6 Trends in Digital Advertising That Take Us to 2019
We live in a world where everything changes so fast — it is basically a mounting heap of “blink and you will miss it” situations. However, there is one very important nuance — the more things change, the more they stay same. That allows seeing through the avalanches of changes and calculate what is going to happen in the near future.
Digital advertising is very sensible industry. If something happens somewhere — be sure Digital Advertisers will find a way to apply it to their benefits. In these uptight times it is important to know what may happen in order to prepare yourself properly.
Here are the top six trends in digital advertising that will take us to 2019.
1 GDPR Aftermath
General Data Protection Regulation is an earth-shattering game-changing document. While it was adopted back in 2016 and was aimed at fighting adTech Fraud, it comes into full force in May 2018 and will seriously affect digital advertising. How? It will be apocalypse, basically.
GDPR severely limits gathering and use of personal data for a variety of purposes including advertising. In other words — it means death of personalization in European Union segment and completely transformation of advertising approaches in favor of more abstract context-based digital advertisements.
2 Rise of Multimedia Ads
2017 was year when video ads finally started to take off. By the end of the year they took off a large share of market and it is easy to see why — multimedia ads offers more engagement. It seems like things will be even more exciting by the end of 2018.
Text and static-dynamic images are oldie-goldie foolproof solutions but multimedia ads open up a whole new dimension where moving images can convey a message in a more elaborate and effective.
Basically it means that digital ads are following the path of traditional ads — from papers to television.
3 Continuing ascension of Native Advertising
Another important trend that is growing exponentially is native advertising. The reason for its quick ascension is easy to understand — it is completely different kind of experience. It is not as annoying as traditional forms of digital advertising and thus more and more advertisers are trying their hand in this new fad.
Native advertising offers gentler, unobtrusive ad encounter that entwined with user experience. Because of that it is perceived not as blatant attempt to market something but rather like a suggestion, recommendation of sorts.
4 Evolution of Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is tried and tested solution for those who are looking for unconventional marketing tactics. It really helps to build relatable engaging brand from inside out putting user’s point of view in front and center of entire operation.
However, over the last couple of years it was abused and misused to the point its effectiveness started to slowly diminish due to ever-growing paranoiac suspicion that any form of recommendation might be viciously commodified.
That opens up the challenge for coming years. Influencer marketing can still be effective if done right and now the question is in finding the right strategy to keep the engagement and trust of the target audience.
5 Augmented reality finally becomes a thing
Augmented reality was a fancy gimmick bae for a very long time. Then Pokemon Go was released and all of a sudden everyone became on board with it. However, there is still very limited tool set to operate and the entire things still needs a proper alphabet to be worked out.
However, augmented reality offers immense marketing opportunities. Integration of digital data into real-time experience is something akin to pop-up push notifications. It can be used as suggestions and FYI-styled messages.
6 Fair play is nigh
Back in the day, playing dirty in digital advertising was a fact of life. If you wanted to break through - that was the easiest and most effective way. Gathering data from unsuspicious user, selling it off to treacherous scammers and spammers, flooding users with bullshit nonsense — all that was something of a twisted bizarre industry norm. However, things are changing right now.
Because of growing caution of importance of data protection — IAB and Google announced full-scale war against cheaters. Things like Ads.txt, Ad Experience and Abusive Experiences are aimed at bringing a fair play status quo to digital advertisement.
What will come out of it is still unclear, but we can definitely state that it will seriously affect marketing approach and will require new solutions.
In conclusion
With technologies experiencing another evolutionary leap and growing number users — it is really hard to say what will happen next. After all — tomorrow never knows.
However, these six trends are most definitely here to stay to play the game.