The rapid advancement of advertising technologies has birthed many ad trends that continually shape the future of advertising. Today, innovative digital advertising technologies like programmatic advertising and paid search significantly mold the advertising industry.
In the future, these technologies will only advance in reach and efficiency. Better yet, emerging tech like artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) will create novel pathways for marketing experts to advertise in more relevant and engaging ways. No wonder stats project total digital advertising ad spend to reach $740.3 billion in 2024.
But before we dig into the impacts of evolving advertisement tech on the future of advertising, let’s briefly explore how advertising has evolved in the digital age.
The Evolution of Advertising in the Digital Age
Since the dawn of the digital age – also called the information age, new media age, or computer age – it’s triggered a profound shift in the advertising industry, from strategy development to attribution and expectations on marketers.
From Traditional to Digital: A Brief History
Before the digital age, traditional forms of advertising, such as print, radio, outdoor advertising, and television, were the mainstay options. While these mediums were effective, they lacked one fundamental marketing aspect: audience targeting.
Marketers couldn’t pin down their target audience or tell who read or viewed their ads once they were broadcast. Traditional marketing utilized the spray-and-pray approach, which wasn’t particularly effective to reach a specific target market. However, the internet provided new digital platforms for marketers to reach and connect with their target market more personally.
The Rise of Digital Platforms
The initial digital ad was a banner ad that appeared in the first commercial online magazine, Hotwired, in 1994. It was sponsored by AT&T and took the advertising industry by storm after achieving an impressive click-through rate of 44%. Display ads became popular among marketing experts and soon went mainstream when search engines launched such as Yahoo in 1995 and Google in 1998.
As search engines became widespread, paid search advertising took center stage and triggered:
- The launch of Google AdWords in 2000
- The introduction of pay-per-click and cost-per-click advertising models in 2002
In the 21st century, social media advertising was born as various social media platforms launched:
- LinkedIn in 2003
- Facebook in 2004
- YouTube in 2005
- Reddit in 2005
- Twitter in 2006
- WhatsApp in 2009
- Instagram in 2010
- Snapchat in 2011
- TikTok in 2016
The rise of social media advertising was further fueled by the advent of the iPhone in 2007 and Android in 2008, which popularized the use of smartphones globally. Today, 99% of social media users worldwide use their mobile devices to access their favorite social media platforms, proving the immense influence of mobile on advertising.
The Impact of Mobile Usage on Advertising
Since smartphones went mainstream in the early 21st century, they’ve transformed how people consume advertising. Because people walk around with their mobile devices, they can interact with a brand in real time when they need information the most. This convenience and speed of accessing information has transformed consumer behavior and raised the bar for customer experience.
Thanks to mobile ads, customers have an on-demand mindset. They expect quick information when they need it, especially when considering a purchase. It’s normal for customers to turn to their mobile phones to check out your brand when shopping in a store and immediately decide whether or not to buy your product.
Mobile devices have enabled such intent-rich moments, which gives marketers a great opportunity to convert potential customers to buying customers by influencing their decision-making through advertising. Additionally, mobile usage prevalence means marketers can target and reach a wider audience: 4.8 billion people worldwide, as of 2024.
Better yet, marketers can analyze mobile phone user data and know what users want. You can use mobile analytics to review user data such as app-use logs, online web engagement, and push notification response rate.
This data helps you create demographic targeting campaigns to reach your target customers more effectively. With mobile analytics, you can establish the right metrics to track and analyze depending on the objectives of your ad campaign. It indicates the future of mobile advertising will be increasingly data-based. As a savvy digital marketer, you’ll want to upskill your data collection, analysis, and interpretation skills to be a more effective marketer and stay ahead of your peers.
Emerging Technologies Shaping the Future of Advertising
Because the digital advertising industry is heavily tech-driven, tech innovations trigger substantial shifts in advertising trends. These are the emerging technologies that show great promise of effecting seismic changes in the advertising world.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
AI has been the lifeblood of the digital advertising revolution even before the 21st century, and it will only get better in the future. This is thanks to machine learning, which enables AI to self-learn and improve by leveraging the data you feed it.
