How advertising and marketing will change in the coming years

Where is the advertising market going, and how will things change in the immediate future? Marketers and advertising managers want to know this, anticipating market changes and positioning themselves more clearly in the face of new trends. Understanding what the future will look like and what changes it will entail allows them to make more efficient decisions.

The fact of being in one of those moments of change of calendar (the jump from one decade to another) works as a kind of element of the psychological impulse to make new decisions and outline things more efficiently. If we add to this that the industry is at a time when, due to the characteristics of the market, it functions as a potential hinge for change, it is even more understandable the need to know what the future will be like.

The context will have a direct impact on how advertising is managed and on the investment that brands and companies will make in marketing. One of the studies that GroupM had launched with the end of the year and the start of the new one already pointed out several main lines about how things would be and what would impact the market. Their data indicated that the world economy “has weakened in 2019”, something that would also mark the following months. 2020 will continue in this direction, with slow growth and thereby affecting business decisions. Still, consumers are going to keep buying. The expense in personal consumption remains despite everything, which makes marketers also continue to bet on investing.

The United States market remains the largest advertising market worldwide, the largest. However, markets such as China are also of considerable size (although they have already begun the process of entering their maturity).

The power of internet brands

In the advertising market, the analysis also pointed in a clear direction. “A substantial part of global advertising now corresponds to leading digital brands,” they noted, noting that they are brands that are “endemic” to the network. That is, they are giants who have their expansion area and work area on the internet.

Alibaba, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon … Those are the brands that star in global advertising investment. These companies are already advertisers that exceed one billion dollars of investment, which makes them one of the great global advertisers (also having an increasingly higher weight in the total of global advertising investment) and their weight in that total of Advertising investment does not stop growing (although they do it not by creating a more market, but by eating an existing market, which does not increase the general spending of consumers).

Amazon is, on the other hand, and as other analyzes have just shown, the leading advertiser already worldwide.

It is not the only change that the network brings since the internet is the most important advertising medium worldwide and the one that is eating ground for television, which is decreasing.

Trends that will change advertising

But beyond the general changes in means and investment, the market itself is changing what and how it must do to respond to changes in consumption and those of consumers themselves. The Indian subsidiary of GroupM is responsible for a study that focuses precisely on that, on how cultural, consumer, or technology changes will change advertising in the decade in which we are entering. Their conclusions allow us to outline an overview of what tomorrow’s advertising will be like.

From the outset, brands will have to do a changing job in how they generate content and what content they incorporate into their campaigns. They have to be cultural creators, going hand in hand with the times and with the themes of the moment. Also, they will have to face the paradoxical situation that trust is increasingly important to establish strong relationships with the consumer, but that, at the same time, the consumer trusts brands much less.

It is not the only challenging terrain. Companies need to understand that attention, being watched, is no longer as important as achieving engagement and response to the message; that the means and channels of connection have become more sophisticated, which forces to change the vision of retail or to incorporate new formats, such as audio; or that consumers themselves have changed in what they care about.

If a few years ago, the magic word was FoMO, the fear of missing things, now it is JoMO, the joy of doing it. Consumers want moments of disconnection and not be overwhelmed by brands.

To all this, we must add that experiences change. Consumers want to be part of them and not just a taxpayer of them. And messages and campaigns have to integrate what they do in a transversal way. That is, campaigns can no longer be closed spaces but defined holistically.