Melanie Hoptman.
The AdNews end of year Perspectives, looking back at 2024 and forward to next year.
LiveRamp Managing Director, Asia Pacific Melanie Hoptman
In 2024, Australia’s ad tech landscape underwent a pivotal transformation.
Key shifts emerged as brands contended with a dynamic environment marked by a heightened emphasis on privacy, a review to Australia’s Privacy Act, and more.
Aussie marketers also faced mounting pressure to capture consumer attention in an environment flooded with competing messages and at the same time, consumers became more privacy-conscious, demanding greater transparency and control over their data. These shifts underscored the need for brands to continue reinforcing their data practices, all while driving the results needed to power their businesses.
What marketing success in 2025 hinges on
As we enter 2025, marketers are looking for more effective ways to connect. Marketers seek streamlined strategies that can cut through the clutter, while consumers want interactions that are relevant, timely, and above all – personalised.
In 2025, marketing success will hinge on adopting technologies and practices that help brands create impactful campaigns. These campaigns must be built on consumers’ first-party data, and must be tailored, relevant, and engaging. Furthermore, the campaigns should be built to enable marketers to quickly iterate and invest, enabling the optimal use of marketers’ budgets.
To navigate this new landscape successfully, marketers should focus on three key areas:
Identity resolution
With fragmentation persisting in 2024 – and likely intensifying in the coming year, identity resolution will become critical for brands to understand their customers and customer’s customers.
Identify will no longer be a ‘nice-to-have’, but will be a must-have capability, essential for connecting with consumers in a meaningful way. With data streams from various sources, connecting data to understand individual consumers will help marketers understand their customers better.
Creating this all-important unified view of the consumer enables marketers to see all touchpoints they have with a consumer, to understand what channels to advertise on in order to reach them, and to seamlessly activate on these channels and drive results. Without a unified consumer view, omnichannel marketing is not possible.
Taking first-party data to the next step
First-party data is poised to play a major role to navigate success next year. In 2024, we saw an uptake in first-party data investment – for example, research from Lotame’s State of Data collaboration report showed that Aussie marketers recognised the urgency of first-party data, but the data challenges marketers faced were still ubiquitous.
Building a first-party data structure alone won’t be enough, which is why the industry must shift focus towards ensuring this data is accurate and validated to form a solid foundation for understanding the customer journey.
By deploying identity solutions that connect data across channels, marketers can gain a holistic view of their audiences, enabling them to build personalised and privacy-safe interactions.
First-party data will remain essential to success, and marketers will need to activate it with greater precision and purpose to drive meaningful results.
Turning challenges into opportunities with data collaboration
Across the ecosystem, the macro pressures of consumers’ privacy preferences and regulation continue to drive change in companies’ data-driven marketing. Combined with signal losses from third-party signals like IP addresses, if unaddressed, marketers will not only lose understanding of their target audiences, but also their ability to target them with campaigns across channels. However, with the opportunities afforded by data-driven marketing, marketers can gain signal through solutions like authenticated identity, as well as building customer intelligence – and stronger relationships with customers – through data collaboration.
In this landscape, data collaboration, a strategy that allows brands to share and combine data to gain a more complete view of customers, will become essential for unlocking new opportunities.
According to Forrester’s Data Collaboration Report, 93% of respondents agree that enhanced data collaboration is essential to driving revenue growth. This is why data collaboration enables brands to stay competitive by not only accessing insights that drive innovation, but also improve the bottom-line.
By partnering with trusted companies, brands will be able to enrich their data, improve personalisation, and elevate the customer experience—all while ensuring privacy is maintained. Working with trusted partners, brands can expand their data ecosystem responsibly, aligning with consumer expectations for security and transparency.
The roadmap to success in 2025
In 2025, the most successful marketing strategies will centre on Strengthening data strategies and everything this entails, in order to continue driving the experiences that consumers want.
It is no doubt that in the next year, the ecosystem will continue to evolve in unpredictable ways, but those who stay ahead of the curve will be better positioned to adapt and thrive. By preparing now and setting clear data strategies for the new year, marketers can turn uncertainty into opportunity and be ready to thrive in the face of change in 2025.
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