Wow, what a year; 2023 was one for the books for digital media buyers. We saw the introduction of Netflix OTT placements, the last of lingering Cookies going away, the new growth of DOOH, and the ever expanding reach of display ads. Staying true to form, Genius Monkey is here to dive deep into platform user’s data to give you a quick overview of some interesting trends observed throughout the year.

In early 2023, a startup called Telly boldly declared its intention to revolutionize the television industry. Many took notice because the founder and CEO is Ilya Pozin, the former CEO of the wildly successful Pluto TV streaming platform. Even more stand-out was the novel approach to selling televisions: giving them away at no charge. The basic premise is to sell ad space on the TV that subsidizes the cost of the panel itself.

Gen Z is growing up; they’ve been the transition generation for some time, and now more than half of them have reached adulthood. As their purchasing potential grows, it’s time to take notice of how, on what, and where the iGen spends their money so you can know how to better speak to their wants and needs. Let’s take a look at the data so you understand the youngest generation of adults and how their buying brains think.

Programmatic advertising has been on the rise ever since Genius Monkey helped coin the term in 2010. It’s no easy one-size-fits-all solution, though; a good programmatic campaign involves a lot of work with careful research, a thought-out strategy, and – the topic of today – a strong paid search plan. Travis Champ, COO of Genius Monkey, commented: “Paid search is so important that Genius Monkey will often tell clients to start – at the very least – a branded PPC campaign prior to using our platform.

If you live in the U.S. and have been on the internet this month, there’s a good chance you’ve been on YouTube. The video platform hosts more than 2.7 billion active users, and no platform can get that popular without seeing its fair share of controversies. Lately, YouTube has been making some not-so-great headlines that demonstrate the importance of knowing the entire customer journey in your programmatic campaigns. Let’s take a closer look at impression tracking and what we can learn about it from YouTube.

Wherever services can be exchanged for money, you’ll find not-so-great artists trying to make as much money with as little effort as possible. Made-for-advertising sites are a barely-legal scam that everyone recognizes when they see it, but it’s still going to eat up around $20 billion dollars in ad spend this year. How does this happen, and – more importantly – how can you minimize its impact on your business?

‘Tis the season; holiday spending in the US grew to over $940 billion in 2022, largely concentrated around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the newly-minted Small-Business Saturday snuggled in between. That’s a 5.9% increase over the last year, and represents an incredible opportunity to make money and create loyal customers – but you have to get started now! Start Early and Don’t Stop When The Holidays are Over Even with the best campaign in the world, you should not wait until the week before to start talking about your holiday deals.

Election season is right around the corner, and now is the time to put your advertising plan into action! Political marketing is more essential than ever; research suggests that most people don’t necessarily learn new things from political ads, but there is strong evidence that they are persuaded by them. In our latest article published on AP News, Yahoo! Finance and MarketWatch, we break down three keys to making a political campaign stand out from the crowd: getting a head start on the competition, choosing a programmatic platform with the features you need, and setting yourself apart as the “good guy”.

Digital advertising is always on the move, and the industry has seen some recent shake-ups that can have an impact on your marketing strategy. From new advertising partnerships to rapidly expanding inventories, here are some of the recent digital marketing headlines worth paying attention to. X Now Selling Ad Space via Google Earlier this year (summer of 2023), Elon Musk reported that advertising revenue for X was down 50%. In an effort to combat the declining figures, X is now selling inventory through the Google Display Network to programmatically serve users on their X home feed.

Genius Monkey is teaming up with StatSocial, a platform that leverages social profile audience data to give users next-level insights into their engaged audience, their affinities and other persona profiles they associate with – allowing Genius Monkey platform users to have thousands of more data points on their audience to further optimize campaigns and overall marketing efforts. In our latest article published on AP News, MarketWatch, and Seeking Alpha we explain how the Genius Monkey data panel is expanding with over 85,000 new customer attributes to track, including hobbies, education, preferred media, personality types, and much more.