Digital Marketing Technologies Tipped To Trend In 2014

With the continued rapid growth of digital communications channels in mind, certain areas will exhibit stronger growth and innovation than others in the next 12 months.

One of the areas expected to be of great interest to digital marketers is ad-buying through programmatic platforms, visual content specialist WeSEE predicts. The attractiveness of the technology will be driven by strong targeting, content value and personalisation opportunities, supporting the emergence of a market consisting of private ad exchanges that are owned and managed by a publisher. Such exchanges will guarantee publishers that only relevant messages, brands or products are promoted through adverts on their sites, ensuring an increase in value and more premium content appearing on digital platforms.

Mobile, unsurprisingly, will also be sitting on top of the list of innovative trends in 2014, with the most remarkable one being the roll-out of apps such as Osom, which allows users to take a photo of an item around them and recommends similar items to buy on a retailer’s site. Such innovations in technology and the consequent mobile-powered consumer behaviour they enable will further support the launch of new models of advertising, such as in-app advertising and content-embedded ads, creating more visual and location-based consumer experiences with brands and allowing advertisers to better tailor content to users’ multi-screen behaviour.

The soaring number of people using smart devices to access media content will also propel growth in online video advertising, which will be driven by faster streaming speeds and consumers’ growing appetite for short video clips. While advertising solutions for video-demand services are at early stages of development, technology that can classify, automate and improve video content of the entire process of placing video ads is already available. Next year, the use of such technology will be more pronounced as a result of companies’ desire to create highly targeted marketing content.