Last week several MediaMath employees outlined their predictions for retail marketing in 2015. With the new year only a week away, MediaMath’s Managing Director of EMEA, Dave Reed, has also contributed his own set of predictions to take into consideration. Dave’s predictions touch on cross-device targeting, data cooperation, social recommendation, and the evolution of programmatic within agency holding companies. His predictions, in full, are below:
Cross-Device Targeting
Cross-device marketing will continue to rise in 2015. As the number of smartphone users in the UK approaches 40 million (37.8m), there will be an emphasis on reaching the right audience with the right message, regardless of device.
This will result in a shift away from traditionally siloed marketing strategies towards a more holistic approach to media buying, where optimised ads are served seamlessly across devices from a single point of creation. Advances in attribution will also allow the impact of ads to be measured on all screens, providing shared data that can be used to inform marketing strategies.
Data Cooperation
Given the speed of industry evolution, 2015 could be the first year we see a rise in data cooperation within the EU. The current reliance on third-party data results in brands paying for ads that are served but not necessarily viewed.
It’s a simple idea, but leveraging first-party data will allow brands to exchange wasted impressions for wider audiences and apply more precise targeting, which will create positive brand equity.
While activation of their own first-party data should remain a high priority for brands, cooperating with other companies to acquire first-party data would be a strong approach to expanding marketing budgets.
Social Recommendation
As social networks continue to expand their advertising capabilities, the line between earned and paid media – along with the definitions of content and marketing – will become ever more blurred.
Driving social recommendation will be a high priority and brands will invest more in social media, with European social media marketing spend expected to increase from €2.6 billion in 2014 to €4.3 billion by 2019.
Marketers will increasingly rely on technology partners to develop robust and differentiating social strategies with great speed and agility, and there will be a focus on well-defined goals, specific audience targeting, and campaign tracking via social management tools. This will enable marketers to gain a more complete view of their digital advertising, maximising scale and efficiency across all channels.
Evolution of Programmatic in Holding Companies
Programmatic media buying is recognised as the future of digital advertising and is set to push UK ad spend to over £20bn in 2015. Programmatic’s place used to be out of sight within the engine room, but as holding companies increasingly use trading desks to capitalise on the growth of automated media buying, their endorsement of the programmatic model will push it even further into the mainstream.
This will result in an increase in brand adoption and investment in this advertising method.
These predictions were first published on the Wall Blog. You can see that article here.