Myles Younger

Until you understand a few fundamental truths, you won’t understand what makes digital media so dangerous when you find yourself on the wrong side of an information asymmetry.

Myles Younger, head of innovation and insights at U of Digital, is an ‘explainer.’ It’s *almost* a thankless task. He explains why.

My thoughts on the drivers and tensions around three fast-growing hybrid domains: adtech + cloud, adtech + TV/CTV, and adtech + privacy.

Elon Musk is showing the world the end-state of a nihilistic and unserious approach to running a media property. It's not going well for Musk or for Twitter, but more broadly it's exposing the strategic dead end that media companies face if they don't actively nurture their content, their audience, and their monetization.

Just when everyone thought email might be a refuge from cookies and MAIDs, consumer tech companies like Apple are doing their best to ensure that email doesn’t become another tracking vector.

If we can’t yet agree on exactly what "zero-party data" is (or whether it’s a legitimate concept at all), perhaps we can at least figure out the relevant questions to ask.

As part of my job, I get asked to explain "The Death Of The Cookie" to CMOs and marketing leaders. Here are the top 3 things I tell them to consider when setting their strategy.

Weaning media plans and tech stacks off third-party cookies and audience data is now an urgent priority for the remainder of 2021. Here’s a look at what you’ll learn as you master “cookie-less” advertising.

A year ago I started to ponder how the digital ad industry might “unlearn” Ad Tech 1.0. This is a continuation of that line of thinking; specifically, an exploration of the wide-ranging “domino effect” that’s happening as third-party tracking goes away.

It’s time to look beyond 1:1 identity solutions and take a serious look at micro cohorts, an exciting, privacy-safe area of innovation in digital ad measurement whose time has come.

In Q1 of 2020, we turned an economic corner for the worse. It then matters greatly that many ad tech companies and products either came about or experienced most of their growth during the long post-2008 economic boom in the US. Now, the ad tech product features and value propositions that marketers prized in the Good Times likely need to be adapted to suit the Not-So-Good Times.

Digital advertising technology and “Privacy with a capital P” will learn to co-exist. However, that still leaves a growing blind spot in the conversation about Privacy: no matter what “Ad Tech 2.0” ends up looking like, digital advertising professionals around the world are going to have to relearn how to advertise under a very different set of assumptions and constraints.

As 2020 dawns and digital privacy is increasingly prioritized over the needs of the ad industry, tech-driven solutions face a messier future and fewer easy answers. In many cases, the solutions to advertising’s challenges beg organizational innovation as much as technological, but this shift to a more holistic mentality sheds light on ad tech’s path heading into 2020 and beyond.

Much of the handwringing over how to handle opt-outs under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and similar legislation is simply wasted energy. In practical terms, there’s no battle left to be fought. Although the CCPA and its ilk allow for consumers to opt in to having their data used and resold for marketing purposes, those that opt out will become the lowest common denominator in scaled programmatic advertising.

Between a dusting-off of classical ad measurement techniques and some serious geeking out over first-party data, advertisers will find that, far from being the airless, suffocating hellscape they have been taught to fear, this new "cookieless" world will prove a hospitable and possibly verdant environment for measurement and attribution.

You can't advertise your way into first-party data superiority. So you better have a customer experience strategy if you expect to win.

With data able to travel a two-way street, digital ad tech ceases to be an end unto itself and must take on a symbiotic role with brand data.

Constructive thoughts and predictions on how digital advertising will continue to innovate and thrive in an age of increased user privacy and decreased opportunities for user-level targeting.

As Behavioral Tracking Comes Under Pressure, Look Forward to a Revolution in Contextual Targeting

My colleague Ben Rudolph and I presented a talk at General Assembly San Francisco, walking a group of marketers through the concepts and technologies needed to build and run a data-driven marketing stack.

A walkthrough of what "programmatic" means, starting from the pre-programmatic Dark Ages up the present day. After building a coherent understanding of why programmatic advertising exists in the first place and how it works, we move into FAQs that dig into audience, creative, inventory, and how to select a programmatic stack or platform. Co-presented with Bryan Gaynor of Hanapin Marketing.

In this piece from ANA (Association of National Advertisers) Magazine, I supplied a few thoughts on how programmatic/dynamic ad creative can play a role in the strategies of brand advertisers:

"A lot of brands have maxed out what they can achieve with basic display ad creative and want to explore ways that their ads can fully leverage the power of their media buying tools," says Myles Younger, CEO of Canned Banners, a San Francisco–based company focused on dynamic display ad creative for… Show more

In this piece from ANA (Association of National Advertisers) Magazine, I supplied a few thoughts on how programmatic/dynamic ad creative can play a role in the strategies of brand advertisers:

"A lot of brands have maxed out what they can achieve with basic display ad creative and want to explore ways that their ads can fully leverage the power of their media buying tools," says Myles Younger, CEO of Canned Banners, a San Francisco–based company focused on dynamic display ad creative for personalized retargeting and new customer acquisition campaigns. "A fast food chain’s media buying platform can detect the zip code of the viewer, and the ads can automatically customize themselves with the address of the nearest restaurant. In the world of programmatic marketing, this is somewhat rudimentary, but it might generate more foot traffic than basic ads that aren't 'aware' of the zip codes in which they're being shown."


For all its benefits, programmatic marketing is by no means a silver bullet that can turn failed campaigns into successes or help build or maintain your brand, says Canned Banners' Younger. "The value of programmatic tools lies in the margins, where brands are looking at possibly tenths of percentage points in performance gains," he says. "Programmatic helps brands more efficiently
capitalize on brand equity they've built elsewhere, usually over the course of decades. It's just a matter of brands being mindful of where programmatic can add value and where it can't." Show less

I was interviewed on MSNBC's "Your Business" and discussed a few tips for effective banner ad design.

An interview exploring why programmatic media buying doesn't reduce the need for skilled media planners and buyers.

Tim Nichols: Everyone keeps predicting the death of the banner ad, yet Canned Banners has staked its business model on making it easy to create banner ads. Why do you think there’s still opportunity there?

This week, digital media agency Exact Drive and display ad design platform Canned Banners announced a partnership to offer marketers a one-stop solution for launching and managing dynamic display ad campaigns. We’ve asked Myles for insights into the current display ad market, and the challenges and opportunities for SMBs & long tail advertisers.

Display advertising is ready to play a larger role in B2B marketing automation, lead generation and direct marketing. Display ad targeting can now forge a one-to-one communication channel with prospects, and display ad content can be tailored to maximize its relevance. Read how display ads can become a key part of the B2B marketing mix.

Content’s value is still intact; it’s just been spread thinner and thinner as the web has grown. Given that web content still has some value, how can publishers stay in the game while facing the commoditization and dilution of content?

In light of Google's pending $500 million settlement with the DOJ, examines ways that self-serve ad platforms can protect themselves from being held liable for the actions of fraudulent advertisers.

A (somewhat sarcastic) critique of the disappointingly limited self-serve display advertising options available to SMB online advertisers.

Posits a potentially heretical question: when creative is mostly finished and the client wants to hem and haw over the size of a few polka dots, do agency staff really need or want to be involved?

If you could build an intelligent system that would put the client in the driver’s seat for the final stages of a project, the answer might be yes.

Examines the challenges and bottlenecks in creating online display ads (i.e., banner ads), and proposes three ways to streamline the process in order to generate more ad revenue and profit from small online advertisers.