A Taboola survey of 326 US and UK marketing leaders found budgets up about 9% while 81% keep re-targeting the same audiences and 92% would shift money to the open web. The honest finding under the vendor pitch is a measurement failure, not a reach failure.
The Take: A company that sells open-web advertising just published research proving you should buy more open-web advertising. Read the numbers, then read who paid for them. The fragmentation it describes is real. The cure it recommends is a sales pitch.
The study: Taboola's Data Advantage Report, out on 5 October, surveyed 326 senior marketing leaders across the United States and United Kingdom. Budgets rose about 9% over the year, yet 81% admitted their organisation keeps targeting the same audience segments as spend grows. A further 92% said they would move money to the open web given true closed-loop targeting, reallocating about 28% of current budget on average.
The tell: Taboola sells open-web advertising and identity products, so a survey finding that advertisers want to buy more open-web advertising should be read with one eyebrow up. B&T ran the Australian framing as four in five advertisers still missing the audiences they pay to reach. Worth noting the study did not include a single Australian business. It surveyed the United States and United Kingdom only, so treat the headline as a weather report from someone else's market.
Second order: Strip out the pitch and the honest finding underneath is uncomfortable. Bigger budgets are buying the same people twice. That is a measurement failure, not a reach failure. Spending 28% more to chase strangers you cannot identify funds the miss rather than fixing it. The report even concedes part of that 9% budget rise may be advertisers paying more just to hold the ground they already had.
Senior marketers who admit bigger budgets just re-target the same people
For Australian operators: With WPP forecasting Australian ad spend to crack $31 billion this year, the pressure to spend into growth is heavy and the vendors know it. Before you move a dollar to a new channel, fix identity and measurement on the channels you already run. Ask any supplier waving a statistic who commissioned it. A number from a seller is a question, not an answer. Treat reallocate to the open web as a hypothesis to prove with a holdout test, not a conclusion to buy on trust.