AI’s capability to analyze and interpret big data in real time is perhaps the most profound aspect influencing digital advertising. With AI, you can leverage existing marketing data to predict customer behavior. When you have accurate audience insights, you can package your marketing message so it resonates with each customer.
AI makes it easier for marketers to run personalized ad campaigns that target the right audience, helping you foster deeper connections with your customers and ultimately build customer loyalty.
For example, our AI-powered AUDIENCEX Intelligence (AXi) suite can analyze crucial behavioral signals and facilitate personalization at scale. These tools can be leveraged by our expert teams to effectively analyze historical data, first-party data, and log-level data.
Using advanced machine learning capabilities, these tools can leverage the insights derived from audience data analysis to model consumer behavior and build the ideal audience to drive a high conversion rate – as well as continually optimize your campaign to ensure maximized performance out of any budget, all while providing full transparency into performance.
Predictive Analytics in Audience Targeting
Also a feature of the AXi suite, predictive analytics uses machine learning techniques and statistical algorithms to analyze historical data and derive insights and predictions about future events. In digital advertising, predictive analytics identifies patterns in customers’ online behaviors and interests, buying patterns, and customer demographics. Predictive models then use this data to provide informed insights into your target audience.
Aspects of audience targeting that predictive analytics perform include:
- Customer segmentation (behavior and demographic-based segmentation)
- Product recommendations (predictive models suggest what products best suit a particular target audience)
- Churn prediction (predictive models forecast the customer audience that’s likely to disengage with your ads)
Unlike traditional analytics that focus only on understanding customer historical data, predictive analytics provide data-informed predictions about how your target audience’s behavior may change.
A reliable predictive analytics tool can help predict your customer’s needs as they change and create relevant digital ads that resonate with them. This way, your digital ads will always be music to your customers’ ears. You’ll have the insights to craft engaging messages that harmonize with ever-changing consumer behavior.
AI-Driven Content Creation and Optimization
Content marketing and optimization is a fundamental part of digital advertising. The fact that companies allocate anywhere from 11%–50% of their marketing budget to content marketing confirms content is king. However, creating and optimizing content is time- and energy-intensive, and doing it at scale without compromising quality comes with quite a price tag.
This is where generative AI comes in. Using AI to create marketing content such as blogs, outbound messages, press releases, and social media posts is faster and more efficient. In fact, 77% of marketers surveyed by HubSpot now admit they create more content using generative AI than without it.
AI rewards busy digital marketers with substantial time savings by empowering them to create and optimize content faster. Because most marketers wear many hats in their jobs, even the tiniest amount of time saved is worth its weight in gold. To these marketers, AI is the gift that keeps on giving.
Some of the content marketing tasks you can use AI to complete include:
- Generating content ideas and topics
- Automating routine content creation tasks like updating your content calendar
- Generating marketing images and other visual content for ads
- Defining your content optimization goals and objectives
- Craft video advertising content
With the fast-paced nature of the content marketing world, marketers who integrate AI in their content creation and optimization process gain a significant competitive advantage in the ad market. But, it’s also vital to remember that human expertise is necessary to ensure that these tools are being applied correctly. Working with experts on AI can produce much better results, provide fact-checking for these tools, and ensure an editing process that refines the product initially generated to ensure that it’s suitable to be published.
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
AR and VR technologies are revolutionizing the advertising industry by enabling immersive shopping experiences that take marketing personalization to the next level. These two reality technologies let you run try-before-you-buy campaigns in a simulated environment.
Such AR- and VR-supported ad campaigns give your customers a virtual shopping experience that’s more memorable and interactive. VR and AR ad experiences trigger emotional responses from your customers by simulating how it would feel to use your products. Besides try-before-you-buy campaigns, you can utilize VR in advertising through:
- Immersive brand storytelling
- Virtual rooms
- Branded AR filters
VR and AR will greatly influence the future of advertising, considering that more people globally are gaining access to VR devices. As of 2023, over 110 million Americans use AR devices, and over 32 million use VR devices, according to Statista.
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