By doing so, they were able to reach consumers in a place where, if the content is good, brands can have their undivided attention rather than a momentary glance at a banner ad. Dove's parent company, Unilever, is planning to create a lot more of this sort of content in the coming years, according to a a recent report from the digital agency Huge.

Look for more brands to follow suit as they begin to discover the benefits of presenting their message directly to consumers, without interference from traditional media outlets. While creating content that is both relevant to the brand and enticing to consumers is a difficult task, those willing to invest in quality will be rewarded.

My view & advice:

What I do observe by several brands like L'Oreal is that they make you feel a bit good by allowing you to participate in their digital experience but fall short of making you or me a believer in their brands. My advice for other brands? Get to understand your consumer a bit better than just random suggests you might get from Google or Facebook folks - yes we all know that they share our data with you guys. Believe me those "suggestions" come nowhere close in what I want or desire!

There are several reasons for eMarketer's bullishness. For starters, wireless networks are becoming fast enough to reliably stream video to mobile devices, making video a more widespread alternative to the much-despised mobile banner ad.

Because these pre-roll video ads can capture more of a viewer's attention than static ad formats, advertisers are willing to pay more than twice as much for them. As a result, publishers from The New York Times to Buzzfeed are investing time, manpower, and money to produce more videos and capitalize on the higher prices.

My view & advice:

While these numbers are staggering, I still want to know how enterprises can promote their videos to consumers. Finding and creating meaningful videos will remain key before throwing billions of dollars on advertising!

Nearly 30% of all web traffic is coming from smartphones and tablets, according to web tracking firm StatCounter, and as Business Insider's CEO and Editor in Chief Henry Blodget is fond of saying, "Money follows eyeballs."

U.S. mobile ad spending more than doubled from 2012 to 2013, and eMarketer predicts strong growth of more than 50% in 2014. While mobile marketers have for years been championing the idea of "the year of mobile," it appears their day has finally come.

My view & advice:

This is a huge area and the post-PC shift has already happened.(see slide 25 why). Mobile is really the future!

4. Ad budgets are being stolen by botnets.

A recent study from Solve Media says that in 2014, advertisers will waste a total of $11.6 billion on ads seen only by bots programmed to impersonate human traffic. Though the advertising and technology media have paid more attention to the problem in recent months, Solve Media, which gives publishers tools to ensure visitors are human, says fraudulent traffic will continue to be an issue until the entire advertising ecosystem commits to preventing it.

Google is just one of the major players to have made such a commitment, purchasing the anti-click fraud startup Spider.io last month to root out botnets.

My view & advice:

Not just that, digital forensics and local and regional law enforcement agencies need to ramp up their competencies to help combat this challenge! Protecting and safe-guarding citizen's data may not be initially viewed as critical by many since all of us are "free to operate in this marketplace" but misuse of information such as stealing identities and faking sentiments could be harmful to individuals and will severely affect the brand's reputation as well.

According to a recent survey from the digital advertising company Undertone, 88% of advertisers think viewability will be a big issue in 2014 and 62% plan to work with a third party to help them measure viewable ad impressions.

My view & advice:

"Pay-Per-Glance" and interpreting exact emotional charge by a consumer will be key in determining the real "value of spent dollars" in that area. This is a key area and expect a massive revolution in this area. I did present about "eyeballs" in a presentation in MalaysiaMalaysia, see slide 31 of slideshare above for "pay per glance" and or look for start-ups that are already doing some amazing work.

Now that Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have all established themselves as major destinations for advertising dollars, the only way for them to achieve any sort of substantial growth is to start winning ad deals worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Unfortunately for the folks at the major networks, the only platform currently taking in that kind of money is television.

Both Twitter and YouTube have taken substantial steps to woo brands used to buying media on television, with YouTube allowing Nielsen to measure its audiences the way it does television and Twitter allowing brands to capitalize on its real-time chatter with promoted tweets that run at the same time as their TV ads.

Meanwhile, Facebook trumpets that it has a bigger prime-time audience and better measurement tools than television.

My view & advice:

Clearly the battle for ad revenues will be fought within these three players, the rest are sadly selling pipedreams to each other! For buyers, they do have data but ask for relevant data so you can target appropriately.

Through the wonders of real-time bidding, media buyers are able to automatically purchase ad inventory in just a fraction of a second.

By using complex formulas to automate the process, publishers and brands are able to find the ideal price for an ad served to a specific person in a specific place.

At this point, just about every major web publisher sells at least part of its inventory programmatically, as opposed to having a sales representative sell ads face-to-face. According to eMarketer, U.S. buyers will spend 29% of their digital display budgets programmatically by 2017, up from 19% this past year.

In theory, any type of media inventory that be bought and sold online could eventually end up programmatic.

My view & advice:

Don't forget one thing, consumers will also massively robotise their behaviour. There will be apps that will completely cover this (analysis-compare-reference-negotiate-buy) spectrum as well.

Devices like Smart TVs, which allow people to watch traditionally desktop-native content from YouTube on their TVs, and TV Everywhere apps like Watch ESPN, which allow people to watch TV content on their computers and phones, have blurred the lines between TV and online video.

This convergence has accelerated recently with Dish and Disney's big rights deal, which paves the way for Dish to one day offer an internet-based, "over-the-top" streaming content service, and Comcast's acquisition of FreeWheel, the ad tech company that allows brands to buy video ads across platforms.