Canadian ad tech company and Profit 2013 hottest startup Chango has released its predictions for digital marketing in 2014. Many of the highlighted trends will be familiar to digital marketers, but there are some surprises too.
In a webinar hosted by publisher platform OpenX and the American Marketing Association, Chango vice-president strategy Premal Shah described his expectations of the year ahead. Specifically: audience and device fragmentation will increase; marketing silos will break down; mobile advertising solutions will improve; and marketers will get cozier with CIOs and CTOs as they seek more and better data.
Hot new budget items that Chango gave the thumbs-up included content marketing and online video, which it says will “explode” next year. However the company is skeptical that native advertising will be able to meet the scale demands of digital marketing. While some publishers and platforms have attempted to sell native ads programmatically, “truly native ads are ‘native’ precisely because they’re customized for a particular publisher’s voice and audience,” said Shah. “We may see some standards for native units emerge, but you can’t go fully native without humans customizing that campaign.”
Chango trumpeted the emergence of “flow advertising,” which they defined as dynamic, sequential retargeting that is able to follow a consumer through the purchase cycle and adapt to changing behaviours (for example, an advertiser showing a consumer a pre-roll ad and later showing a corresponding second ad only to those who viewed the first). Microsoft has promised to release sequential targeting across Xbox, Windows 8, Windows Phone and MSN in spring next year.
One of Chango’s final predictions was that the third-party cookie won’t meet its demise in 2014, because it remains integral to programmatic buying and there are currently no viable alternatives. That may be overly optimistic, given the wins that privacy advocates have had in the past year, like default-enabled Do Not Track on Mozilla Firefox. While digital marketers would certainly prefer to keep tracking cookies in place until a better solution is found, there’s no reason to think the privacy lobby will give them the time.
Chango said that overall RTB growth is expected to grow from $3.4 billion this year (or 20% of digital spend) to $9 billion by 2017 (or 30% of spend). Meanwhile mobile advertising (including RTB and other buying methods) is expected to grow from $3.8 billion this year to $14.5 billion in 2017.
