The display space has been the subject of numerous exciting innovations over the course of 2012, resulting in some fantastic growth in the industry.
Europe’s online display ad spend for 2012 will reach £3.8bn, and grow at a rate of 13% to be £6.2bn by 2016 – all extremely healthy signs that the sector is on the up.
From social media sentiment analysis to digital ad buying, faster is increasingly seen as better, or at least necessary.
So it’s no surprise that the ability to generate lots of data and analyze it rapidly is changing the way products and services are sold.
Last year, Unilver, one of the world’s largest advertisers and a bellweather for the ever-important CPG market, spent $8.6bn on ads, an 8% jump over the prior year.
And it invested heavily in digital, upping its digital ad spend a whopping 40%.
That would normally be reason for agency execs to cheer, but you like won’t hear any champagne bottles popping.
The reason? According to Unilever CFO Jean-Marc Huet, the company is working to reduce “the part of the advertising spend which is used to make films, pay agencies and the like.” And it isn’t where it wants to be yet.
Despite the fact that real-time bidding is a complex and sometimes confusing space, media buyers and sellers alike continue to flock to RTBs, a trend that experts don’t believe will end any time soon.
Real-time bidding, of course, isn’t the end-all and be-all of digital advertising, and there are numerous areas for concern.
But is the entire model for how ads are bought and sold via RTBs broken?
For most businesses, marketing is a crucial component of success. If you can’t market effectively, you can’t sell and grow, and that spells trouble.
Thanks to the internet, the rise of digital marketing channels, and the abundance of marketing tools and technologies, companies have more marketing assets and capabilities than ever.
But figuring out how to use them correctly is often a challenge and there are a number of common mistakes that hold companies back. Here are five of the biggest and most detrimental.
Real-time bidding (RTB) is a small, but rapidly growing part of the overall display advertising market, which is billed as a way of giving agencies and advertisers better control of their ad buys and costs.
Last year eMarketer predicted that RTB spend in the US will reach $7.1bn by 2016 – nearly a third of the display ad market – up from $1.9bn in 2012.
However RTB also receives criticism for being too complicated, overly expensive and offering poor quality inventory.
With this in mind, AdMonsters and PubMatic have published a new report that examines publisher attitudes towards RTB.
AdMonsters distributed an online survey to its European publisher contacts and carried out several in-depth interviews with experienced RTB users in both the US and Europe.
At the end of every year, executives and pundits put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) to project how their industry will change in the months ahead.
Some years that change is downright incremental. In others, there’s a significant shift in how people do business, reach their customers, and make money.
2013 is one of those years.
Following are my personal thoughts on what will be interesting and important in the world of digital marketing and ecommerce for 2013. As is traditional for my trends, there are around seventeen of them.
I haven’t spent too much time on giving extensive justification for any of these; they are based largely on the many conversations I have with industry influencers and practitioners.
Many are really just notes, or bullet points, but I’ve tried to give links to further information if you want to delve deeper. They are in no particular order though I’ve started with the more ‘strategic’ stuff.
As ever, I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts, or feel free to post a link to your own trends or predictions.
With JUMP coming up in New York on January 30, 2013, we’re very interested in what is happening in the world of integrated marketing.
We’re tired of companies working in independent silos and not having the conversations that can save them time and money, as well as create a better customer experience and help grow their business.
Tag management has been on everyone’s lips in 2012 so it’s no surprise that the conversations are continuing into 2013. It’s important for companies to better manage their websites and the information of their own and that of their customers that they are sharing.
Better site performance is expected by customers especially for ecommerce sites. Tag management is the way to make this happen and will be utilized by more and more companies throughout the year.
Yesterday, we looked at what some industry professionals think are the big trends in big data for the upcoming year. I had the chance to talk to Dr. Michael Wu, Chief Scientist at Lithium Technologies, about what he is looking at for his research in 2013.
For him, it’s about smart data instead of the generics often spoken about around “big data.”