The last year has seen a perfect storm hit the marketing industry – brand safety concerns, agency strife, GDPR and Facebook’s data scandal.

In response, the industry is seeing a big movement of money, from platforms now deemed undesirable, to alternative channels brands find more appealing.

So says Geoff Ramsey, chairman of marketing analysis company eMarketer.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Ramsey opines on some of the challenges which have kicked up in digital advertising – and charts how brands are changing strategy in response.

Eighty-three percent of display ads are bought programmatically today,” Ramsey says. “It gets you scale, it helps you do audience-based targeting. At the same time, brands end up seeing their ads in all kinds of unsavory places.

“What’s happening within programmatic is that marketers are saying, ‘No, we want to put more of our money in direct buys as opposed to real-time bidding’. They are starting to invest on websites where they know that it’s going to be a savory environment. Marketers are slowly, but surely, putting their money where their mouth is.”

The “brand safety” concerns are lingering because of well-documented cases in which certain advertisers’ creative was showing against content deemed offensive or unsavory.

Technology platforms – which have already added algorithms to tackle ad fraud, viewability and more – are also racing to offer brand safety solutions, often through blocking of content containing flagged keywords and, latterly, “artificial intelligence”.

But Ramsey seems wider waves echoing out in an industry that is undergoing carthartic convulsions.

“They’re going to be starting to invest less in third-party data through Facebook, and Google, and so on, and try to have a more direct relationship with consumers with their own first-party data because if you can control that data, then you can control the relationship with the customer,” Ramsey adds, echoing a widely-held observation of a move toward owning an audience relationship through first-party data, rather than piecing one together using disparate network pieces.

This video was recorded at the annual DMS conference presented by LUMA Partners.

This video is part of a series titled The Consumer First, a New Era in Digital Media presented by MediaMath.  For more from the series, please visit this page.