Until the advent of the internet, the world of advertising had become somewhat stale and staid. Focused solely on the delivery of packaged information to the consumer regarding brands, the industry did very little to truly engage with the average joe away from their TV.
Now, with the interactivity afforded by the digital technologies at our fingertips and the various tech developments on the horizon, such as the (atrociously named) ‘internet of things’, for better or for worse, ads are a major facet of our existence. As marketing teams attempt ever more inventive means of attracting our attention one thing is clear, the future will most likely be a slightly more obnoxious place.
What the future will actually bring is of course a major point of interest for firms around the world as they all compete to have the best ideas first. Bing Ads, a part of Microsoft, are no different, and have assembled a team of advertising ‘experts’ to weigh in on the future of their trade, some of their thoughts were, of course, a little troubling.
The first prediction regards ‘retargeting’, or the buildup of consumer profiles in order to use specialized information to make them ‘convert’. As Larry Kim, co-founder of Wordstream states, it is:
“Basically the strategy of amplifying organic content using social ads, then tagging the visitors, applying demographic and interest filters, and chasing them on social media and across the internet, getting them to convert via remarketing ad”
Aaron Bird, CEO of Bizible, predicts that B2B networking will become even more valuable to businesses, especially to the SMEs of the world, allowing them to make use of big data at a low level. As he says,
“One core example is connecting of marketing, sales, and support data at granular enough level to enable optimization decisions across the entire lifecycle and all customer touchpoints”
Of course as our use of the internet continues to advance away from the desktop and onto smaller, more mobile screens, this will be a new major battlefield for advertisers as they attempt to grab your attention even more aggressively through the likes of Youtube, and increasingly, Facebook. Bryan Eisenberg sums it up best,
“The hot play going into 2015 and beyond is going to be Video Advertising and specifically mobile video advertising. As more traditional advertising move towards digital advertising, advertisers are comfortable with telling their brand story using video. I have seen predictions of Facebook video ad revenue rising from a mere $151 million this year to $7.2 billion by 2015”
Lastly, it is predicted that cross device tracking and search will continue to gain significantly more prominence as our media consumption habits change. As Andrew Goodman of PageZero Media states,
“Conversations on device switching and more accurate attribution of first and middle clicks in the user’s journey will be white hot. We’ll finally be moving away from the tired reminders of the “importance” of mobile. By now, I think we area aware that a lot of people use smartphones to search for things!”
In all, 2015 is shaping up to be a bumper year for advertisers, and a rather tiresome one for consumers, as ever our attention is up for grabs.
Does the prospect of more advertising excite you? Let us know in the comments below.
