Overdrive is starting a new initiative this year to bring in guest presenters and marketing luminaries at least once a month. Our goal is to learn from our industry peers and gain exposure to different perspectives on marketing.
Our first guest speaker was Rob Griffin from G5 Futures. He has had a long career at different agencies across the Boston area and was a perfect fit to kick off the series. In his presentation, 20/20 Reimagined, Rob focused on what he called the “key drivers of change” in the coming year: mobile, streaming, augmented reality, data and privacy. Here some useful highlights from each topic covered.
Mobile
While mobile isn’t a media channel, it is a major access point to all other media. Today there are more than 2.7 billion smartphone users and nearly 70% of them are active in the early evening. The competition for getting the attention of those users will only increase in the coming years. For that reason, optimizing for mobile is paramount. Being able to leverage the functionality of mobile devices and creating integrated campaigns will have a huge impact on your marketing initiatives. Mobile advertising currently accounts for the majority of all digital advertising dollars, and its dominance will only continue to grow.
Streaming
Currently, there are over 200 streaming services available in the United States, and at least 5 major streaming options are scheduled to launch in 2020. The sheer number of options run the risk of creating “streaming fatigue” among consumers. One of the significant differentiators among the services is their pricing and the advertising plans that go along with them. The standard subscription for programs like Netflix was all the rage when they first came out because for the first time there were no commercials. What they didn’t foresee is that the business model wouldn’t be sustainable forever. Even though it’s resisted, Netflix will likely have no choice but to transition into featuring commercials within the next 1-2 years.
Augmented Reality
The capabilities of AR are endless, but the most popular iterations are voice search, visual recognition, and cars. Today, it’s estimated that 35% of all households have a smart speaker such as Amazon Alexa or Google Home. Visual recognition hasn’t been as widely accepted despite having interesting benefits such as checking prices or finding the artist of a painting just by snapping a photo. The security risks with keeping the data secure are what has kept it from becoming as prevalent as voice search. Fully self-driving cars have come up against legal concerns, but that has made way for innovation in the realm of connected cars.
Data & Privacy
As technology advances, so does the amount and quality of the data that can be collected from it. Ultimately, that data is power. Griffin said it perfectly, “a brand’s data is their crude oil and their most valuable asset.” Data is the driving force behind the efforts to monetize technology and utilize it in other forms. Companies are trying harder and harder to keep that information proprietary, but most likely will need to use an agency to manage it. The regulations around the use of this information are becoming quite stringent. An example of the change in the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which is intended to give power to the consumer by giving them the ability to see all information a company has about them, and who they have shared it with.
So, what does this all mean for advertising in the coming year?
Mobile will be at the core of all campaigns and will continue to take the lion’s share of digital dollars. Being able to seamlessly connect different aspects of a campaign while incorporating new channels will be a challenge, but if done right will yield the most success.
