1. Display advertising is no longer just the 'next big business'
Display advertising is no longer just the 'next big business' as it is already central to what Google and our clients do. Advertising with Google used to be all about four lines of text, on Google.com and our partner sites. With the exception of ads alongside search results, more than 40 per cent of the ads that we show are now non-text ads and that doesn't even include the 45 billion ads that our Double Click advertising products serve every day across the web.
2. Paradigm shift from a 'media buy' to an 'audience buy' advertising model
Google sees a general shift in the advertising industry from a predominantly 'media buy' to an 'audience buy' model. Google believes that the advertising focus of businesses will be more on targeted consumers and less on media platforms.
3. Social and interactive applications impact marketing and advertising strategies
More engaging rich media ads can overcome banner blindness, but only 11 per cent of total ad impressions served in the last couple of years were rich media (versus 69 per cent flash and 20 per cent static image).
We noticed that the ability to like, share, edit and update ads is a big area so the incorporation of interactive features on display advertising is another big growth area that we foresee.
Mobile advertising is another trend due to the fact that people can now get onto the web via their mobile devices – tablets, notebooks and smartphones. This convergence means that major advertising solutions providers are discussing cross platform campaigns with advertisers and agencies, with a focus on display advertising. We see advertising in social applications as one of the major trends impacting marketing and advertising strategies.
4. Open ecosystem for advertising publishers
An open ecosystem drives meaningful results for publishers. When a wide range of buyers can bid for a publisher's ad space, through an advertising exchange or network, this creates more competition for that ad space, while giving publishers choice over whose ads they want to appear.
5. Dynamic campaign measurement is the future
In the future, the measurement of online advertising will take place almost instantaneously, creating an almost immediate feedback loop. Currently, the process is very linear — marketers plan their campaign, buy ad space, run the campaign and measure the results, often with weeks in between.
Soon, measurement will become truly dynamic and will feed into the planning process itself.
Agencies and advertisers will be able to test multiple creatives and media plans, and immediately tweak them to deliver the best performing ads and reach the optimal sites and audiences as measurement data starts to come in, similar to search campaigns.