Advertising, The Future

Abiola Adejare
8 min readApr 6, 2018

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Advertising is reaching a tipping point where data, technology, and iot infrastructure are able to integrate and deliver more impactful, efficient, and effective campaigns for advertisers than ever before.

That paragraph you have just read would be a perfect introduction to a series of boring passages of a brochure style essay about the future of advertising.

Let us start over.

It may be unfair to some readers to start this piece with references from a sci-fi movie but I will go on anyway taking us through unfamiliar ideas of times we have not lived in but comes close at sound speed.

A long time ago not so far back, the future was really a tricky magnitude of time, predictions were made only by weirdest minds in the art and science field who understood the patterns in singularity. In the 2004 Minority Report, a rich techno visionary film showing Tom Cruise’s John Anderton entering a store, walking through a screen lined lobby, greeted by a friendly female voice and bombarded by digital ads that call out to him by name saying “John Anderton, you could use a guinness right about now”.

We are already too close to that period where immersive direct targeting will follow consumers outside of a web browser to analysing and employing all kinds of measurement to define what consumer wishes are and how an advertising Genie can help fulfil them. If you think that’s intrusive, One of Google’s deepmind project is to advance the next frontier on context based advertising that will produce targeted ads tailored to fit what a user is seeing or hearing in the real world. That’s one advancement on how Neuroscience is been applied to advertising through analysing real time data such as eye tracking and possible ways to result to higher sales for advertisers.

Reaching the universe as seen in Minority Report, Yottabyte worth of data is required to head in that direction. As brands are able to collect increasingly detailed data from wearables and connected devices. According to Jeff Malmad, the managing director and head of mobile Mindshare North America; a marketing company, he predicts that as wearable technology improves, the available data will continue to bend our physical environments and experiences in increasingly subtle and sophisticated ways. “Biometric data is going to live better lives,” he says. But it doesn’t always end up like that. Your phone, that little tracking apparatus in your pocket with geo-location and geo-targeting apps like google maps, consumers trade minimum privacy encroachment for maximum service. Location and sound as another dimension for interconnectivity combined with biometric data recognition will lead us to a world similar to a post-digital sci-fi film, “Her”. “Her” is romantic sci fi drama where Theodore develops affectionate feelings for an operating system with a voice called Samantha. It’s not an average operating system but an Artificial Intelligence with a consciousness. The OS possesses powerful intelligence that she uses to assist Theodore in ways others hadn’t. Imagine the less and less amount of reliance Theodore would have on his own humanly choices as he leaves everything to Samantha whose consciousness is still a property of a corporation that can push any content to Theodore in the most unnoticeable way possible.

I hope that doesn’t give you worries, In 2008, Google first filed a patent to create ads based on environmental condition” present in the background of voice communications. This is the direction every application software is going, and we have embraced it in the name of better and more personalised service. Just as this may cause hackles in the Post-PRISM society that we’re in, privacy concerns will be less and less important for Generation Z, but as voice(ACR fingerprint) will be one of the major interaction with hardware which has been growing lately around consumer products like Amazon Alexa, Apple HomePod amongst others, they would be less invasive for personalised advertising than other forms of online data collected over the years.

The next gen advertising will be focused purely in interactive and the technology. Behind this will not be the platform that treats all consumers as a child, luring and playing cheap tricks to get them to click a banner. Imagine the ad that will offer you a nice cold beer because it understands the time of the day, location you are at and ultimately your pulse and facial expression. Through our digital actions, advertising will be more measurable and more targetable. Advertisers would be able to add first-party data and syndicated data to anything and everything.

To get a better picture of the future of advertising, I have highlighted the key players that will shape the future and those factors that will bring a dramatic shifts to the period we are yet to see, some which you may be familiar with but just at its infancy stage.

The Holy Trinity

Business problems causes great innovative opportunity, These are the 3 players that controls the advertising landscape.

