Women in ad tech have been making strides both in terms of bridging the gender disparity within the industry and making meaningful contributions.

According to Campaign Asia, more than half of the people working in the ad tech industry are female. That’s a surprisingly positive number, although only one-third of these take up leadership positions. 

Experts have cited long working hours, familial responsibilities, and a generational tendency to delve in STEM fields only when women have 100% confidence in their abilities. 

But all things considered, it’s impossible to deny that more and more women are becoming significant faces in the ad tech industry with their fresh perspectives and approach to work. 

For this reason, we invited a host of esteemed women in our industry to share their thoughts on how the sell-side will fare this year especially with how 2020 fared for all publishers. 

Ekin Koseoglu (Interesting Engineering)

Ekin Koseoglu is the Chief Operating Officer at Interesting Engineering, a website for all things engineering, technology, and science. 

A lot of what 2021 is going to be like for publishers depends on what happens with the Covid-19 situation and how normalized the economy gets throughout the year. Already towards the end of 2020, ad revenues experienced some recovery, but we find ourselves in a situation where we cannot create a clear trajectory yet for 2021 as far as display and banner ads are concerned. We experience that the content consumption habits our readers acquired during the lockdowns haven’t changed much. If people start going to the offices or if students go to the classrooms, then their habits might change again to resemble how things were before Covid-19 happened. Publishers, after the uncertainty the Covid-19 situation created in 2020, want to have as much control as possible over their ad technology. Subscriptions are also becoming more widely applied as publishers look for reliable revenue sources and want to create a stronger bond between their readers, whom they can monetize directly via loyalty instead of indirectly via ad inventory. 

Natascha Chamuleau (WeTransfer)

Natascha Chamuleau is Chief Advertising Officer of WeTransfer, a position she has held since July 2020, having joined as Vice President of Sales in 2017. Before WeTransfer, Natascha spent three years at Facebook as Head of Sales and Client Solutions for Benelux and Central Europe.

2020 has been a tough year, and at the same time it has been a year of monumental change; we were forced to break habits, we finally had time to reflect and had to be creative to get things done. Creativity and culture have anchored themselves in 2021 and I am convinced they will be key drivers for our industry this year, and give diversity the boost it deserves. 2020 was a challenge, but we definitely took great things out of the entire experience. 

Angelina Eng

With 25+ years of digital media and operations experience, Angelina has supported brands to define, build, and manage their digital media and marketing efforts. At IAB, she collaborates with the IAB’s Center of Excellence, IAB Research, IAB and Tech Lab groups, and other trade bodies to help bridge business and technical conversations.

Apple’s recent efforts to limit targeting in Safari is probably a factor that many publishers are ignoring. Safari inventory revenue loss is probable as the Intelligent Tracking Prevention continues to become more stringent. 

Additionally, with third-party cookies phasing out in 2022, this year will prove significant in the development of privacy-first solutions. First-party data will also be at the forefront of this ad tech revolution. How the industry works together to build solutions to target audiences and measure campaigns on the open web will be interesting to watch. This year will also see contextual targeting becoming relevant again as buyers and sellers look  for solutions to reach their audiences who are not authenticated or unknown.

Keren Pass (TheViewPoint)

Keren is working with TheViewPoint as Account Executive & Business Development Manager (CTV/OTT/AVOD). Before this, she was working as Business Development and Sales Manager at S&W Media Group. 

2021 is bringing new developments, open communications, and interesting partnerships. We’re excited to be part of industry evolution and help others move from their infancy stage to maturity. Premium publishers, which had to change strategies to reclaim lost revenues, are shifting into the CTV space. They’re focused on premium content, higher rates, reducing costs, and ways of expanding demand within programmatic. 

We’re expecting to see more SVOD platforms adopting AVOD into their operations to stay ahead of the game. As for the top regions, they’re led by APAC, followed by LATAM, slightly lagging behind EMEA, and rising activity in SEA.

Katarzyna Kozińska (Clearcode)

Katarzyna is a Project Manager with a technical background, working with her team at Clearcode since 2017 to deliver the best possible services to their partners. 

