Ovum advises enterprise marketers to embrace online advertisin​g technologi​es

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: The online advertising industry is growing extremely quickly as advertising consumption patterns shift online and toward mobile. The online advertising industry is in a "2.0" paradigm, with personalized real-time bidding technologies replacing traditional mass-media static "banners" and "skyscrapers." According to a new report* from the global analyst firm Ovum, enterprises, advertising technology vendors, and digital marketing services providers need to urgently redefine their online advertising strategies.

Gerry Brown, Senior Analyst in Ovum's Customer Engagement team and author of the report says, "The online advertising industry is full of supply chain complexities, acronyms and buzzwords that have made it difficult for CMOs and marketing executives to fully comprehend. They need to break down this complex industry into easy-to-consume, bite-sized chunks in order to make informed, educated, and strategic decisions about online advertising technology investments and their choice of external services partners."

The report reviews the state of maturity of the online advertising industry, the early adopter industry sectors, the key vendors and service providers, and forecasts the future technology developments and enterprise adoption trends. In particular Ovum discusses how vendors should address the key enterprise concerns of ad viewability, ad performance measurement, and ad attribution within the context of a hostile regulatory environment and enterprise Big Data strategies.

"Leading enterprise marketing technology providers such as Oracle and IBM have been slow to embrace the online advertising market," says Brown. "As a result, specialist best-of-breed vendors such as Rocket Fuel, MediaMath, and OpenX have been able to grow extremely quickly from humble beginnings into powerful and influential online advertising technology vendors. Now these vendors are entering their next growth stage, transitioning from point solutions into enterprise advertising platforms.

"Enterprise marketing vendors should respond to incursions into their enterprise customer base. Meanwhile global management consultancies and systems integrators are looking to exploit the burgeoning services market that surrounds online advertising technologies, in particular the creation and management of the Big Data that is integral to online advertising processes."

"Enterprises need to embrace the online advertising market, which is becoming a key promotional channel to market for enterprise marketers. However, enterprises' market participation needs to be managed with caution. Fraud and data security in particular are issues that plague the online advertising industry. IT departments should work alongside marketers to ensure that robust IT best practices are deployed," concludes Brown.