Hume Management & Consulting Blog

February 2019


3 Predictions for Digital Marketing in 2019


Advertising is changing. Facebook and Googleown 25% of global ad spend. Amazon is getting into the ad game. Social media is mature, but each channel is anything but stable. In the world of ad-tech, the talk has gone from platforms to ecosystems. Marketers aren’t talking through strategies for new platforms anymore. We’re talking about strategies for navigating the existing ones.
On the horizon, there are new AI-powered advancements coming to the world of advertising. Chatbots, virtual reality, hyper-personalization–these are things that will become commonplace in 2019. Here are three major trends that marketers should expect next year:
No. 1: Social Engagement = Video
One recent survey from fall 2018 showed that only 36% of US teens use Facebook on a monthly basis. In general,Gen z social media trends point to YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat as the favored channels.
In 2019, we can expect Facebook and Twitter to keep emphasizing streaming video in order to keep up. With competition from visual-first mediums like YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat, it’s clear that social needs
to be mobile, engaging and movie-like to keep user attention. Watch out for messaging, too–Facebook Messenger recently enabled autoplay video ads within the platform itself.
How do you get users to actually watch video ads? Well, marketers have to start thinking about how to optimize the creative in real-time.
No. 2: CPMs Get a Lot More Interesting
If we’ve learned anything from major ecommerce players, it’s that an ecommerce site can be built into an ecosystem for brands and consumers alike.
New technology and retail-brand partnerships will keep paving the way for retailers to activate not just the shoppers that convert on their website, but the audience that visits. Brands will start paying more on a cost-per- thousand impressions (CPM) basis because dynamic product pages will allow them to work with retailers
to target the best potential customers for awareness, consideration and conversion.
No. 3: Ads Get Intelligent, Everywhere
Phones, cars, refrigerators, coffee machines. In a smart home, there are more screens than ever before. That marks a big opportunity for marketers, but only if they don’t annoy shoppers with irrelevant ads.
The stakes for intelligent, AI-powered ads are going to get higher in 2019 as ad-tech strays into the world of the third, fourth and fifth screen. Companies will start experimenting with even more hyper-personalized ad campaigns and deploying them in new ways–as long as teams can activate the data at their fingertips.
In an environment where people are more ad-sensitive and ad-blind than ever, we will see even more focus on data-centric campaigns that don’t just offer products, but offer experiences.
The Ad-Tech Renaissance
Good ads today need to be more than ads. They need to be memorable experiences that offer something that reminds, engages or inspires the shopper. It’s a full funnel journey that tracks across the awareness and consideration phases down to conversion. At each touchpoint, every consumer experience has to be individualized and relevant, otherwise your campaigns go unnoticed and impatient shoppers will go onto the next thing.
Intelligent ads are going to pop up in messengers, chatbots, and, of course, across the smart home. But to actually work, every ad-tech campaign is still going to have to start with the same thing: a good ad.

This post was contributed and sponsored by Criteo.