YieldFest 2024 – Panel Discussion: Tackling Challenges and Seizing Opportunities in the Future of Digital Advertising

As year was coming to an end, it’s clear that the digital advertising industry has experienced a year of rapid innovation, shifting priorities, and new barriers. At YieldFest 2024, a distinguished panel of industry experts came together to reflect on these developments, identify challenges and discuss the transformative opportunities shaping the future.
Dive into this article to discover their responses and key takeaways.

Let’s start with the past, a small summary of 2024, which comes to an end. How did it go for you? Was it according to your expectations, or did something unexpected happen?

Satya Vinnakota, Director of Ads, Vinted:

I’m really amazed that we’re mid December, I don’t know how did it pass so quickly. I think 2024 was very rewarding, but also at the same time very challenging for us. As you explained, Vinted is a marketplace, so obviously our core revenue is what we generate from people trading second-hand clothes and items on our platform, and ad revenue is an additional revenue. I think one trend which is very challenging for us is to create a very rich ad experience when your core business is trying to do something else. It’s a struggle with the product, decision maker, stakeholder – even if you go with the experimentation implementation model. It’s still a lot of challenge to conceptualize the ad experience and try to figure out if advertisers are going to buy it programmatically – if not, try to sell them directly. But like I said, it’s also rewarding when you do something like this from scratch and you build an ad experience, which works with advertisers and users, because they’re looking at the ad they want to interact with.

Frantisek Kosir, Senior Programmatic Yield specialist, Madwire:

For me it’s practically 3 things. One – the expectations of the beginning of the cookieless world, so we did everything we could in order to prepare as much as we could for this possible big disaster that was coming, but, luckily, did not happen. Now we can use all the audiences and the data we have built, even though the ,,cookieless’’ is not coming yet, but it will eventually show up. Two – the new Google Video Declaration Policy, that was a blow for us, and I think many of the publishers around here in Slovakia were struggling with that. We’re still at a point where we can’t recover the full revenue that we got previously, so it’s very challenging. It also makes us think about things differently, so thank you Google for the opportunity. Another challenge was seeing Google Open Bidding Product going into almost zero performance. We’re not sure what was happening during the year, but compared to 2023 the performance is much worse. Looks like it’s waking up slowly, but we’re not sure if it will go back to the previous numbers.

Piotr Bartłoszewski, Head of Growth and Digital Sales, Wyborcza:

I need to say that we’re a subscription business. Now that we’re bigger, we have almost 300k active subscribers, so they put a lot of trust in us and what we do. Having that in mind, we do everything we need for them first, then users and then monetization of our website. 2024 was an exceptional time in the development in AI, especially chatbots, which had a positive impact on our communication and business. Chatbots today offer advanced futures, ranging from real time analytics of large data sets to the creation of precisely tailored content. Of course, I can say that this year we were expecting, as an industry, a huge change. The cookieless was to come, and the surprise was rather positive. Google retreated from planned extinction of third-party cookies. The process – which really changed the way we really collect data and target ads – was deleted several times and Google eventually said to put it on hold. But for us it wasn’t a lost time, we were waiting for a cookieless world, but it has forced the advertising industry to adapt its strategies to develop new and innovative solutions. And the first half of 2024 was an intense time of preparations and testing alternative ways of monetization. Even though the world without ,,cookie” has not become reality, the effort we put into the development of first-party data, contextual advertising or content personalization has generated a lot of value.

Now, having covered the past, let’s dive deep into current challenges and how you think it will be in 2025. Will there be other challenges to come?

