In our April Marketing News Snapshot, we shared this article from Direct Marketing News. It features Susan Wojcicki, SVP of Advertising at Google, discussing five trends shaping the future of digital advertising. While they all warrant monitoring, these three in particular jumped out at me, coming from a marketing technology background. For deeper explanations of the trends, be sure to read the article by Ryan Joe. To see how the future of digital advertising compares to that of digital marketing, and the role marketing technology plays in that future, keep reading below!
Choices: Ad views will be voluntary
“The advantages of the voluntary model...is that both advertiser and user incentives are aligned. The user wants to see an ad, the advertiser only pays if the user sees the ad, and it's up to the publisher to serve the ad at the right time and in the right place.”
In the world of advertising you can either find or be found, as it pertains to your audience. Not only will businesses have to wait for customers to find them, they’ll have to actually complete some action to view their ad. If the “be found” element is drastically reduced (from an ad quantity standpoint), the proactive, or “find” element, becomes even more important. That means digital multi-channel campaigns that include email, direct mail and social media engagement are going to become increasingly valuable. Marketing technology’s (especially marketing resource management’s) ability to help businesses manage, execute and track multi-channel campaigns will be ever-more critical as companies look to supplement their digital advertising efforts with more proactive approaches.
Control: Users will participate if we provide enough value and control
“...there are a lot of places where we go tell people we're interested in buying something—like sales associates and travel agents. But how do we get that online to users so they can have control?”
While value and control may be new trends in online advertising, they have always been central elements in online marketing. One way to increase value is through localization and personalization. Marketing technology can help businesses do this across distributed sales forces while also preserving the integrity of the brand. By giving individual sales professionals the ability to plug in pre-approved messaging that has been optimized for a specific audience, they can build communications that will both have value to their target market and represent the brand properly on a personal level.
The control element has always been in play for audiences of online marketing, especially when it comes to email marketing. The ability to opt-out of campaigns and future communication provides a necessary filter for both audiences and marketers – we don’t want to waste time sending messages to people that just aren’t interested and audiences don’t want to be hit with messages they have no interest in.
Charm: Ads will be more interactive and beautiful—at scale
“Many ads are well-designed and beautiful...But many times the well-designed ads running on a homepage aren't the ones that show up across the Internet.”
This is an area where advertising can definitely lean on marketing technology for solutions. Creative production and collaboration workflows, along with brand consistency controls, are key components of many digital marketing platforms. Just as you don’t want different branding and messaging across various web outlets, you don’t want different branding and messaging among your sales force. Marketing technology helps control how marketing and advertising assets are produced and approved, providing oversight of branding elements to ensure consistency (and beauty) throughout the various formats the assets will be used.
As these trends continue to develop, the role and capabilities of marketing technology will continue to expand to meet their demands. This also means marketing tech vendors will have to work more closely than ever with businesses to make sure their products continue to evolve with client needs.