The Advertiser;

Advertisers are more focused on penetration today than brand building, they build brand identity that’s intended to last a lifetime but now, consumers are becoming less and less of repeat buyers of the same brand. That will cause marketing and advertising strategies to be changing campaign to campaign and it will change faster than it ever did. As the world continues to change, Advertisers will be forced to follow suit or risk getting left behind

Publisher Platform | Platform Publisher | Platishers;

Since the birth of Web 2.0 and the rise of prosumers, everything is creatable, editable and publishable by anybody. Platform models brings people together by facilitating the production and not the content itself while Publisher models provides guidance and models to the content published. Traditionally, Platforms don’t care about user generated content unlike traditional Publishers, advertisers worry about the credibility of their ads when they are seen in places disreputable for the obvious reasons and issues about relevancy. Pure platform players like Youtube continued to acquire more revenue by investing in their own content and stylishly dominating the publisher space, and the then Publishers like Forbes, New York Times started Contributor programs. The result of these arms-race becomes an overwhelming bulk-load of content to the consumer. The challenge today is having relevant ads get through to the right consumer through all the clutter of indecisive publisher/platform models, but the coming of hybrid players like Snapchat, Wechat that have a closed personal reach with a consumer and their friends will not have relevancy problem and will become more successful at reaching the consumer faster than the Publisher and Platform players.

The Consumer | The People

There will be so much content flying around and every brand will try to get the attention of the consumer. Attention has become a price commodity in the digital age, where you see an average millenial spending about 7.8 hours a day consuming digital content.

According to Loni Stark, senior director of strategy and product marketing at adobe, personalisation strategies are becoming table stakes for brands that want to compete in the digital landscape.

This is why brands need to connect to people from online to offline traction. An example of this is a new Facebook API, called the Offline Conversions API, it works with a number of in-store sales systems from companies like Square and IBM to match customer data with Facebook’s advertising data. The goal is to try and connect your in-store purchases back to an ad you may have come across in News Feed.

On the other hand, a consumer’s electronic action says a lot about them, According to Dr Michal Kosinski of stanford university, he found out that with 10 facebook likes, your computer knows you better than your average coworker; 150 likes, It knows you better than your mother and at 300 likes, It knows you better than your spouse. Not only the things they might like to do but also what they are like psychologically which is how brands will sell to them, the government will see them and also how they will get hired.

The Take out

The Fall & Rise of OOH

Out-of-home is nearing its big bang with the help of data. Technology and human centered/ civil infrastructural design will cause a new era of advertising by pioneering new products like Audio-spotlight, digital signs with facial recognition capabilities.

Time is the new money

Since Facebook defined video views at 3 seconds which seemed appropriate for online, but in OOH where attentions dips after about 0.85 seconds, getting consumers to focus on the creativity will become crucial. It will increasingly adopt online engagement principles like GIFs to deliver fast and memorable experiences within a short period of time.

Also in the online space, Consumers’ attention are short and their perception about a brand is fluid, It is the value that an advertiser offers that keeps the consumer engaged and it not just been a piece of information.

VR

Many today think virtual reality to be a play for nerds and kids, but the use cases for this technology is getting noticed day by day, Advertisers will start advertising experience to customers instead of flat image or video banners because of its ability to convey a sense of space. Consumers will be able to interact with the brand and make purchase at the same time.

Self Instructional Data

Through Neuroscientific advancement, human level communication isn’t going anywhere but the quest for advertisers to tailor communication to consumers at a dna level will lead to achieving advertising modules that simulates a human to human communication, but of course machine communicating with human at a more natural level. This will involve collecting and analysing data from a consumer with the help of machine learning and algorithms that will be generating words and images for such consumer in real time, I mean real time.

Content Paradise

In a busy digital world where brands would fight for a consumers’ attention, advertisers will be taking different schemes to engage consumers’ time and will be doing it with a twist. To sell anything, you have to buy people’s attention or earn it, today, we have started experiencing people paying for commercials, basically what used to be a cost for advertisers and turning it into actual profit. Some of us have paid to watch a commercial and have been a part of a $468 million revenue hits of LEGO Movies. That is still advertising. It could have taken LEGO to sell approximately 4 billion single LEGO blocks to match that revenue in sales.

Advertise for discovery

Letting technology first in approaching a consumer may not be entirely advisable because it constantly changes at an exponential rate, One way to stay ahead is understanding the human mind and advertising to all of the 5 senses of man

Bonus

Today, publishers make advertisers depend on vanity metrics like views, clicks and impressions, all these worked a while back and maybe now which honestly does not result to sales but we are moving to an era where the success of an ad is measured by the emotional connection between a consumer and a message. Emotion technology will be used to measure physiological data to understand how a consumer truly feels and knowing the ad for that consumer at that moment and location.

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Abiola Adejare
Abiola Adejare

Written by Abiola Adejare

I have come to this time to study the cultures of the 21st century elder men.

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