Advertising Trends Expected to Reshape Ad-Tech Industry in 2020

It is important to stay ahead of the advertising trends and plan your advertising campaigns accordingly. It’s the start of the year and the perfect time to set yearly advertising goals for your business. So what’s special about 2020, what will change, what will remain unchanged, and how businesses can best plan for the year ahead?

Here are the top advertising trends that are expected to reshape ad-tech industry in 2020.

Voice

There has been a lot of debate about voice search and how it will impact businesses and marketers. According to ComScore, more than half of smartphone users will engage with voice technology in 2020. Gartner predicted that 30% of browsing sessions will include a voice search by 2020. Smart speakers, smart homes, voice AI, and other voice-powered devices are already out there that are used extensively.

Voice search by Google is of prime interest to marketers. They have been optimizing products and webpages for voice search for a few good years. Voice assistants on smartphones have already changed the way how mobile users interact with their phone, access applications, and run different search queries.

It is predicted that the voice search market will cross $16 billion and an estimated 1.8 billion people will be using voice assistants by 2021. A more focus on voice optimization, an increase in the production and sales of smart speakers, and other voice-powered devices will be observed in 2020.

With an increase in the number of devices and users, paid voice search is expected to become a common practice by the end of 2020. Advertisers are already optimizing their ads for voice PPC, but the emphasis will increase in 2020. As an advertiser, you need to understand how your clients can get targeted traffic from voice search.

Third-Party Cookies Obsolesce

It’s one of the biggest news of 2020. Google has announced that it will end third-party cookies from Chrome by 2022. The announcement wasn’t surprising as Google has already announced its concerns over third-party cookies. Firefox and Safari have already blocked third-party cookies.

This news will impact both publishers and advertisers. We will see a major shift in advertising techniques and changes in data collection methods. One of the biggest trends that is expected in 2020 is related to first-party data. Businesses and advertisers will start collecting and using first-party data for targeting and personalization.

A shift to contextual advertising will become a common trend this year and in the coming years. The ads, in contextual advertising, are relevant to the website’s content where they are served as opposed to the user’s browsing history. These types of ads work equally well but aren’t as personalized as behavioral advertising. A reduction in behavioral advertising will be seen in 2020 since leading advertisers and businesses use third-party cookies to serve ads.

Ad networks are doing a great job of providing advertisers with contextual advertising. AdMaven, for instance, has over 10 years of experience in ad-tech industry and has hundreds of advertisers and publishers that power their display ad network. It launched an Optimization Engine last year that uses series of algorithms to match the right ad to the right people at the right time. Ad networks like these have long been trying to get rid of this cookie-stuff.

Third-party cookies will remain effective in 2020 so the changes in ways how advertisers personalize ad campaigns won’t become effective immediately. The response to this change will be slow.

Video

Video advertising is still the number one marketing channel. According to Wyzowl State of Video Marketing Survey, 85% of businesses are using video advertising and 92% of businesses have reported that video is the most important marketing channel. As much as 99% of current video marketers said that they will continue to use video marketing in 2020 while 95% plan to increase video ads spend in 2020.

Video content and video marketing will continue to rise and shine in 2020 for all types and sizes of businesses. However, the type of video content and video ads will change significantly this year due to changing user demand and other variables.

Social networking platforms and video streaming sites are the two biggest video advertising platforms that will continue to evolve. YouTube will dominate as the biggest video advertising platform. It’s hard for an advertiser to ignore YouTube for a video ad campaign. Social networking platforms especially Instagram and Facebook provide advertisers with the opportunity to run video ads to connect with their audience.

Here are the leading video content trends that are expected to dominate this year:

• Live video will evolve despite Facebook Live closure
• Short video ads (5 seconds or less) as viewers can skip video ads on YouTube after 5-seconds
• A rise in vlogging and an increase in the number of vlogs
• 1:1 video that is created for a specific user will be seen everywhere
• Interactive videos with a focus on 360-degree
• Shoppable videos will be the new trend in 2020

The global online video viewing time is expected to jump to 100 minutes a day by 2021 and the global ad spending is forecasted to cross $61 billion by 2021 from $45 billion in 2019. Yes, video advertising is all set to break records in 2020 too as it has been doing for the past several years.

Conclusion

Other most anticipated trends include augmented reality, the rise of stories, a shift to data-focused advertising, use of big data in advertising, the crackdown of fake video views, and use of the cloud to power advertising.

Nobody can predict the future, especially in today’s digital economy. Thanks to data that makes it easier to peek into the future based on data at hand. Use these digital advertising trends to define and refine your advertising strategy for 2020 and beyond.

Businesses that will respond to these trends early and quickly will outperform others. Let your business be the first mover.