The state of digital marketing -- technology and business landscape

Abstract

Digital marketing has grown rapidly over the last two decades into a multi-billion dollar industry with thousands of companies operating in the space. Its' digital advertisement model has provided crucial economic backbone to support the proliferation of free digital content around the world. However, the industry is now facing significant challenges and controversy around Ad Blocking. The rapidly rising adoption of Ad Blocking is threatening the fundamentals in the digital advertisement model, and could have a profound impact on digital marketing and Internet content consumption. In this thesis, we research online resources to describe the latest technology and business landscape for the digital marketing industry, including the main digital marketing platforms, and system decomposition for its key subsystem Ad Tech industry. We then introduce the Ad Blocking controversy. We use stakeholder value network analysis to analyze how various market responses to Ad Blocking satisfy the system stakeholder values, hoping to shed lights on possible directions for solving the challenge systematically.