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New Insight About the (Very Near) Future of Advertising

facing-the-future.jpgThe advertising world is changing -- no new insight there. Unless you live under a rock, you're aware the interactive digital age has dramatically changed the way consumers access content and receive advertising messages. However, you may not be aware just how rapidly the advertising landscape is shifting. IBM's new research suggests the ad world will change more in the next five years than it did in the past 50.

The study revealed:

  • Internet time is rivaling TV-viewing time for the first time ever.
  • Consumers are becoming savvy at avoiding ads, necessitating a shift to "permission-based" advertising.
  • More than half of ad professionals surveyed by IBM believe open advertising exchanges, like Google, Yahoo, and AOL, will take 30 percent of the ad dollars now going to traditional media companies.
  • Two-thirds of advertising experts surveyed by IBM expect 20 percent of advertising revenue to move from measurements based on impressions to measurements based on actions.
The report suggests advertisers will need to innovate in three key areas to stay in the game:
  1. Consumers: making micro-segmentation and personalization paramount in marketing.
  2. Business models: how and where advertising inventory is sold, the structure and forms of partnerships, revenue models and advertising formats.
  3. Business design and infrastructure: All players need to redesign organizational and operating capabilities across the advertising lifecycle to support consumer and business model innovation: consumer analytics, channel planning, buying/selling, creation, delivery and impact reporting.
Advertisers need to become even more creative to get consumers' attention. As YouTube learned recently, consumers have grown accustomed to controlling what they view and aren't thrilled to see ads where they weren't before. Now Facebook's taking a stab at permission-based advertising, recruiting its users to market their brand preferences to friends -- and once again, users aren't happy. Clearly, companies will need to learn through trial and error what methods work best.

(Facing the Future image courtesy of cogdogblog, cc 2.0)

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