Remember the good old days when watching television was interrupted by only a few ad commercials? Indeed, there has been a huge rise in the number of streaming platforms, premium social media services and more and so has the number of ads punctuating your watch has grown manifold. Does that mean there is a decline in the traditional television viewing? Is there a new wave of advertising marketers is shifting towards?
In short, the answer is yes. Marketers are looking into where its target audience spends the most time, and develop the advertising budget accordingly. The future is seemingly bright for digital advertising because it is cheaper, more agile, and simple to segment.
Digital advertising vs traditional advertising
The gen Z possibly doesn’t even know what “Prime Time TV” means! While there are yesteryear memories where the entire family gathered for an after-dinner show, the trend has changed a lot and how! Present-day families don’t usually watch anything on TV together; and it is not just the younger generation who streams video content, but a considerable percentage of older generation is equally delved into digital content. That means brands can directly reach its buyers over their handheld devices instead of spending on the traditional advertising platforms such as TV or radio.
You can always argue how TV ads always told a tale. We all remember ads that have a well-knitted story behind it. Similar is the germ of the concept now with video ads online. But these stories have become smaller because time is precious now. Additionally, these stories can follow people to where they are viewing. Consequently, you get smaller creative, interesting formats, but with much less budget.
Looking at the key trends in digital advertising today
Advertising is seeing a rapid change since the last year when it started to grow in macro scale. Here are the five big disruptions you cannot ignore in digital advertising in the coming years –
Brands need to be more accountable, transparent and secure
Data collection has been controversial and social media giants such as Facebook has been no stranger to this. But brands who are continuing their bad PR for their lack of transparency will be soon facing trust issues from consumers and other contemporary brands.
The companies need to go beyond just talking about transparency and be accountable for their advertising strategies. The platforms and publishers that can abide by the data transparency and privacy will be trusted by customers where they will flock to. The three very important points, thus, in the new age advertising will revolve around transparency, accountability, and safety.
Going Big
There are plethora of options for customers in today’s ecosystem. To survive amongst the crowd, brands need to make the biggest and most memorable impression. And there’s only one way to do it, being brave. For instance, brands can follow its customers and take a stand on the prevalent social issues. Creative campaigns based on creative ideas and a strategic and well-thought-out risk can pay off well.
AI-Assisted Advertising
Every brands need to embrace technological advances. And, the creative industry needs to have a wholehearted acceptance of artificial intelligence (AI). With the rise of more powerful and friendly AI along with the deep learning solutions, can help to cut through the crowd and leverage only the data that matter. With more insights, advertisers will be able to create more informed decisions along with some strategic creative risks.
Creating witty ad campaigns backed with data-based insights will be the new age digital advertising, also referred to as predictive advertising. With deep learning in the mix of AI, it will be possible to predict when is the best time to engage the audience. Customer impression is the biggest currency of digital advertising and it needs to be rightly implemented.
Personalized Advertising
One of the biggest shifts in the future of digital advertising is leveraging data that it allows to make campaigns more targeted and successful. This will get more streamlined with time. Optimizing for location, time, buying patterns and other factors will be integral to the future of personalized advertising. A very simple yet relevant example could be the ads for a car manufacturer. Instead of directly telling the features of the vehicle, you can target the customers via the context of travel and road trips. Even though there were traces of personalized ad targeting, optimization has never truly existed the way it is popular now. Optimized campaigns based on audience behaviors can bring out astounding results.
Brand Perception and Mixed Reality
Arguably, ad campaigns with mixed reality are more impressive than when you are limited to print, digital, and video. There is almost an explosion in virtual reality and most of these devices are getting more affordable. The creative team can leverage this new canvas. With the mix and match creative assets, advertisers can better connect and engage with the consumers.
What Your Business Needs?
Understanding which platforms provide the best value for advertising is an expert concern. Viewership and listenership are seeing a major shift from traditional to digital. The advertising bellwether, TV, is also seeing a decline in its viewership.
Attribution is one significant difference between traditional and digital marketing. With the latter in the picture, fine-grained accountability has become easier. Advertisers can now frame a scene that’s familiar and relatable to its target consumer with deep data insights. Banner ads can be witty but don’t tell a story. With images, multiple images in a slide deck, and video, digital advertising is a powerful combination, that caters to the wants of the modern-day visual consumption.
The next big concern is broadcast vs targeted delivery. Targeting with traditional advertising is primarily dependent on the number of readers, listeners, viewers, or people within proximity of a public ad. But digital advertisers can segregate the data so that marketers can create and provide contextually relevant content to the individual consumers. With a technology called retargeting, brands can create video-based ads that target consumers individually filtering by their interests and intent.
Summing up
With all these expert speculations, it might be tough to make heads or tails of this. As a marketer, you need to aware whether and how much people are fleeing from traditional media. Digital media (websites, social media) is definitely on the rise and how you can emerge digitally will define your presence in this over-crowded competitive space.
FAQ's
Is digital advertising effective
Digital Advertising is often generalized and seen to be more effective than traditional advertising. With its precise scalable metrics, digital advertising is essential to thrive in today’s business.
Digital advertising vs digital marketing
Although both the fields are interconnected, digital advertising creates brand awareness while digital marketing forms the brand visibility online. The purpose of digital advertising is solely about generating sales and improving the brand image.
Digital advertising vs print advertising
Print ads are run in publications and is a totally offline channel while digital advertising is about search engine marketing to banner ads to paid social and the newer technologies like geofencing.
Is digital advertising expensive?
The short answer is NO. When you compare with the investments needed in traditional advertisement, it is much cheaper.
What services should Digital advertising agencies offer?
Some of the common services include
- Search Ads
- Display Ads
- Shopping Ads
- Video Ads
- Social Media Ads
Some of the platform level ads
