The Future of Digital Advertising will be Innovative, Agile and Personalised
With new legislation and technology, the digital advertising industry is rapidly moving toward a monumental shift in the way organisations will market and sell their products online, and brands must be prepared to react.
Despite the plethora of advertising solutions available to companies today, the jury is still out when it comes to deciding the industry standard for the future, with more and more brands looking toward digital advertising for an answer that has yet to fully reveal itself.
With continued technological advancement, ease of access to the likes of smartphones and tablets, and entire nations being forced into lockdowns worldwide throughout the last 13 months, people have been spending more time indoors and online.
Because of this, organisations have been pushed to think fast on their feet when it comes to getting their message across in an affordable yet impactful manner, and not to mention at a time where users are getting overwhelmed with ads.
Organisations will continue to compete in the search for the user’s attention with the all important goal in mind: to increase exposure and click-throughs to ultimately achieve sales. How they will continue to do so however is still up for debate.
The Strive for Personalisation
Given the vast amount of users interacting with products online and the competition looking to put their products forward just as much, brands and digital advertising providers continue to be on the lookout for the optimal solution.
Knowing that a brand’s assets must feel personal and authentic to the user means ad solutions must work harder than ever before.
Whilst various business sectors continue to push for digital transformation and new innovative technology to maximise profits and productivity however, most marketing teams are continuing to dedicate their advertising budget on now decade old solutions that have proved far from perfect:
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The use of targeted social media ads, which work by filtering potential viewers via specified criteria with the hopes to hit the right users and convert clicks into sales. Advertisements remain a noticeable portion of a user’s social feed, so getting this right is incredibly important when thinking ROI.
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The production of creative banners, digital video, and full website takeovers that often rely on a cookie technology that has fallen out of favour with privacy-weary users who prefer to opt out of sharing their data with organisations. These solutions also face the risk of encountering user installed ad-blocking software, often used to avoid watching irrelevant and impersonal ads to begin with.
Although online commerce continues to thrive, with data revealing that the share of individuals making online purchases has just seen its greatest increase in eight years, endless mismatched and irrelevant advertisements continue to contribute to a user’s ad fatigue and frustration, instead of feeling naturally personalised.
This is despite the use of cookie-based targeting, which follows the user’s browsing experience in the attempt to provide them with relevant and click-worthy content.
This often paradoxical generalization in the end result of cookie-led advertising, which continues to fall flat with many potential customers is still being relied upon and invested in by a majority of brands who are looking to increase sales but are unaware of other solutions, which composes a risk.
With the technology soon to be phased out of existence, organisations must prepare to look ahead, as sitting still will no longer be an option. A trident of options looms but where would you put your house; Universal IDs, Contextual Signalling or Audience Cohorts - debate rages. But we do at least know that there will be a laser focus on consent and 1st party data.
Consumers are Digital, so Brands Must Follow Suit
Brands must act on the knowledge that this decade’s consumer is empowered by evolving technology and is used to making quick yes or no decisions, relying on their instinct to make purchases. This means that the few relevant ads that do succeed in catching a user’s attention must be optimised to convert their earned interaction into a sale, which most times is not the case.
Digital ads today continue to waste precious time, instead of allowing the user to make an instant purchase, it forces them to wait for new webpages to load and to be patient enough through often long and unexpected checkout processes that are not yet up to their standards.
This leaves brands with many abandoned shopping carts and a lower conversion rate on their impression-lead or pay-per-click advertising models.
Proof that consumers want brands to embrace and pioneer faster and more effective solutions to dilute the sales funnel can already be seen through the uptake in purchases through Voice Activation software and the widespread embrace of Amazon's ‘1-Click’ solution.
That same innovative mindset allows us to push the boundaries in the space and make this technology work for everyone, from product and ticket sales to charities for fundraising as demonstrated in this demo.
These are examples of technology that provide a positive interaction to the user by making things easier, and to the brand by positively impacting sales generation, and are strong signs that technology will continue to revolutionise the way people will make transactions.
This means that today’s marketing decision makers must stay well informed of technological advancement in their field. Their biggest risk is taking no risk at all.