Twitter's New Buyers and Safari's Ascendance: Experts' Take on What 2023 Has in Store

The last few months of 2022 have seen some unusual market dynamics, including an increasingly murky future for Twitter with forecasts of it shedding users, CTV ad spend continues to see grow while the long-awaited ad business from Netflix takes a wobbly turn, and rumors swirl of Apple building its own demand-side platform. Ahead of a major privacy reckoning in 2023, Adweek spoke with five industry experts about their boldest calls for next year. Disney’s Bob Iger acquires Twitter With Twitter's future looking uncertain, some believe the platform might have a new owner in Disney’s CEO Bob Iger. “I can easily see him acquiring Twitter, which is going to be a firesale soon,” said Lou Paskalis, senior marketing, and media executive, former head of Global Media at Bank of America. In 2016, Iger pulled a last-minute plug on Disney’s “cheap deal” to acquire Twitter given “the nastiness [of the platform was] extraordinary,” Iger said previously, hinting at Twitter’s rampant bot activity. Before Performance Max, There Was Google's App Campaigns, Muddying Transparency Insider Intelligence estimates Twitter's global users will fall by 3.9% next year, diminishing the social media’s monthly active users from 368.4 million to 353.9 million. Meanwhile, Iger has been given “broad license by the company’s board to do whatever he wants,” said Paskalis. The CEO's return to Disney has boosted the company’s stock prices by 6%. And he is armed with troves of data from Disney’s theme park, studio, and television network, Paskalis added. “Iger can build a true end-to-end platform driven by identity and consent," Paskalis said. "To that, marketers need to conduct their business in an environment of predictable outcomes—something Iger will quickly reestablish and has an excellent team in place that knows how to woo advertisers." Safari takes market share Conversations at the Web Developer Forum, a web development and programming community, strongly suggest that Apple is making a tremendous effort to improve its web designer and developer experience for its web browser Safari. According to Statcounter, Safari's global market share, which is 18.67%, is a third of Chrome's market share at 65.86%. As a result, “marketers will have to address the notorious Safari revenue gap," said Don Marti, vp of ecosystems innovations at publisher network CafeMedia. As a result of Apple's ATT implementation in 2021, audiences on Safari do not have signals attached to them, resulting in lower CPM. Meanwhile, audiences on Chrome are more likely to have third-party cookies tracking them, which results in higher RTB bids and comparatively higher-priced ads on Chrome. Publishers have to figure out how to sell Safari impressions.Don Marti, VP of ecosystems innovations at publisher network CafeMedia Safari's resurgence is two-fold. Firstly, Europe’s Digital Markets Act, a bill aimed at making the digital economy fairer, should end Apple’s iOS anticompetitive practices over the forced use of its browser engine WebKit. Currently, competing browser engines such as Mozilla and Google Chrome distributed through the iOS App Store are required to use WebKit, a requirement that limits their product differentiation or uses of their own engines. “Regulators will enforce [Apple] to offer browser choice, and so they have to come up with a browser that's worth choosing,” said Marti. The second is that Safari competitor Google Chrome is working on getting wider adoption for its Privacy Sandbox proposals, which are still low. “Most of what they're Privacy Sandbox doing is re-implementing web ads, including their existing anti-competitive practices within the browser,” said Marti. Safari's comeback will also mean the buy-side will need to figure out how to better buy Safari traffic. "And publishers will have to figure out how to best represent and sell Safari impressions,” he added. Regulators crack open Google log files The rising concern over data governance will make way for “an in-depth look at what amount advertisers pay for ads and where that money flows. And more efforts to provide transparency, control, and limits on advertisers who extract value from the advertising supply chain but don't create any value,” said Joshua Lowcock, global chief media officer at UM Worldwide. This means log files will be a hot conversation in 2023, especially for regulators. Currently, "advertisers and agencies want the log data. But there is resistance from the ad tech ecosystem to provide it," said Lowcock. Every time a marketer buys ads on the internet, log files are created by the ad server that shows where ads are delivered, ad dollars spent, what data is used and what device the ad is delivered on. Previously, publishers have been exasperated over not having access to Google's ad-tech stack log files at the impression level, which deals with user targeting. This has limited publishers to compare Google's bids with other exchanges. As a myriad of privacy laws go into effect next year, "it's possible that regulators will seek [Google's log files] in order to get transparency in market dynamics," said Lowcock. “There's a wealth of data and insight that advertisers can extract out of log files to help them be more efficient.” Meanwhile, as CTV ad spending surges, log files can help solve CTV inventory impersonation issues as well as eliminate wasted media spend in times of economic uncertainty. To that, JF Cote, CEO of independent ad exchange Sharethrough, believes consolidation will take place at a torrid pace on the supply side over the next three years. Exchanges will be narrowed down to five or six major players used by publishers and DSPs. Additionally, agencies and DSPs will continue to strike deals directly with publishers as a form of differentiation, pressuring the ad-tech layers in the middle to be low-cost transaction layers. Competitors get cozy with data sharing As has been well documented, eyeballs are shifting from linear to over-the-top streaming platforms. “As a result, you're now seeing the currencies in the measurement change beyond reach and frequency. This is beyond just Nielsen panels,” said Bill Stratton, media, entertainment & advertising head at Snowflake. “The requirement to collaborate between media companies or publishers, agencies, advertisers, and measurement companies along with technologies like programmatic and identity resolution is greater because what you're measuring now is granular data.” As a result, more marketers are expected to share data with media companies and vice versa. Historically, this has been more of a data-independent relationship between a measurement provider, a media company, and an advertiser or agency. Why Digitally Native Brands Like Wisp and Earnin Are Turning to CTV "Direct data sharing between two parties was challenging due to the difficulties in sharing data between parties with latency issues and in a privacy-compliant way," said Stratton. Now as data collaboration makes headway, this “creates a better way to measure the marketing campaign and make it more relevant.” To that, more video streaming services are expected to collaborate and share data as opposed to competing with each other for viewership. This collaboration is seen with companies like OpenAP, backed by NBCUniversal, Paramount, Fox, and Warner Brothers Discovery. "Efforts like OpenAP Data Hub give advertisers access to rich, cross-publisher data in a privacy-compliant environment to power more effective audiences for targeting and measurement," said Stratton.