4 Digital Advertising Predictions You Need to Keep Your Eyes On With companies tightening their spending budgets, it's time for advertising to innovate.
By Christopher Massimine Edited by Micah Zimmerman
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Silicon Valley media leaders like Google, Meta, Twitter and TikTok run primarily off selling advertising space as a significant revenue stream. According to their Q2 earnings reports, not only are these giants slowing down and losing on their advertising sales, their advertising clients are in a state of strategic restructure as effects of the recession have started to impact their annual spending budgets and return on investment negatively. Over the last two months, we have seen this trend spread from large corporations to organizations of every size — with July having the worst dip in advertising spending in two years.
In an already oversaturated market, traditional digital advertising has become increasingly expensive as a means of customer conversion. With access to the same ocean of information, targeting has never been more effective in making a match. But, in a free market, the competition is ultimately driven by who can spend the most. The more spent, the more often you'll have your product seen.
However, with economic pressures now facing consumers and inflation-cost projections increasing, purchasing trends are changing at a challenging rate for ecommerce analytics to keep up with. Advertiser's revenue is hurting. The shifting online consumer spending marketplace is trending from a growth economy to a more conservative one.
The digital advertising market is relatively young and still has room for growth as tech evolves. This marks the first time its market may see significant stress testing. It will tell how quickly advertising agencies and marketing departments must adapt. Here are some predictions of what we may see from the digital advertising space over the next year.
Related: 6 Proven Business Marketing Strategies to Grow During a Recession
Video advertising will reign
Content-connected video advertising has proved effective marketing, with digital video viewers retaining 95% of the messages compared to the same message conveyed by text. With current viewers spending more than 100 minutes a day watching digital videos and 92.6% of worldwide internet users watching some form of digital video every week, the digital video market has never been hotter.
Brands will invest heavily in developing influencers
Topping digital video consumption is music videos, comedy specials and social commentary. All three share the common theme that their content comes from influencers. Influencer marketing is already standard and growing brands are investing in the development of an influencer. By signing exclusives with the influencer — or creating the influencer with the help of the extensive influencer market research available — and promoting the influencer's visibility, brands can construct entire lifestyles embodied by their influencers.
In these scenarios, advertisers partner with influencers to create content that innocuously incorporates their product within the video. It takes less work and time to encourage commerce by seeing ourselves in a personality we admire than proving a product's merits. With a strategically manufactured consumer audience who engages the content, brands generate competitive sales funnels based on transforming wants into needs.
Streaming services will emerge as the most-invested platforms
Over the past two years, the streaming market has grown and is projected to continue to grow into the next decade. With more variety in content options than ever before and what seems to be an innumerable slate of new programs being sent into development, there is truly something for everyone.
Streaming services operate on as many personal devices with digital capabilities as technology will allow. We are engaging with them constantly. In 2021, 78% of US consumers used a subscription streaming service.
Between its fast growth, affordability and array of collected data, streaming's ability to pair a brand with content primed for its target market is uniquely competitive. Due to streaming advertising's specific lock onto programming that acutely matches a brand, this infinitely populated market cannot see oversaturation, as each program reflects a micro market, which can be dominated by slowing infiltrating and widening marketspace with similar programs.
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Personal messaging will increase as data hygiene improves
It has grown increasingly reasonable to sort and format data in ways that better connect a brand to its customers because of access to utilizing habit-tracking tech, sharing cookies and the ability to buy into consumer-related data. Integrating AI into customer success will help piece together digital consumer profiles by comparing, collecting and analyzing the data.
Understanding the digital profiles would take departments of research teams to implement just one sales-driven AI program. An informed AI can help create digital sales narratives that have some degree of customization for their target buyer. AI's are already developing narratives, and while there is still much room for improvement, setting specific parameters can help create concise and personalized storytelling. The digital profile's relationship could then be managed, followed and updated by the AI and documented on a rolling basis for relationship continuity and improvement purposes.