Satya Vinnakota, Director of Ads, Vinted:

The biggest challenge would be connected to running the ad business and metrics ex. increasing revenue per active user, but at the same time restrict impressions per active user. That means we want to show less ads, but make more revenue, which leads us to generating performance for the advertisers. As long as they spend money on ads on Vinted vs what they get back is positive, they will continue to spend and it will increase their budgets. I think the biggest challenge there is to figure out how we could use innovative ad formats to grab this. I’m not talking about what already works in the programmatic environment, like banners, interstitials, especially when it comes to mobiles because our business is very heavy there. One of the things we experimented with is to work very closely with subscription businesses and offer very specific promotions for Vinted members, ex. Hellofresh. They offer very fast and specific offer, only for Vinted members that are non-existent on the open internet. We run an ad when a customer finishes a transaction on our platform, which is a happy moment, and we say ,,Congratulations! There is an offer for you to register at Hellofresh and you get the first month for free, it’s on us”. These kinds of things are still a challenge, because everything is very conceptual and we don’t know if we can reach scale with that kind of ad. The other thing that I’m very worried about is bot automation. Now with AI and how quickly you can create creatives, there are a lot of bad actors. Typical examples would be all these dating websites or so-called dating apps, with creatives built in bad taste. We don’t want to show these ads, but because it’s becoming super easy to make them, run so many of them at the same time, even if we start blocking one creative after another with different mechanisms, I see a big rise in bad actors. Of course, with the programmatic setup we get scale, but we also get problems. We have to solve them very quickly, and ad quality is definitely a big challenge. We don’t want to show ads of our competitors, which is any fast-hand trading. Our mission is to promote second hand, and we definitely don’t want any Temu, Shein, and other fast-fashion businesses. 

Piotr Bartłoszewski, Head of Growth and Digital Sales, Wyborcza:

Subscription business is connected with quality, so long story short – quality and authenticity are very important. Today, we’re dominated by fake news and AI generated content, so authenticity is gaining new unique value. Users expect from us, publishers, to be sincere in our messages and clear presentation of our values. So building a community based on truth and trust became a key element of our communication strategy. This approach will drive greater audience engagement. I think brands will look for partners or environments that not only offer white reach, but – above all – partners who bring together an engagement community based on shared values. The era of empty numbers is coming to an end and the relationship based on authentic dialog is giving meaning. I’m talking about it, because more than half of the people believe that they fall into fake news, and according to Newsworks’ study conducted in the UK, almost 80% of users are concerned about it. 25% of them believe that they are able to detect fake news themselves. Most of them said that they would turn to newspaper websites, like ours, to verify stories they read on social media. This is an important role for publishers. Also, I mentioned quality, which is important in advertising. Our current focus at Wyborcza is attention, and this is becoming the key. The VA indicators have been with us for more than 10 years and we have to ask ourselves whether this is all we can hope for. The user receives several thousands advertising messages a day, so the question is if displaying 50% of ad for 1 second and counting it as visible by metric system is effective enough. Viewability is important, will be important, but probably not enough. We have developed a high attention package based on our SuperUser, digital subscriber who is paying for reading our articles. This is connected to technical targeting by using units with highest VA and – what is more important – the highest visibility time. Also, in addition to this, with our friends from Yieldbird, we have implemented more user engaging solutions of Adnami, and they definitely have higher impact than normal banners (higher CTR), and the client receives analytical metrics at the end including the attention rate. We believe that qualitative advertising activities are being a long term success.

Frantisek Kosir, Senior Programmatic Yield specialist, Madwire:

My views are slightly different due to the market as well. One of the biggest challenges we’re facing right now is the declining trend of pageviews generated across the whole market in Slovakia. For some publishers it’s around -10 to -20% of pageviews, which is really a lot. It’s a strange trend, meaning to wake up the lost inventory in order to feed the programmatic revenue, at the same level or even higher. In order to secure that number, we’re currently testing and will be introducing rewarding ads on one of largest news websites in Slovakia for the comment sections. We understood that it;s a very delicate group of people, and only a small change can send them away, so we’re trying to find the right amount of ads they would  be able to digest. This is something that I’m looking forward to next year. The second thing would be to educate, especially the sales department, to start using more opportunities of the first-party data they are giving them. So far, we don’t see any benefits of that in the open market. We’re sending out the first-party data and looking for  whatever we’re able to attract, but don’t see it being evaluated by the open market in any way. Using these in the stage of going cookieless, it would probably be beneficial. We want to educate them, and look forward to doing so next year.