MODCo Media's Erik Dochtermann and MiQ's Robert Jones offer up the tech trends that advertisers and marketers assume to be the most promising, along with the real deal opportunities for realistic success across three major areas: video, audio, and data.
30-second summary:
With 2019 coming to a close, and CES around the corner, marketers are looking ahead to new technologies and platforms that will once again revolutionize the way brands interact with customers.
However, as the year ends, we’re also reminded of last year’s promises, and those that failed to live up to the hype.
Every year, marketers around the globe run ahead to the next big thing without taking full advantage of the technology in front of them, or advances from the previous year that bear fruit late.
In that vein, we’ve identified three “headfakes” – areas where marketers should be wary about when chasing the next big thing, in addition to the current opportunities that are under-utilized that hold a lot of value.
4K/8K high resolution video is coming, and will eventually be part of people’s lives, but won’t mean much for advertisers in 2020.
While some may salivate over the prospect of massive screens and incredible pixel density, the reality is that living rooms aren’t growing and consumers are spending less time on the couch and more time watching on the go.
The majority of video content in 2020 may be consumed on tiny, smudged screens, often without sound.
Rather than focusing on new massive screens and resolutions, advertisers’ time is better spent looking at new ways to make use of existing technologies, and optimize the experience for how people will actually be viewing.
15- and 30-second, unskippable ads create a terrible user experience and have felt like bad holdovers from a bygone era for some time.
Smart advertisers have seen the value of 3- to 7-second ads optimized for mobile viewing, which yield a higher volume of impressions and encourage consumption of longer units in a different, more ideal setting.
For TVs, the opportunity lies not in new screen sizes and formats but in ACR – Automated Content Recognition. ACR tech allows advertisers the ability to track what people are watching on smart TVs and tie that behavior to their digital activity.
In effect, it helps advertisers close the gap between TV and digital. And as the technology develops, advertisers will be able to not only target and decision on TV content watched, but games played and apps used.
We’ve been hearing about voice search for several years now as Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google battle for dominance of the voice search market.
Voice search is coming, but it’s not going to be much use to advertisers – the largest existing channels are owned by Amazon and Google, and voice will only serve to line their pockets as they use the tech to direct customers where they want them to go.
Namely, their own products and services.
With U.S. adults spending more than 77 minutes per day on digital audio, there’s a very real present for advertisers to listen to when it comes to audio.
As more and more consumers get into podcasts and acquaint themselves with digital radio, advertisers are rediscovering audio as a valuable branding tool.
What’s more, digital audio represents an opportunity to dust off playbooks and skillsets that may have long lain under-used, re-applying the lessons of traditional radio advertising to a new format.
Advertisers are still underspending on digital audio channels compared to consumer time spent, proportionately.
This creates an opportunity for a brand to come in and, through a mixture of proper site creation, repetitive and consistent brand support, and the support of micro-influencers, become the “Kleenex” of its category and occupy the coveted “0” position in SERP.
The hottest thing to promise clients is a stable of data scientists making the most complex dashboards.
But marketing data is more perishable than skim milk and is subject to external forces that can completely invalidate it and dashboards can cause marketers to focus too much on what’s easy to visualize over what’s useful.
Meanwhile even the best dashboards can’t do the work of connecting the dots when it comes to connecting the data to business outcomes.
Actionable analytics are the key to successful data integration into a plan.
Instead of fixating on a dashboard that doesn’t change much beyond small standard deviations, advertisers should be using data and technology to engage in conversations at a business consulting level, determining how the data they have can be connected directly to business outcomes and used to test new approaches.
In our work with MiQ, the focus has been on connecting our data and our clients’ data to advertising outcomes, to solve challenges we couldn’t otherwise.
We’re not generally down on new technology–in fact, we’re big fans! But we are wary of moving on too quickly to the next big thing when there’s plenty to be done with existing technologies.
For advertisers, it’s a mistake to rush into the next new thing at the expense of doing things right with the tools you have.
As CEO of MODCo Media for more than two decades, Erik Dochtermann and his team of experts have driven sales and thereby built the businesses for nationally recognized brands across a variety of industries. Robert Jones is VP, Research and Insights at MiQ, a marketing intelligence company that combines human insight with artificial intelligence to help advertisers analyze data, deliver media, and solve business challenges.
