zagorski doth protest too much when he says, “Make no mistake: real performance starts with protection.” This is exactly the move DV should be making: capitalizing on the Year of Quality by arguing that quality is a precondition of the pursuit of outcomes. ‘Yes, you can have your outcomes,’ DV is saying, ‘and we’ll even increasingly align ourselves with the pursuit of them (via, for example, Scibids). But outcomes are impossible without quality.’ In reality, quality is a countercultural anxiety, so in steering a quality company, DV will always be climbing uphill. Plus, it seems far from clear to me that DV actually plays an integral role in shoring up the quality that is hypothetically critical to driving advertising outcomes.

All of that said, the necessarily countercultural nature of media quality companies doesn’t make them negligible, and 2024 has shown precisely that. A pretty large quality barnacle can prosper on the back of outcomes’ blue whale. Ad verification is already a $5-10B market. A cottage industry of consultancies and data companies whose job is to verify the verifiers seems to be arising to check the work of DV and IAS, who continue to face what I’d anecdotally consider a gap in public confidence. Finally, curation, this year’s key new-ish sector, represents the same yarn DV is trying to spin: it rests on the assumption that quality is essential to outcomes or, at the very least, that you can deliver better outcomes by factoring quality in. 

Google announced last week that it would launch curation services in Google Ad Manager, partnering with adtech players such as IAS, LiveRamp, Audigent, Lotame, and Scope3 to do so. In terms of market dynamics, Google’s curation launch is the opposite of DV’s posture: instead of the king of quality arguing for its business as a precondition of outcomes, Google, the king of outcomes, is saying, “For brands especially concerned about quality, we have that base covered, too.” 

People continue to be confused about the value proposition of curation — particularly its rise this year — but it is intuitive when viewed through this lens. Curation is about driving outcomes while honoring advertisers’ concerns about inventory quality. In other words, if 2024 will be remembered in part as the year of curation — featuring the entry of DMP owners such as Azerion, Audigent, and Lotame into the space and culminating in Google’s endorsement of the idea — it will be because curation marks the synthesis of the dominant concern with outcomes and the countercultural concern with quality. 

“Real performance” may not necessarily “start with protection” (emphasis mine). But the curation phenomenon represents a growing obsession with what exactly “real performance” is — and how to deliver it safely and efficiently. I expect that, going forward, the debate over real performance will become the crux of many of our debates, including the future of CTV and commerce media, the ongoing tension between the open market and the walled gardens, and the viability of the ad verification sector. The tension between outcomes and quality may evolve into a debate about the quality of outcomes.