Most publishers collect tons of valuable visitor data which can be used to create profiles and audience segments. The problem is they don’t know how to do this efficiently and make it available to advertisers. This is a chance for tech companies with domain knowledge to fill this gap and come up with new technological solutions for the sell side. But data lakes and big-data workloads won’t be enough; building strong partnerships with publishers, instead of just acting as a tech provider, will be the thing that makes the biggest difference.

Lina Lugova (Epom)

Lina Lugova is a Head of Marketing at Epom with an intensive experience of leading the communication across all business units. At Epom, she is responsible for driving customer preference for the solution through all digital marketing channels, every day.

Browsers are preparing to kill 3rd-party cookies and publishers will need a new persistent identifier like shared user ID solutions. Here, publishers collect 1st-party cookies on their website and forward them to the ID provider through a Prebid API. With shared user ID, open web finally can offer the same level of targeting accuracy as Google or Facebook.

Publishers who implemented the new engaging ad formats for mobile and CTV with high viewability rates will benefit more than those who believe the industry will come back to normal after the pandemic. For mobile, the proven top-performing formats are interstitials, native ads and in-app rewarded ads. For content creators and platforms the most popular ad formats for CTV will be carousel, inline video, TV-to-mobile and data-driven ads. These two factors will help publishers sell their inventory at higher prices to advertisers who know what they’re paying for.

Good monetization strategy for local media in 2021-2022 will be dynamic paywalls which can be triggered according to the user’s behavior.

Jane O’Hara (Kevel)

Jane O’Hara is the Product Marketing Manager at Kevel. Kevel (previously Adzerk) offers the infrastructure APIs needed to quickly build custom ad platforms and take back the Internet from ad tech giants.

Given the challenges and opportunities 2020 presented, I predict publishers will look for new and innovative ways to boost their revenue and protect their users’ privacy in 2021. 

From online shopping to media consumption, consumers have adopted new habits that will encourage more publishers to build and scale their own custom ad products. eCommerce platforms that offer user-first ad experiences and advertiser-friendly features will continue to perform well — and we’ll see a surge in traffic to travel, live entertainment, and job listings marketplaces as the world re-opens and the economic recovery begins. 

Lisa Bouam (eyeo)

Lisa is working as Senior Business Development Manager at eyeo, an open-source ad block platform used by several people across the globe. She’s also the co-founder at Familities. 

As 2020 came to a close, publishers were still facing the consequences of the pandemic while getting ready for an almost cookieless 2021. Privacy might be the new buzzword, but the paradigm shift is real: users want to be in control of their online experience. Ad-filtering is not going away anytime soon. Users are now more aware of what their data mean to advertisers and they expect brands to develop more personalized experiences. The value exchange table has always been set for two people only… Now the table is about to fall apart and users want in. Why not give them a seat and see if we can all start talking together?

Sweta Singh (KhaleejTimes)

Sweta is the Manager of Yield and Digital Partnerships at KhaleejTimes, a daily English-language newspaper published in the United Arab Emirates. Prior to this, she worked at Havas Media Group as Senior Media Executive. 

2021 might just be the year that contextual targeting makes a comeback as one of the most reliable methods of earning revenue. With third-party cookies dying a slow death and all eyes turned towards initiatives such as the Google Privacy Sandbox, one thing that we can all rely upon is the classic contextual advertising that AdSense publishers have already leveraged for years. In addition to that, technical advancements in how publishers and advertisers use first-party data to balance losses incurred during 2020 and develop a programmatic mechanism for 2022 (the year of third-party cookie death) is another aspect that we are all looking forward to.

In Closing

It was very interesting for us to read the above insights given by a host of admirable women. 

As for us, we think that 2021 will be the year we collaborate with more such women. In 2020, we invited many women leaders to webinars and online events that helped us provide actionable insights to our readers and subscribers. 

We hope to carry the tradition forward and in fact, substantially increase our efforts at the same.

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