TransUnion Educates — and Gets Educated — at Beet Retreat 2024 in San Juan

In March, senior media and marketing leaders convened at the Beet Retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico to discuss the future of advertising. Over three days, participants shared insights on timely topics, including ad-supported streaming, data and identity, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), maturation of retail media networks and emergence of shoppable media.

TransUnion speakers shared insights on where the industry is headed 

For this event, two of TransUnion’s own were featured speakers, delivering powerful insights to invested participants.

Gillian Rudich, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships, joined other senior industry leaders for the panel discussion, “Is First-Party Data the Panacea to Privacy Pressure?” This lively conversation focused on the significance of first-party data and how data collaboration — enabled by advanced identity solutions — can deliver better consumer experiences within an increasingly complex compliance landscape.

And, alongside other industry leaders, Kevin Kowalick, Vice President of Strategy, Media and Entertainment, participated in a fireside chat, “Connected TV (CTV), Identity and the Power of Performance” centered around how identity is unlocking the true potential of CTV as a performance channel by making it possible to connect signals across the entire CTV advertising process. 

Below are key themes and ideas TransUnion attendees took away from dicussions, presentations and conversations and are not necessarily representative of Beet.TV's perspective.

The media industry needs more education on identity, graphs and audience solutions

Marketers need to be aware of the universe of solutions available for first-party data onboarding and audience activation. They need to have a seat at the table. It's critical for brands to evaluate the solutions they’re using and invest in ones that prioritize data quality and accuracy.

Identity is critical to the CTV ad experience, frequency capping and performance

CTV is a tested performance medium; however, without solving for biases in data (e.g., age, ethnicity, household income) brands will miss out on lucrative financial opportunities. Identity solutions are vital to powering CTV advertising. 

The future of CTV will see dynamic and interactive AI ads that deliver personalized content and products. It will be imperative to get activation right in identity to run effective ads.

Overcoming a big CTV challenge

Advertisers are frustrated with the inability to frequency cap and the fact they’re running the same ad repeatedly for people who will never buy or already bought the product.

Brands will need to lean heavily into ad innovations and different ways to creatively deliver ads (e.g., QR codes, frames, pause ads).

They’ll also need to develop a standardized way to judge content (perhaps a content graph that configures data related to engagement, attention, genre, actors, sentiment and metadata signals) to have insight as to whether it’s the content — rather than bad data — that’s hurting campaigns.

Addressability in the era of cookie deprecation

Regulators are very focused on the industry. It’s likely “surveillance capitalism” and CTV will come under greater scrutiny next as concerns over vulnerability as the primary identifier for CTV mount.