Ad Tech is Booming: Top Trends to Know

Information Gathering Will be Used For Hyper-Personalization in Marketing

There are multiple ways that marketers can gather information about consumers. The keywords they enter in search engines, the websites they visit, the videos they view, their social medial likes and dislikes, IP address, geographical information, along with a variety of other bits of data can be used to target advertisements that are as personalized as possible. Marketers will continue to find ways to use this data to market to consumers using hyper-personalization. This will ensure that the ads customers see are more relevant than ever. However, as they maximize their abilities to create these hyper-personalized experiences, marketers must also be careful to ensure that they don't make customers feel creeped out or as if they are being spied on.

In App Ads Will Focus on Video

It seems like a no-brainer doesn't it? Video has become an extremely popular advertising medium. Mobile devices are now a better and more popular platform for viewing videos. The majority of time spent on mobile devices is spent within apps. As a result, more marketers will use videos in their in app advertising efforts. In order to facilitate this, they will use companies such as AppsFlyer to help them find the best apps for reaching their target customer base.

Efforts Will be Made to Make Advertising More Seamless And Less Intrusive

Online advertising is difficult. You are dealing with an audience who would, quite frankly, love to experience the internet without dealing with advertisements at all. This means that you not only have to create ad content that quickly convinces people that your ad is somehow different from other ads, you also have to ensure that the experience of viewing your ad is as pleasant as possible. This means optimizing the time it takes for your ad to load, showing the ad at the right time, and having production values that make your ads easy to watch. Marketers will spend a lot of time 2016 finding ways to get customers to reconsider using ad blockers.

Marketers Will Make Advertising More Relevant

Picture this. You are planning your wedding and are on a popular floral retailer's website scrolling through a slideshow of bouquet design options. You get a few slides in and an advertisement comes up. It's a video commercial pushing a local car dealership. Do you watch the video? Of course not. You find the "Skip Ad" button as quickly as you can and move onto the content that you were already focused on. You're also probably a bit annoyed at the disruption. Now, what if instead of interrupting your experience with an ad that was completely irrelevant, you had been shown a video ad about a really cool, local venue that would be a possible location for your wedding reception? According to Edward James of GoUp, "In the next year, you will likely notice online advertising that is much more relevant to the content that you are consuming."

Creativity in Advertising Will be Key

Take a moment to think about the advertising campaigns that have been most successful over the past 12 months. Brands such as Kate Spade and Chipotle have launched campaigns that have gone viral. While technology and relevance played key roles in this, it was creativity that got audiences attention and managed to keep that attention. Rather than hitting their audience with straight forward advertising, both of these brands created online series that got viewers not only watching, but eagerly anticipating what was coming next. Smart advertisers will take note of this, and will recognize the importance of creativity in engaging audiences.

VR Will Help Marketers Create Experiences Rather Than Ads

Until now, even the most engaging advertisement was a flat, two dimensional experience. Now that Oculus Rift and other technologies are making virtual reality accessible to mainstream audiences, we will begin to see advertising efforts that utilize these technologies.

Conclusion

Technology, data, and creativity will make the next 12 months in ad tech extremely exciting. The result will be ads that are more palatable for audiences, and that generate more revenue for brands.