Before setting new goals and plans for the year, I decided to overview online advertising trends that will more likely to increase our chances to beсome a digital top bananas and help to build a successful marketing strategies for the upcoming year.

Augmented Reality

This year advertisers and brands revealed the real power of AR. Unlike VR, the augmented reality integrates a new digital information on top of habitual users environment without inventing something completely new. Thus, it helps to forecast your purchases and take the right decisions. People embrace augmented reality to figure out if fancy chairs from IKEA blend in their living rooms or if a party outfit won’t be a mess. Find the way to talk to your users through AR and show how your product will complement their lives.

Advertising Trends 2018 Edition

Native Ads

Native advertising remains a growing tendency with a strong position in the online advertising market. Native Advertising Institute predicts that native ads will take over the ad space. Business Insider expects native display ad revenue will reach record-breaking 74% of total display US ad revenue by 2021 (compared to a 56% share in 2016). Frankly speaking, these numbers are not surprising considering the rapid pace at which native ads spread over social media and programmatic advertising campaigns. Keep this info in mind while setting up your advertising budget for the next year.

Mobile Video

Mobile video will also stay among the revenue boosters for both publishers and advertisers, but with some new variations. A great success of social media streaming and so called “stories” has shown how live videos caught on this year. Latest Cisco studies allow to assume that video will absorb 80% of world’s Internet traffic by 2019. On top of that, mobile video advertising is expected to grow from $6.72B in 2017 to $9.90B in 2018. So don’t hesitate to dip your toe in the live video pool too, and think over integrating stories, streaming and unique video ads to your marketing plans.

User-generated Сontent

Users do not trust marketing slogans. On the other hand, they might give a credit to those who already dealt with your company. Put your product into the hands of influencers — new-day trendsetters who gather related audience around their blogs and social media accounts. Team up with people who’ve got a status of opinion leaders in your particular niche. Not only influencers can build up product credibility. Dilute your advertising campaign with a user-generated blog posts, reviews or videos. One public positive feedback may bring you more engagement, purchases and leads than a high-сost ad campaign.

BuzzSumo and NinjaOutreach services help to find out the best influencers in your field and location.

Transparency

This year the IAB and Google announced a full-scale fight against industry shady players. Ads.txt, Ad Experience and Abusive Experiences initiatives are aiming at making advertising and media buying transparent and safe. It seems that a brand-new reality has come and there is no place for deceits. Are you also on the bright side?

Personalization

Data driven personalized ad campaigns are becoming increasingly important. Reaching out users with right messages in the right time and place along with a tailored approach will be crucial for advertisers. Companies and platforms with high-powered functionality maintaining hyper-targeted ad campaigns are going to lead digital marketing.

Emotions

The fact that emotions and heartbreaking stories sell is not revolutionary. This year thought-provoking ads devoted to politics, gender and harassment became nothing less than a self-assertive voice of society. We expect advertisement containing important social messages will capture bigger market share.

Other Advertising Trends

Among other upcoming trends, here are several more we didn’t go over in detail.

• Multi-channel advertising
• Social media ads
• Voice recognition marketing
• Blockchain
• Sponsored content
• Virtual reality (yet again).

Some of them are more likely to trigger digital revolution, while the others will no longer be industry buzzwords and turn into essential part of a new reality.

What is clear, advertising business should remain user-conscious, meaningful and touching.

Wanna get a better handle on how to implement mobile & video trends in your business? Join the brightest minds in Ad Summit Kyiv!