Dive Brief:

• The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Winterberry Group conducted research on tactics that will occupy marketers' time and resources in 2017 and found that cross-channel measurement and attribution topped the list at 57.1%, according to a new eMarketer report.
• The news follows a decidedly down period for interest in cross-channel attribution, as only 35.4% of marketers put the tactic at the top of their lists in 2015 with that number declining to 33.3% in 2016.
• Other 2017 tactics marketers were surveyed about include programmatic advertising, general audience analytics and predictive modeling or segmentation, which all dropped compared to the previous year.

Dive Insight:

As the variety of devices consumers use continues to proliferate, marketers are putting fresh mindshare toward cross-channel tactics, aiming to be able to engage across an entire spectrum of activity from desktop to mobile, as well as online and offline.

To date, tying together on- and offline marketing efforts and achieving omnichannel goals have proven major challenges for many in the industry. The skills gap has become an especially pressing concern as more consumers become mobile-first, so a renewed interest in cross-channel is perhaps unsurprising and certainly warranted.  

Per eMarketer's other findings, the drop in attention being paid toward programmatic advertising was slight — 47.6% in 2017 compared to 48.8% in 2016 — but continued a trend that might accelerate given recent news shedding new light on its effectiveness.

In March, JPMorgan Chase drastically reduced the number of websites programmatically serving its ads from 400,000 to 5,000 and found little difference in impression metrics. These results have the bank and other marketers rethinking the value of high-volume programmatic ad buying overall.