Blis, the leading privacy-first, location-powered programmatic advertising partner, announces the launch of its new research-based e-guide, “The insider report: by media planners, for media planners”.

The e-guide is designed to ensure media planners are better informed and prepared for a more productive 2022, outlining a range of best practices to optimise the media planning cycle with privacy-first in mind.

The study reveals that most UK media planners are still not seeing privacy-first solutions as a key priority during 2022. In fact, over a quarter of media planners cited privacy-first solutions as one of their biggest challenges this year. However, 60% of them still say that privacy-first solutions are not a priority for 2022 – a sign that planners are still sceptical, or even confused, about how to tackle this challenge.

The report also addresses how media planners feel about the current privacy-first solutions in the market. Overall, just one in four media planners feel they have good privacy-first solutions in place to reach their audiences. Almost half (42%) of media agencies are considering a mixture of contextual targeting, UID 2.0 and FloC, compared to one-third of brands. In-house planners seem to be more sceptical, with 23% of them still saying they wouldn’t consider any of the current solutions as ideal to overcome privacy concerns.

The study also reveals how media planners expect to spend their budgets in the next five years. According to the findings, CTV gained planners’ attention during the pandemic and will continue to do so in 2022, with half of media agency planners expecting to spend more than 50% of their overall digital media campaigns on CTV. Similarly, in-house media planners expect to spend 35% of their budget on CTV, a much lower but still significant part of their budgets.

As consumers get back to their lives and restrictions continue to lift, media planners are also preparing to increase in-app advertising budgets by 15% in the next five years. According to the survey, in-app spending is expected to account for 51% of total media spending by 2026.

Aaron McKee, CTO at Blis, commented, “This new piece of research highlights some key areas that media planners, and the industry as a whole, need to be aware of and plan for, if they’re not already. Many media planners are already missing half their web audience and 80% of their most valuable in-app audience and challenges around reach, relevance and measurement will only get worse with the Chrome third-party cookie changes coming shortly.

"This is the year to try new approaches to reaching wide audiences in a way that demonstrably performs. The approaches that stand the test of time will be rooted in privacy and respect for personal data. Finding trusted privacy-first partners will help make their lives much easier – and their campaigns more effective – in the long run."

The e-guide is available for download and reinforces Blis’ commitment to offering privacy-first solutions to enable brands and agencies to target audiences at scale based on real-life behaviour.