Marketers want Google to create a DMP: Gartner
The company has aggressively invested in enhancing DV360 and addressed privacy concerns related to cookie-based ad targeting and measurement.
The advanced planning and analytics tools, proprietary reach and data, and a dominant ecosystem position are some of the reasons CMOs consider Google to be a leader in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Ad Tech report. With APIs that are extensive and well documented, Google offers marketers at advertisers and agencies advanced analytics tools and automation features, while DV360 gives users the ability to aggregate data for audience profile analysis and targeting.
Drawbacks of the service include being unable to access to user-level data and media placement transparency. This restriction has its roots primarily in profit motives that are disguised as privacy considerations, which hurts an advertisers’ ability to apply analytics and insights outside of Google’s environment. The lock-in nature of the relationship means that advertisers are dependent on the reporting and measurement of the media sold by Google.
With interoperability being a major strength between regions and markets, Google uses its influence to create standards and practices in the ad tech ecosystem that are adopted by all, while ensuring that its products remain at the leading edge of evolving capabilities. Far more than any other ad tech provider or aggregator, inventory, and data from over two million websites gives the Google ad network market dominance.
As a result, the technology company is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice over antitrust concerns, while the Competition Commission in the EU is known to scrutinize practices by Google, hitting the company with numerous fines. Marketers told Gartner that these actions against the AdTech company raise concerns about possible disruptions if Google is forced to break up.
Despite its market development funds and subsidies for startups and SMBs, marketers told Gartner that Google and Facebook will not directly support a business unless it meets a specified - and country-specific - media volume spend. Other factors include business maturity and the ability to self-serve, which startups and SMBs famously struggle with, resulting in the reluctant use of resellers like DialZero (which serves Facebook customers), with mixed results.
Marketers also complained that ever since Audience Center was merged into DV360 with some DMP-like features, the service has lost the capabilities it once had such as supporting the rapid delivery of self-service campaign planning through customizable cuts of data available via an intuitive user interface. As a result, marketers are turning to either The Trade Desk, MediaMath, or the Adobe Advertising Cloud.
Some marketers told Gartner that they use Amazon Web Services (AWS) and related services to perform some functions otherwise performed by a DMP, such as streamlining resources and freeing marketers from having to secure more technical expertise. Marketers said that if Google works on a DMP it should be a platform with real-time decision features that offer users retargeting capabilities, machine learning and optimization, and the ability to work with agency partners.