New briefings: The 2022 trends and challenges for marketers

In this week's Media Buying Briefing:

A look back through the year reveals a confusing time for the media agency world. The holding companies are feverishly trying to update their offerings and break down silos in an effort to become more nimble, while independents find their niches and exploit them to the best of their abilities.

In this week's Marketing Briefing:

This year hasn’t been an easy one, especially the second half. Marketers navigated economic uncertainty as well as determine what channels will be popular, Twitter ups and downs and privacy changes that have made their jobs much harder.

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Media Buying Briefing: The good, the bad and the ugly of 2022 for media agencies

By Michael Bürgi and Antoinette Siu

As 2022 comes to a close, a look back through the year reveals a most confusing time for the media agency world, holding differing fortunes as they try to get back to normalcy, whatever that is. The holding companies are feverishly trying to update their offerings and break down silos in an effort to become more nimble, while independents find their niches and exploit them to the best of their abilities.

A few irrefutable trends emerged over this past year that merit revisiting.

The continued rise of commerce media:

Judging from the number of agencies and holding companies that launched dedicated e-commerce and/or retail media divisions, it’s safe to say that commerce media is the hottest growth factor media agencies enjoyed in 2022. Just last week UM updated its UM Shopper unit into a more broadly focused UM Commerce — a tacit recognition that the industry’s moved way past just looking to Amazon.

And why wouldn’t they? Commerce media is exploding and is expected to keep up hockey-stick growth for years to come. In the last year alone, so many more retailers opened up retail media network offerings, to the point where Acxiom’s CEO declared to Digiday that everything’s an ad network these days.

Marketing Briefing: Here are the top trends, issues marketers had to navigate throughout 2022

By Kristina Monllos

This year hasn’t been an easy one, especially the second half.

Marketers navigated economic uncertainty as well as determine what channels will be popular, Twitter ups and downs and privacy changes that have made their jobs much harder.

Before we look ahead to 2023 (our next Marketing Briefing will be out Jan. 2), we wanted to look back on the big trends of 2022. Read on below:

Flexibility amid economic uncertainty:

Over the last few years, the marketing community has been dealing with uncertainty — when will the pandemic truly end and things get back to normal (if ever), when will we return to offices and with that more normal consumer behavior, etc. Over the last six months or so, that uncertainty has been more focused on the economy. The ups and downs of the market, the expectation for a recession the conflicting reports making it more difficult for marketers to read where people’s heads will be at and what they should be doing with their advertising — it’s all been uncertain. With that being the case, much of the second half of this past year has been about flexibility and tighter deal windows. That push for flexibility has been commonplace over the last few years and it’ll likely continue next year.

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