Diagnose and rank the headwinds facing digital advertising products in 2021
Company: Rakuten
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Imagine it is 2021 and you are interviewing for a product manager role working on advertising products. What are the biggest challenges digital advertising has to overcome this year? Identify the most important ones, explain what causes each and whom it affects, and say which you would tackle first and how.
```hint Separate the new from the chronic
Some problems in advertising never go away, while others changed sharply around this time because of decisions by platforms, browser makers and regulators. Sort them, then ask which ones the others depend on.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Whose challenges should I focus on: advertisers buying media, publishers selling it, or an ad platform that sits between them?
- Is the scope all of digital advertising, or one channel such as mobile apps, the open web, search, retail sites or connected TV?
- Should the answer use only what was known during 2021, or may it draw on how things turned out later?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A structured set of challenges grounded in the concrete changes of that period in platform rules, browser policy, regulation and the market, rather than generic complaints about ads.
- For each major challenge, its cause and which parties it hurts: advertisers, publishers, ad-tech intermediaries and users.
- A prioritization by impact and urgency, with stated reasons.
- Concrete responses to the top challenges with their trade-offs, and how you would know they are working.
### Follow-up Questions
- A mobile game advertiser loses most of its user-level install attribution. How would you help it decide where to spend?
- Contextual targeting is often offered as the replacement for cookie-based targeting. Where does it fall short?
- Which of these challenges turns into an advantage for a company whose shoppers are signed in and buy on its own sites?
Overview: A strategy question set in 2021 that asks a product manager to name the biggest challenges digital advertising had to overcome that year. It tests knowledge of the industry shifts of that period, reasoning about how they affect advertisers, publishers and users, and the ability to prioritize and propose practical responses.