see the beginnings of a convergence of AdTech and MarTech in. 2018 as supply and demand look for ways to deliver more se
FETCH PREDICTIONS
2018 The year mobile the marketing communications paradigm.
by
JULIAN smith
Head of Strategy & Innovation at Fetch
As we look towards 2018 it feels like there will be a lot that happens in the world that is difficult to predict. Geo-politically, we can’t say where the Trump v Kim Jong-un brinkmanship will end up, how the 2018 midterm elections will play out, or how the Britain v EU Brexit negotiations will go. Sports wise we can’t predict if the Houston Astros can repeat their inspired run. And weather wise we can’t predict where and when the next super storm will erupt. But what we do know with certainty is that consumers around the world will continue to grow ever more dependent on smartphones. They will start to spend more time glancing at their hand-held small screens than they spend with any other media. They will become increasingly reliant on their devices to manage their daily lives, to socialise, to learn about the world, to shop, to be entertained. So much so, that we are likely to see a growing recognition of smartphone addiction amongst some users and the idea of taking a ‘digital detox / sabbath’ becoming more popular as a counter-measure.
And we do know that, as a result of the consumer focus on mobile, marketers will continue to invest ever more into the channel. According to Dentsu Aegis Network’s global ad spend forecasts mobile overtook desktop in 2017 – to become the larger proportion of digital spending. And digital spending is set to overtake TV spending globally in 2018.
In the US, mobile spending will be $70.09 billion out of a total of $218.93 billion – that’s nearly a third of total spend. Come 2021, mobile spending will hit $102.31 billion and make up almost 80% of total digital spending.
As mobile takes up an ever-greater share of marketers’ budget, so it will start to take up an ever-greater share of their integrated communications thinking in 2018. No longer will it live on the margins; siloed and disconnected. Increasingly, planning to reach, engage and convert target audiences - whether for products or services sold on the high street, online or both - will be seen through a mobile lens.
And as marketers start to look at their communications mobile-first, in a rapidly changing and uncertain world, so they will start to question the fundamentals of their established practices and re-appraise current paradigms. As such Fetch predicts the following will be key focus areas in 2018.
Mobile data will be used more effectively to understand and target audiences Digital ad impression quality will become more actively managed AI and machine learning will be ever more widely adopted Production of ‘made-for-mobile’ content will grow Digital UX design focus will shift to CUIs and zero UI’s Building brand buzz will shift to social micro-influencers Fixing the total attribution challenge will intensify Finding mobile and data talent will become imperative
Mobile data will be used more effectively to understand and target audiences - as marketers ask themselves...
“Is demographic audience profiling still appropriate?”
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Marketers will look to make better use of mobile-derived data signals in 2018. As data strategies are re-considered and in-house DMPs built out - to improve customer understanding and inform campaign planning - so mobile (location) data will be ingested, integrated and analysed.
Mobile data, which will continuously improve in quality and accuracy, will be used more to understand and profile audiences as marketers move away from the blunt instrument of traditional demographic segmentation to more useful digitally-derived behavioural segmentation. It will be used more frequently for planning and buying location-specific mobile ad campaigns – that will play a greater role in integrated campaigns. It will be used more for targeting programmatic buys and tailoring ad creative messaging dynamically. And will start to help inform planning for TV and out-of-home media – in terms of when and where to schedule ad placements. Mobile location data will also be analysed to understand consumer conversions and attribution in terms of in-store foot traffic, behaviours and brand insights. For some innovative marketers mobile data will even be used to help plan new services, store layouts and experiences.
Digital ad impression quality will become more actively managed - as marketers ask themselves...
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“Are my ads really reaching the right person in the right place at the right time?”
