4 Simple #DigitalSense Trends Right Under Our Noses

Some far wiser people than me have written great forward looking trend presentations over the past few weeks, but it does sometimes feel like in the pursuit of big headline game changing trends we might be missing out on a few right under our noses. The marketing, media & digital spaces continue to go through some pretty radical shake ups but here are 4 things I don’t hear many people shouting about:

1.      The Google & Facebook Digital Duopoly

For many years digital marketing has been a hot bed of start-ups & disruptive companies with new ways of targeting, engaging or generally reaching people – digital ad budgets have been growing exponentially and there’s been plenty to go round. The industry at large however is sleep walking into quite a different situation, one where two big players in effect control nearly the entire market.

By 2020 Google & Facebook jointly will represent more than 70% of digital display advertising in the UK, up from 53% today; they already represent three quarters of the ￡18.4bn US display market. With those numbers growing, and overall digital budgets inevitably slowing down, there’ll be less and less cash to splash around. It’s probably a bad time to invest in that hot ad tech start-up you just heard about, unless they’re lining up to be bought by one of these guys.

Marketers are finding it much easier and more effective to focus on a couple of big platforms, on which they can have more control of their content, data etc, and are thus consolidating spend into them. It’s a trend that broadly speaking is leading to better creative work and more efficient ways to plan & buy media, but we must be cautious about handing two partners too much power & control. If the AOL/Yahoo merger does eventually go through their empire, combined with Microsoft Advertising, may just offer a third way; other smaller players will have to work hard to differentiate themselves.

2.      Paying to End Advertising

Our ability to advertise is of course dependent on there being times & places at which we can get our messages in front of people. There has long been an expectation that even if you’re paying for content (a subscription TV station, a newspaper, a magazine etc.) it’s still acceptable for additional adverts to be inserted into it. Somehow digital channels are pushing a new norm, where paying for content then requires that the content no longer contains advertising at all.

Sure your cable TV channels are all filled with ads, but if an ad break interrupted your Netflix or Amazon Video session you’d be pretty mad; Mobile apps often specifically offer the ability to pay to remove ads completely from the product; Spotify’s premium product adds some features but is fundamentally about removing adverts too. These networks are building up huge audiences and soaking up vast hours of time, all in completely ad free environments. It's notable that Google & Facebook are creating two of the most popular free ecosystems where consumers will still be reachable (see above).

Pokemon Go may have made the App Store headlines this year but Mario Run may arguably have a longer lasting legacy – it’s ￡7.99 cost to unlock all but the most basic of content is a radical attempt at setting a new price ceiling for apps in the store. If successful we may see a move away from the freemium & ad funded products that have been dominant in recent years. Whilst active use of Ad Blockers has grabbed industry headlines this year, despite almost certainly being overstated in most ‘research’, the trend to remove ads by opting into premium services is actually arguably a bigger challenge for marketers to tackle going forward - though, that isn't to say that either trend is likely to heavily limit the ability of marketers to reach consumers in the medium term.

3.      VR Apathy

Of course there’s lots of mentions of VR in trend decks this year, not to mention many people congratulating themselves on ‘correctly’ calling 2016 as the big year for VR, but there’s one thing they all seem to be forgetting – no one cares. Whilst the availability of VR tech has grabbed headlines the bigger story from my perspective is how truly minimal the consumer interest & take up has been. Does anyone you actually know (outside of the tech industry) have & regularly actively use a VR headset?

This Christmas the entry points to VR range from a ￡10 Cardboard, through ￡100 Gear/Daydream setups through to Playstation, Vive & Oculus which can cost well above ￡1000 – there really is something for everybody. Why then is VR not the must-have gift of the year in the way that something like hover boards were last year? Largely because the key barrier to VR is not truly technology any more but content, and there’s a long way to go on that front.

What content actually currently exists which is better in VR? Certainly gaming has an answer here, beyond that there are some visually impressive party tricks but not a huge amount that would have you coming back every night to play around in for a few hours, let alone that your less tech friendly family members would be interested in. It’s quite probably that widespread adoption of VR is an inevitability, but it could easily be 10 years away – indeed even Oculus owner Facebook thinks that’s the timeframe we’re talking about. Stand down people, stand down.

4.      The End of the Engagement Age

This is one of those trends I’ve written about before only to be surprised by how slowly it has actually manifested, but like the eternal year of mobile it’s finally time for this to come true. Digital channels & especially social media channels propelled themselves into marketers’ hearts & budgets with a range of new ways of directly interacting with & engaging with consumers. They built up whole new currencies of fans, likes, comments, shares, engagements and more to justify getting a bigger & bigger slice of those budgets. Then sense started to kick in and slowly people started to realise that however fantastically engaged a few people were, marketing really did still hinge on reaching a far bigger audience than you could ever hope to get interacting in this way.

Spoiler alert: Facebook almost entirely abandoned the ‘engagement’ narrative around 4 years ago when it introduced a far clearer push around promoted posts, the importance of reach and then more recently video. Twitter has followed suit over the past 18 months, moving from its hold out focus on ‘Cost per Engagement’ solutions to also pushing its reach & video. The core of Snapchat’s ad offering has always been vertical videos, which until recently there was literally no way to respond to or interact with at all.

The remarkable thing is how slow the marketing industry has been to follow suit, perhaps because no one really likes to admit they might be doing something wrong. Social media conferences, industry headlines & many companies’ strategies are still littered with the sort of ‘step changing’ personal engagement pipe dreams that just about all credible research disproves. Time for us all to move on and start thinking of digital & social channels as powerful allies to traditional media, but not entirely new beasts in themselves. They play by more of the rules of traditional marketing than truthfully they break.

I am a marketer who helps global brands make sense of media in a digital world; Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. These#DigitalSense posts are my attempt to cut through the hype that surrounds the industry. I am Digital Partner at Carat Global, an agency redefining how the world's biggest brands think about media, though these are my personal thoughts. #AgencyVoices