Ten (10) Marketing Expectations for 2014

The Page Group always works with its clients to assure that the dynamic change of today’s marketing world is in focus with respect to how the clients consumers are connecting with the brand.   Technologies, strategies, tools, and creative marketing solutions are evolving faster than ever before, and it is impossible for the average company to afford the investments necessary to stay on top of each of these trends.  The safest, most effective and beneficial path to follow is not to follow the technology leaders, but to follow Your Customers leadership by understanding first how your consumer engages with new technology before you engage, and invest, in that new pathway.   Always understand how your consumer uses technology to engage with your brand first…that is the pathway to success.

10 Great Marketing Expectations For 2014

by Ben Plomion
VP, Marketing & Partnerships
Chango

Making predictions about digital marketing is never easy. The industry has been changing so rapidly that it can sometimes be hard to know what to expect in the next week, let alone the next year.

But, then again, marketers have to at least try to plan for the future. Here, then, are my 10 expectations for 2014.

1. Audience And Device Fragmentation Will Only Increase
If you’ve spent any time trying to reach consumers in recent years, then you know they’re now dispersed across lots of different channels and using lots of different devices. The days of reaching the entire country with a 30-second spot during “Dallas” are over, and they’re not coming back. According to eMarketer, more than 50 percent of Internet users will also be tablets users by 2015. And, to complicate matters further, many of those tablets users will be glancing back and forth between their TV and tablets screens–Nielsen data reveals that 43 percent of tablet owners currently use their devices daily as a second screen while watching TV. Expect that number to shoot up next year.

2. Flow Advertising Will Emerge
You might not have heard much about flow advertising at this point, but expect to next year. Flow advertising makes it possible to target consumers in sequences. You can serve your first ad at a particular moment, and then serve the second ad (or choose not to serve it) based on the customer’s reaction to the first ad. For example, you might show a preroll on YouTube and then only retarget the consumer who watches the entire ad.

3. Marketing Silos Will Continue To Disappear
Once upon a time, the different groups within a digital marketing team were divided by clear lines. But as programmatic techniques have spread from search to every other corner of the digital marketing world, the lines have blurred. Meanwhile, paid, owned, and earned media are as blurry as ever. Who owns Facebook Exchange–the social media team or the paid media one? And for that matter, what happens when someone likes an ad on Facebook? Is this social lift paid or earned? In 2014, expect to see media buyers taking credit for social lift. And you can bet that social managers will try to take credit for native ads.

4. Native Advertising Won’t Scale Very Well
There is plenty of talk these days about native advertising scaling via automated buying and selling. It’s a nice idea, but if the ads are truly native, it won’t work–almost by definition. Truly native ads are native precisely because they’re customized for a particular publisher’s voice and audience. We may seem some standards for native units emerge, but you can’t go fully native without humans customizing the campaigns.

5. Mobile Advertising Will Get Better
Everyone knows that we’re living in a mobile world, but what’s less obvious is whether marketers can figure out how to make the most of that world by finding new ways to engage consumers. Facebook is already making great strides in mobile, and in 2014 the rest of the marketing world will begin to catch up. Look for more rich media ads, more RTB units, and, following Facebook’s lead, an emphasis on app discovery.

6. Content Marketing Will Go Mainstream
Content marketing is already a huge, but quite a few brands have remained on the sidelines. That will end in 2014 as content marketing goes mainstream. More companies will hire in-house reporters and editors because they’ll come to appreciate that consumers care about their ideas as much as their products.

7. Corporate Marketers Will Embrace Networked Innovation
If you’ve worked in corporate marketing, then you probably know that awful, trapped feeling–the sense that you’re not allowed to try anything new and exciting. Well, that’s going to be less common in 2014, as corporate marketers rely less on their internal subject matter experts. Instead, corporate marketers will be increasingly free to talk to fellow marketers, in and outside of their industries. In digital marketing, startups will become a source of new ideas for corporate giants.

8. The Cookie Won’t Die–At Least Not Yet
Cookies–those tiny bits of code that cause so much controversy–might well disappear one day. But don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. Third-party cookies still power the large and growing RTB sector. Some estimate that Facebook alone is making a $1 billion per year from its RTB exchange, FBX. So, yes, privacy advocates might one day deliver a knockout punch to third-party cookies, but that won’t happen until we have a suitable alternative. Simply put, the technology is just too necessary and valuable right now.

9. Marketers Will Get Cozy With Their CTOs And CIOs
Chief marketing officers (CMOs) know all about working with chief financial officers (CFOs) and sales teams. Next year more and more of them will be spending time with chief technology officers (CTOs) and chief information officers (CIOs). In the age of big data, marketing goes hand-in-hand with technology and information. And if marketers want the best, data-powered digital marketing platforms, they’re going to have to stay on the good sides of the people who oversee the technology and data.

10. Video Will Explode
It took advertisers a while to warm up to online video. But once it happened, it happened fast. This year has been huge for video, and next year will be even bigger. How can we be sure? Well, in this case, there’s some pretty solid evidence.