Monday, November 17, 2014

The Future of Online Advertising



Today, we live in an internet driven world; from researching to social networking, people use the internet on a daily basis. This has given advertisers a new platform to reach potential customers. So far in this blog we have explored the topic of online advertising. We have talked about its history and its current impact. But just as in business, we need to also look towards the future.
One area where we can expect future improvement is the relevance of online advertising. Advertising companies have the infrastructure in place to implement ads and reach a large audience. A new trend that will continue into the future is better targeting individual ads to consumers. One example where this has been implemented in on Hulu, a website that allows people to watch current shows online for free. While watching a show, Hulu will present commercials or advertisements. While these ads cannot be skipped over, the view has the ability to provide feedback about the relevance of the ad or even switch to a different ad. This allows for Hulu to provide a better ad experience to its customers. As more companies start to take advantage of the technologies available to them, in the future online advertising will be able to become even more personalized and relevant.
Another growing trend in this field is mobile advertising. Traditionally, online advertising was associated with internet use on personal computers. As companies such as Apple and Android improve the design of smartphones and cellular providers increase coverage, people are spending an increasing amount of time on their mobile devices. While more time is spent on mobile devices, more advertising dollars should be designated for this emerging platform. According to the eMarket forecast, mobile advertising will make up an average of 5% of the total advertising budget in 2016. This is a sharp increase from its 1% share today, and will be expected to continually increase into the future.   
It is important in business, and especially online advertising, that while we may learn from the past and celebrate our accomplishments in the present, we must always keep looking towards the future. By analyzing emerging trends, we can best capitalize on emerging technologies and markets to increase our returns. What do you think we could see from online advertising in the future?    

Sources
http://adage.com/article/news/marketing-s-years/237616/      

9 comments:

  1. This topic ties in heavily with what we discussed in class today. Like with the app Cidewalk, there are a growing number of ways for advertising to reach us no matter what we're doing. More time is being dedicated to staring at our mobile phones, even while we are in public. The most effective way to get your ads out these days is to put them on platforms that appear before constantly in front of the population.

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    1. I totally agree. If advertisers want people to see their ads, they need to show them in a way that is most effective. This is opening a whole new market for mobile advertising, that companies like Cidewalk are taking advantage of. Good businesses can see emerging trends and respond to them quickly.

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  2. While I am a huge proponent of target ads that consumers can choose to watch or change to another ads like Hulu offers, I do wonder if this is somewhat bad for advertisers that are relatively unknown trying to reach a broad audience. If customers are continuously building a database personalized to themselves indicating which ads they want and which ones they don't aren't new advertisers going to miss a large portion of an audience simply because an algorithm dictates a user may not want to see their ad? Seems like it could get to individualized and end up hurting both the advertiser and the consumer if they really could use the service they are kept oblivious to.

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    1. I understand that companies try to target ads towards customers who fit the profile of actually having potential of purchasing the product. With this being said, some customers do not know about certain products or services so advertising to new audiences is useful to gain exposure and new customers who do not regularly purchase a product.

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  3. So are the target ads suppose to be for a specific product or service and can be from any company or is it more they see ads from specific companies?

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    1. To try and answer your question I think it has more to do with where the consumer sees the ad. The content of the target ads will be relevant to whatever the person is viewing on the internet. So for example, if I am watching a video on youtube about the next big video game coming out, I may see an ad about the Xbox one or the Playstation 4. So it could be a product or service.

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  4. New ways to get targeted adds to potential customers are great for businesses because they are innovative and cost effective.

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  5. In your research, did you all see any major declines in old school physical advertising such as billboards or coupon mailers coming in the near future?

    Billboards still appear to be a thriving medium for advertising and my mailbox is still full of untargeted coupon mailers from stores I don't shop at. When they come from major companies, I have to assume they have experts analyzing the return on these ads and seeing them as beneficial as opposed to simply email ads that go to spam.

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  6. One source of advertising I have personally seen is interactive ads. Ads in which, if you complete a small survey or something, they will allow greater access to the service you are using (like Pandora). Do you think this will be on the rise for years to come?

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