Sobriety and carbon footprint

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In this era of energy efficiency, it also seems that digital marketing is not exactly eco-responsible... The ecological impacts of the web are real. In 2019, digital technology accounted for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions . Not all stored data is attributable to digital marketing, but its share is significant.

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The REEN law (aimed at reducing the environmental latvia mobile database of digital technology in France and published in the Official Journal of November 16, 2021), green data centers, the carbon footprint calculator for digital campaigns, initiatives to reduce this consumption are numerous but still timid.

Cooperation and data protection
On the legal front, the difficulty of creating true partnerships between stakeholders has led to a never-ending series of conflicts: Google's lost lawsuit against publishers demanding payment for their articles, the Facebook-Apple war over advertising tracking , and so on. The data protection agenda is forcing the market back into its own weaknesses. The end of third-party advertising cookies for privacy reasons is destabilizing it. A multitude of technological solutions are being imagined, ranging from Google's Sandbox (a penalty for sites that abuse SEO techniques) to unique identifiers.

Read more: The end of “third-party cookies” does not meet Internet users’ need for control over their data

However, the market is still struggling to find a unified and understandable solution for advertisers, to the point that we are now talking about a "cookie apocalypse", reinforced by the tendency of consumers to refuse cookies ( nearly a third of French people , according to a study by the technology company Seedtag).

Snack content, drop in engagement
Finally, business challenges strike at the very heart of the advertising-based digital marketing business model. Indeed, it has led to failures. A case in point is the social network Snapchat, which will cut nearly 20% of its workforce following the slowdown in digital advertising, the app's main source of revenue.

The drop in engagement (clicks, comments, shares) is sometimes dramatic. Twitter generates an average engagement of 0.05% . In addition, 44% of consumers use an ad blocker (AdBlock). According to Bernstein Research, the trend of "Snack content" (content lasting a few seconds on social networks like TikTok) prevents ads from taking hold because the formats are far too short to generate attention and engagement.