A new study, albeit a UK one, has found that many marketers believe the US tech giants pose one of the “biggest threats” to the long term health of advertising.
The report, called The New Internet, was published by data connectivity platform LiveRamp and came from the responses given by more than 500 senior marketing decision makers.
According to the respondents, 36 per cent said that COVID was the biggest long-term threat to the industry. That was followed by Brexit at 26 per cent (again, it was a UK study), while a quarter said the tech giants such as Amazon, Facebook and Google remained a serious long-term threat.
More than a third (36 per cent) believed that greater transparency about the decisions made by the likes of Facebook and Google around online advertising on their platforms would improve the advertising industry.
While a third believed that the industry would be a lot fairer and could be improved if the tech giants could agree to a list of principles.
A recent study by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority found that Google and Facebook held a duopoly over the digital advertising market in the country, accounting for over 80 per cent of it or some £14 billion ($A25 billion).
As WARC noted: “Access to vast quantities of personal data has made of Google and Facebook quasi-regulators, whose gatekeeper roles means that the rules they set have implications not just within their own ecosystem but outside of it.”
