What every marketer should know about the ACCC Digital Platforms Inquiry

With the ACCC coming to the end of its six-year Digital Platforms Inquiry, it’s interesting to reflect on the implications for brands and marketers, who continue to navigate how best to participate in an increasingly opaque, algorithmic-led performance marketplace.

While the latest ACCC report focuses on curbing anti-competitive behaviour, such as manipulative design and the use of dark patterns, it raises a broader question: are advertisers equally responsible for feeding the beast in exchange for demonstrated scale and results?

With key performance juggernauts (think Google, Meta, Amazon – the usual suspects) moving rapidly towards AI-first products, advertisers are shifting focus towards signal-led strategies to ensure platforms have meaningful data to make automated decisions and find new high-value customers. For many of our clients, signals-based optimisation has quickly outpaced traditional methods, so we continue to work with clients on meaningful data capture and utilisation to drive growth.

And it’s this conundrum of scale and growth that I fear is feeding the beast. We’ve seen impressive results not only across Google’s Performance Max AI product, but now with Microsoft’s comparable product (oddly, also called Performance Max), which continues to justify why the dominant platforms remain a key part of the ecosystem.

Herein lies our ethical dilemma – we know these opaque, black-box campaigns lack transparency, but they undoubtedly drive efficiency and scale. Is it the responsibility of the end user to opt for alternative platforms that may be more transparent, user-centric and fair market players, at the expense of ROI?

You could argue that by continuing to flock to the same watering holes, advertisers are as guilty as the tech giants of driving ad cost inflation. While the big players offer the promise of scale and efficiency, without channel diversification most brands will quickly reach a point of diminishing returns, creating new problems for the business’ bottom line.

So how do we tackle this? The obvious starting point is testing – explore new channels, test enthusiastically, and be sure to measure effectiveness based on the role of the channel.

With continued privacy reform and digital signal loss, focusing on your business-owned data as your primary source of truth can help keep individual platform bias in check. Uplift analysis, incrementality testing and geo-fenced holdout tests are no longer reserved for above-the-line measurement – these analyses hold great value in supplementing performance measurement.

Steph Marshall

Finally, it’s important to continue focusing on the value performance channels drive within your own environments. In your owned web analytics, how does your channel mix drive engagement, discovery, intent, conversion and retention? Similar to business data, what you capture within your ecosystems can be relied upon far more than any ad platform, making it key in investment decisioning and demonstrating business value.

I’m confident most advertisers would leap at the opportunity to redirect ad spend toward emerging – and potentially local – platforms. That’s why the ACCC’s Inquiry is so important: it aims to create a fairer, more open marketplace where innovation can thrive from many sources. But as an industry, we can’t wait for regulators to deliver the solution.

We need to actively support alternative platforms – helping to fund the tools and innovations that will drive growth in a more transparent, ethical way.

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