The 2020s will be a defining era for the adtech industry. While it has so far enjoyed rapid, unrestricted growth, the next decade will be defined by its ability to address its fundamental flaws and retrofit rules and regulations while continuing to grow and innovate.

Its heyday is by no means over. The latest research from Magna Global found that digital advertising (search, video, social, display) represented more than half of the total advertising market for the first time in history in 2019. While digital advertising’s growth curve has been slowing over the past four years, it is still expected to experience double-digit growth in 2020 and act as the growth engine for the global ad industry over the next decade.

But it faces a much tougher competitive and regulatory climate in the next decade. Growing unregulated has allowed the industry to overlook fundamental issues such as privacy, competition, brand safety and fraud. These issues dogged the industry in recent years—according to industry veterans that this week discussed the ways in which adtech had shifted focus over the past decade—and will continues to be the biggest hinderances to its sustained growth.

As we enter a new decade, Campaign Asia-Pacific asked six adtech industry experts what three major themes they believe will heavily influence the industry in 2020. Unsurprisingly, the most common theme to emerge was addressing privacy concerns, which is expected to trigger the revival of contextual advertising as well as the growth of connected TV.

Jason Barnes, chief revenue officer APAC, PubMatic

1. Privacy

The multiple consumer data breaches, misuse and scandals we endured in the past few years have made data privacy one of the foremost issues for our industry. One way large digital corporates have responded is by limiting the ability for third parties to drop a cookie on a user, so we can expect a reduced ability to target effectively across the internet, as access to user profiles is limited to the sites a consumer has a direct relationship with. That is obviously problematic for an industry built on accurate audience targeting and plays further into the hands of the FANG’s (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) who have troves of first-party consumer data. Expect the value of the cookie to depreciate and identity to be a major area of investment and collaboration in the early 2020s as we seek a scaled, persistent and independent solution to targeting users. It is a problem we have to solve. A related point is that governments and the general population trust these global digital platforms a lot less than they did in 2010, so expect increased regulation and scrutiny and an empowered consumer this decade, which may hinder growth if it is carried out with a sledgehammer and not a scalpel.

2. In-app advertising

One platform that has a natural persistent identifier is the mobile phone, with its Device ID or Android ID, which leads me to my second major theme: the exponential growth of in-app advertising. App advertising had a bad end to the decade with multiple global fraud scandals. But with technologies such as OM SDK and app-ads.txt rolling out, we will have a cleaner and more measurable environment, which is a prerequisite for branding dollars. A big winner will be gaming, which is now well and truly mainstream, and buyers are seeing the value of reaching this vast and diversified audience within the data-rich app environment.

3. CTV/OTT

Traditional linear-TV advertising has been resilient in the face of digital transformation, especially in Asia, but this will radically change in the 2020s with CTV and OTT becoming increasingly dominant. Chinese TV advertising is declining 5% to 6% per year, in Japan 1% to 2% per year (buoyed by the Tokyo Olympics this year) and Australia saw a massive 8% decline year on year (Magna Global). In India, according to a report from Boston Consulting Group and the Confederation of Indian industry, viewership of digital video has increased twofold in two years, driven by the fact that India has the second largest base of smartphones in the world. While YouTube is mopping up a lot of the migrating TV spend, it is pleasing to see many high quality CTV and OTT options steadily gaining market share, from Iflix and HOOQ in southeast Asia to Hotstar and VOOT in India and AbemaTV and TVer in Japan.

Written by Jessica Goodfellow, originally published in CampaignAsia