The 2016 Wish list For Advertising Technology

By now you will have had your fill of 2016 digital marketing predictions, be it the rise of programmatic video ads or the final ending to the long slow death of TV. As Rory Sutherland stated in this lecture ‘that the big changes often come straight out of the left field’ similar to Nassim Talebs black swan just look at what Marty from back to the future when he arrived got wrong

1. Lead generation will turn native to get around ad blockers

Ad blockers quickly rose to fame in late 2015. A Clarity Ray report found on average that 9.26% of browsers are now using some form of ad blocking.

Our wish is that this will force lead generation to innovate and adopt ads into a more native setting. Getting traffic will change from intrusion to a more inbuilt and seamless process.

2. Mobile and the web will merge

Last year journalists at the New York Times were made to take mobile seriously by blocking the desktop homepage of the website internally. In fact Benedict Evans went as far as say that mobile is now the Internet, whatever way that you look at it, our wish is clear - mobile is now in full swing and marketing will have to roll with the punches and adopt. This could be added in various ways with pay per call looking like the strongest of contenders.

3. AI will make an entrance into the marketers arsenal

Currently very few but the top brass in Silicon Valley are harnessing the power of AI for their companies marketing. We would like to see machine learning algorithms leak out from the buy side on ad exchanges and moving more into the tools and products that we use more and more as Internet marketers.

4. Advertising will (slowly) become more targeted

Related to the above wish on AI, as algorithms become smarter, they will hopefully become more targeted. Our wish is that the combination of offline and online data will allow marketers to profile prospects in greater depth than ever before.

5. List data’s fate will become clearer

List data has been in a flux, mainly due to various legal cases such as ICO vs Optical Express. Marketers that are using multi-channel methods of communication involving lists are worried that they could be inadvertently flouting rules because of the lack of clarity around what is allowed and what isn’t. A great analogy of this is the use of delay based information for flights – Knowing that uncertainty exists on a particular flight allows travellers to make decisions on their journey. Similarly, our wish is that having robust information and rules around 3rd party data would allow companies that use list data to ensure they are compliant, and make concrete decisions on their marketing activity.

6. Large start ups will become platforms, ready to collect leads from

Two massive companies: Uber and Slack are still funnily enough classified as start-ups. In the next year these start-ups will carry on aggressively expanding, however they are more likely to transform into platform-based companies that offer additional services to capitalise on the traffic they have. For example, Uber have already started exploring the food delivery market with Uber Rush, and it’s surely only a matter of time until they start advertising messages based on a passenger’s destination.

Our wish is that this gives an opportunity for huge businesses to be built on the back of these platforms to collect an enormous amount of leads and data.

7. Leads will not be created equally

This wish goes back to the 19th Century with Pareto’s principle. In this attention economy the value of leads will go even more 80/20, but the leads that you can capture the attention of, will be far more valuable to the company buying them.

8. Retargeting will get a lot smarter, but hopefully not creepier

Our wish is that retargeting will hopefully carry on building up the exchange of data that is available to marketers for use. The combination of using both online and offline data would be more and more welcome for marketers to build up better profiles of their customers and prospects. However, we also hope that it doesn’t edge into the ‘creepy’ zone. There needs to be a degree of control that marketers will exercise to ensure that the audience don’t feel stalked.

If you have any thoughts on what you think will or want to happen in 2016 let us know in the comments below.