The issues of online ad fraud, brand safety and ad viewability came into sharp focus in the digital advertising industry in 2017. More stories emerged of unscrupulous activities taking place in an increasingly complex and uncontrollable digital ad ecosystem. This not only effected the myriad ad networks in the digital supply chain, but even the digital super platforms of Google and Facebook. Google had to supply refunds to advertisers and agencies for the fraudulent activity provided through their programmatic buying technology. While Facebook had to address issues around ads appearing alongside fake news stories – as well as Russian influence over the US Elections. As a result, marketers and their agency partners are likely to take more active steps to reduce the risks of poor ad impressions and budget wastage in 2018. To increase the value and effectiveness of their investments they will set up internal processes to more closely monitor ad performance; work with third party technology partners, such as Forensiq, to better identify suspicious activity; work with a smaller number of more tried, tested and trusted ad platforms partners; and more actively manage a blacklist of banned vendors.
AI and machine learning will be ever more widely adopted - as marketers ask themselves...
“Can algorithms help me drive better campaign performance than my current humans?”
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As it becomes more accessible and understood so all the players in the value chain (from publishers, to ad tech companies, to agencies) will all look to apply AI to improve the performance of campaigns. For example, programmatic platforms RocketFuel, Huddled Masses and Rubicon Project all adopted AI in some form in 2017 to enable more efficient ad bidding.
With the growth in data-driven, programmatic ad buying automation and machine learning will be more widely leveraged in 2018 to drive efficient and effective campaign optimisation.
As marketers’ expectations grow around the opportunities of automation, so agencies will start to respond (before they get replaced)! More automation solutions will be designed and developed to both speed up campaign activation processes, create more actionable insights and help with quicker and more efficient optimization decisioning. Furthermore, we’ll see machine learning being applied more regularly to the creative process to dynamically optimise messaging for greater personalisation.
In the wider marketing data & technology landscape we will likely see the beginnings of a convergence of AdTech and MarTech in 2018 as supply and demand look for ways to deliver more seamless, multi-screen experiences across the full customer journey. This move is already underway amongst the key players of Adobe, Oracle, IBM and Salesforce.
Production of ‘made-for-mobile’ content will grow – as marketers ask themselves...
“How can I achieve the equivalent brand impact of a TV ad in a mobile micro-moment?”
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With consumers spending more and more time enjoying audio-visual content on their smartphones in 2018, and less time watching linear broadcast TV, marketers will increasingly need to create made-for-mobile video and audio branded content. The traditional TV-centric approach of relying on a 30 second TVC as the primary brand storytelling vehicle will start to look outdated. Marketers, and their creative agency partners, will look to tell brand stories across multiple platforms, formats, sizes and lengths.
Branded video will be vertical as well as horizontal; short (6 seconds ‘snackable spots’) as well as long (30 seconds). Audio will be created bespoke for Spotify as well as radio. And as live video streaming grows on mobile, so brands will look to create their own live broadcasts for small screen consumption.
As the mobile-first platforms look to invest in more original content and sports rights in 2018 (Snapchat, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter are all predicted to increase investment) then marketers will find new opportunities for bespoke brand integration to connect with mobile audiences. Furthermore, more marketers will experiment with Augmented Reality content in 2018 to bridge the physical and digital world through a smartphone camera as Apple (ARKit), Facebook (ARStudio) and Google (ARCore) help raise its profile and potential.
Digital UX design focus will shift to CUI’s and zero UI’s - as marketers ask themselves...
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“How can I adapt to consumers’ new found love for digital assistants?”
2017 saw the beginnings of a new paradigm in human-to-machine interaction. With the mainstream emergence of voice-activated digital assistants (like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa) humans were exposed to the new experience of simply instructing their devices in their own human language. This set in motion a fundamental change in consumer behaviour, witnessed by the rapid rise in voice search, and has heightened expectations amongst consumers of even more personalized digital dialogue & transaction with businesses and brands.
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As a result, the focus of mobile UX design will shift in 2018 from Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) to Conversational User Interfaces (CUI). While 2017 saw marketers experiment with chatbots in messaging apps as a new form of automated mobile consumer dialogue, 2018 is likely to see a wider focus on how conversational user interfaces in general can be integrated across a brand’s owned digital ecosystem for greater customer and business benefits.
