Digital advertising is the fastest growing sector of marketing and leveraging on technology is changing the way business connect with its intended audiences. This report will search for current trends and technologies having an influence on digital advertising.
Social media sites have become key pillars of any digital marketing plan as brands partner with influencers to promote products across different platforms and build authority with their audience. Predictive analytics helps us find the audiences and categorise them for the best possible marketing campaign outcomes.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
New opportunities have opened up for marketers that leverage AI technologies. These include the idea that AI can help with customer understanding, process optimisation, and improving the ROI.
For example, machine learning (ML) makes patterns and trends visible to those who don’t have the ability to see them. The candidate takes data in, then trains its algorithm to determine the best approach to generating the desired results. The other applications of ML, whether it’s in data mining, predictive analytics or risk management methods, remain steadfast in their demand for human pause and restraint.
Generative AI trained on colossal quantities of training data that spit out statistically expected outputs has become the favoured marketing gimmick, despite renewed anxieties over its ethical and privacy impacts; international regulators have attempted to rein it in; in May 2023, the G7 launched an initiative with representatives from the US and China who will convene and attempt to establish an international standard on AI governance, the outcome of which could have far-reaching implications on technological futures.
Augmented Reality (AR)
Augmented reality superimposes digital information on physical spaces. It can bring the brand to life, helping marketers create sticky experiences in order to capture the customer, and can help build customer loyalty with creative content and a showcase for the brand. Augmented reality also enables a company to conduct business more effectively. It helps companies collect and analyse data that can be used to improve customer services or drive innovation of products.
Yet, whether it be getting virtual products and promotions to pop-up onto your retina from a billboard, enriching the library experience with special collections, or enhancing learning activities for students (such as an interactive treasure hunt or questionnaire) in the classroom, the possibilities in all of these contexts grow exponentially as the AR begins to fire up brain processes and then lay down new schema.
This technology helps drive sales and repeat purchases by allowing consumers to virtually try on products in the virtual world that as AR gradually turns more and more into the new real world. If you want to keep your place in the market and not lose ground to any other company, you need to keep up with new technological developments in order to enhance their marketing plans with an optimal budget.
Blockchain
That is how second-most popular application of blockchain – after cryptocurrency – is reshaping the pay-per-click (PPC) ecosystem in digital advertising, tracking and reporting activity, eliminating scams and fraud, protecting privacy of user data, and building trust between consumers and advertisers.
It’s no secret that the ad industry is rife with ad fraud and general opacity – with customers wondering if their data is being used in new and horrifying ways. The blockchain therefore enables marketers to create decentralised ad exchanges that connect advertisers and publishers directly, eliminating many of the middlemen and cutting 50 per cent from their fees.
Blockchain not only ensures transactions and promotes accountability by entering each interaction onto an immutable ledger that is difficult to crack, and improving trust between advertisers and consumers by preventing fraud in programmatic advertising, and ensuring the validity of ad impressions and clicks so that marketers can take comfort that their programmed and hard-earned dollar is resulting in actual viewership – the proverbial ‘butt in the chair’ or ‘fingers on the keyboard’, it also improves the management of this data. Moreover, it creates a more humane advertising ecosystem.
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising allows marketers to utilise automation software to buy ads simultaneously across different advertising platforms. This allows the company to advertise to their target audience, and increases the likelihood of success with each sale while spending as little money as possible. With growing popularity and the possible adoption of programmatic ad purchases becoming the dominant method of digital marketing spending in the near future, programmatic ad purchases will eventually replace more traditional methods.
Programmatic winning depends on tech partners, specifically Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) and Supply Side Platforms (SSPs). For the advertiser, the DSP is a modern-day superhero that he dispatches to continuously buy space on all viable channels using state-of-the-art real-time bidding technology; a modern robot servant to bid on his behalf. For the publisher, the SSP is a connector that allows them to tie up to an ad exchange where their available ad inventory is sold off to the highest bidder – a state-of-the-art sales system if there ever was one.
SSPs offer marketers visibility into the behaviour of their campaigns in real time – for instance, which domains they are reaching or what audiences they are hitting – allowing them to make decisions while a campaign is up and running, and determine what will drive the best performance. Another way of reaching audiences based on the content of a particular site, and without the use of tracking data, advertisers can turn to a technique called contextual targeting.