5 Digital Advertising trends to implement in 2019

There was a time when digital advertisers considered ad agencies to be the best option to get media buying hassle off of their shoulders. But that time is long gone. In the programmatic landscape more and more companies shift to the in-house marketing team.

2019 will be the year that you will have to break through the white noise while keeping up with the positive user experience. Despite the fact that changes are mobile marketer's new daily routine, here are five factors that will most likely influence your marketing strategy in the upcoming year.

Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence & Chatbots

The AI market is expected to surpass $100 billion in 2025 and many advertisers are putting significant budgets on AI-development for 2019. When did AI shift from being a futuristic technology to a new handy digital marketing tool?

AI technology has very clear benefits for marketers: it deals with repetitive and boring tasks that can lead to burnouts among employees. According to Gartner, large companies like IBM, Nielsen, and Salesforce are fully relying on AI.
AI and Machine learning are complementing each other: artificial intelligence helps to deal with routine intelligently, while machine learning helps to solve problems in a more efficient way. Machine learning is a self-educational technology, which process data and makes constant improvements without human supervision.
Undoubtedly, the most recent AI achievement so far are chatbots. According to a recent study, the global chatbot market is projected to reach $1.25 billion by 2025.

Chatbots have appeared a long time ago in WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to provide the user with a personalized customer experience when interacting with brands' pages. They help a lot when the customer is asking for quick and accurate information. They are easy to create and can also collect user data which can be useful for further user segmentation.

Smartinsights created a chart to show how Machine Learning, AI and chatbots can be applied to different customers during the customer lifecycle:

Personalization in the GDPR era

Today, companies have to capture the user's attention and provide them with a personal experience while maintaining the appropriate level of personalization.
The Evergage study revealed, that 55% of online advertisers think they don't have sufficient data and insights about their audience to provide a really personalized experience. At the same time, a Salesforce report revealed that 65% of users believe personalization boosts their brand loyalty.

When thinking about personalization, digital marketers think about a Netflix or Amazon experience and assume they don't have enough data, resources and an analytics team to handle it at a proper level. Start small - find 3-4 places on the website where the user intent is clear, and use marketing automation technologies eg. machine learning or chatbots to give a great marketing experience. This data could help to create personas that you can address to later in your emails, notifications etc.

Gathering data is a big deal in the post-GDPR era: the opt-in act became a real treasure, so marketers can't pretend that personalization is just putting the person's name at the beginning of the email.

Personalization is important, but don't forget about privacy. Companies like Google or Facebook asked for private information to "provide a better and more personalized user experience", which meant they gave precise information about users to earn from advertising. However, after the GDPR some targeting criteria eg religion, job title, etc, was cut from both platforms. We believe that GDPR won't reduce personalization and it will remain a continuing trend for 2019.

Video: the most loved digital ad format

Today videos account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic. After the vertical video gained its popularity worldwide and digital marketers saw the amount of video consumption among users, it has become a must-use channel for advertisers.

Next year, real-time video will hit the charts: digital marketers can share updates, interact with customers and get quick feedback and better viewability.

YouTube rolled out its Instagram-like Stories for channels with more than 10,000 subscribers, that stay up for 7 days. This means that the desire to cut off the video sharing piece of the pie from Snapchat and Instagram is tempting even for the giants. However, companies should focus on the quality, not the quantity of video content they produce. Relevant and useful content always beats the spontaneous ones, so if you don't have the resources to think over your video strategy, stick to video ad formats that are known to work:

Programmatic media buying: DSP reimagined

The shift to building in-house teams instead of relying on agencies is growing. In the pursuit of gaining total transparency and control over media budgets, advertisers rely on demand-side platforms (DSP). DSPs play a critical role in programmatic media buying, allowing advertisers to buy ad impressions across multiple publishers at the best price, without paying fees to the middleman

In the past two years, however, advertisers have lessened the amount of demand-side platforms to buy traffic programmatically by 40%. They stopped using different DSP for buying different types of traffic and sought out more unified DSPs that would keep their advertising activities in one place.

In 2019, demand side platforms will become even more important to advertisers who use in-house capabilities.

Transparency, Brand Safety and Fraud are still here

In 2019 the advertisers will closely monitor where their ads end up and who will see it. According to Emarketer's report, the majority of the nearly $19 billion of advertising will be spent on private setups.

Marketers will put their budgets on non-anonymous types of programmatic deals, where you can see the domain URL: programmatic guaranteed, preferred deals and private marketplaces (PMPs). Even though they will have to pay a slightly higher price, advertisers secure themselves with clean and brand-safe traffic.

Brands are moving towards more reputable ad exchanges in order to ensure that they get exactly what they've paid for, supply-side partners (SSPs) which work with third-party traffic security vendors like Double Verify, WhiteOps and many more.

If you are a publisher and haven't implemented ads.txt, its high time to do it. Advertisers prefer to work with authorized sellers.

The online advertising market is maturing, which leaves little to no chance for scammers to survive. Advertisers want to control every aspect of digital advertising, driving the digital evolution further.

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