Marketers will focus on how natural language processing + AI can be incorporated into their website and app platforms to support customer service, CRM, search, selection and sales. And within third party platforms, marketers will look to further develop chatbots for Facebook Messenger, develop zero user interface ‘skills’ for voice-activated smart speakers like Alexa, and work out how to optimise their online content for voice search.
All this will have significant impacts on how organisations manage their audience dialogue and blend human and automated interactions to achieve the best customer experience.
Building brand buzz will shift to social micro-influencers – as marketers ask themselves...
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“Do we need to invest in costly celebrities to achieve social influence?”
As consumers spend more time on mobile, they spend more time within social media channels. These being the primary destinations for mobile audiences. And as they spend more time within social media channels, so they are more influenced and inspired by the user generated, peer content they find there. While marketers have been leveraging the power of online social influencers for many years to propagate positive brand buzz, and overcome advertising blindness/avoidance, there will likely be a shift in focus in 2018. Whereas attention has previously been on celebrity endorsers and macro-influencers (those posters with 100,000s of followers) to spread the word marketers will increasingly turn to relatively less well followed, but more authentic, micro-influencers (with 1,000s of followers). In part due to the recognition that micro-influencers can drive higher levels of genuine engagement and conversions than top influencers at a much lower cost. These more cost-effective individuals, who share their life, passions and opinions on mobile-first platforms, will increasingly become part of the solution for brand marketers in 2018. And it won’t just be on the primary platforms of YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest. Amazon’s new Spark platform, the e-commerce giant’s shoppingoriented social network currently available in their app, will increasingly become a channel where brands look to influence the word of mouth.
Fixing the total attribution challenge will intensify – as marketers ask themselves...
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“Are my current ROI measurement techniques giving me the true picture of performance?”
As marketers invest more and more money into the mobile channel, alongside and integrated with other channels, there will be the growing recognition that existing measurement techniques just don’t deliver. Cookies and last-click attribution metrics will increasingly lose their hold on marketers as the cornerstones of digital ROI calculations. Solutions will be sought that can integrate the different measurement environments of desktop vs. mobile and web vs. app. Multi-touch attribution modelling will be increasingly be relied upon. And marketers will look to the duopoly of Google and Facebook to offer deterministic measures of success. While they will not be one silver bullet to solve all the attribution measurement challenges ongoing industry developments, such as Google’s launch of Google Attribution platform and Nielsen’s acquisition of VisualIQ, will continue to help paint a clearer picture for marketers.
Furthermore
Marketers will look to build internal databases that aggregate different business and marketing performance metrics together and create reporting dashboards that combine the short-term view of performance, derived from live, digital metrics, with the longer-term view derived from sales data, brand tracking studies and econometric modelling. By better understanding the relationships and correlations between these two datasets marketers will be better placed to ensure the short term comms flexibility while ensuring that decision making is still driving business results.
Finding mobile and data talent will become imperative – as marketers ask themselves...
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“Do we really have the right resource to succeed in this mobile-first world?”
And finally... To be able to take full advantage of an increasingly complex, mobile-first and data-driven marketing communication landscape organizations will go on the hunt for new experienced and knowledgeable talent. The need for mobile / multi-screen ad planners, creatives, UX architects and data experts will rise significantly as brands and businesses look to activate and manage mobile-first marketing communications. Data analysts/strategists, in particular, will be in great demand as organizations look to derive true value and insights from their growing pool of aggregated data. And those with any understanding or experience in the application of AI and algorithms will be able to command a particularly high salary.
Author Julian Smith, Head of Strategy & Innovation
[email protected]
Contacts Jonathan Dove, Business Development Director - UK/EMEA
[email protected] Alexandra Ivacheff- Client Development Director - US
[email protected]
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