Blog #9: Advertising Trends For The not-so-future, Future

            The tides are changing in the marketing arena, especially from the aspect of Internet advertising. Cold calling, spamming, and trade shows are all old school, they are too ineffective and costly for companies to utilize in this new era of marketing. Outbound marketing all together is antiquated and/or going out of style to make room for its predecessor, inbound marketing. Outbound marketing is exactly the types of advertising methods I listed above plus many other styles. Along with inbound marketing there is going to be a host of new ad ideas to emerge with the growing need for privacy, mobility, and direct marketing. Some thoughts that should be buzzing around marketing department heads are diversification, digestibility, ad retargeting, and ultra specific content. These thoughts are what is going to shape the new age of advertising. All of these may be mostly intuitive but it is just that reason that they will work. The technology we have come to know and not be able to live without is reforming the way companies are reaching us as consumers.

            These big, profit hungry companies are going to have to diversify their outreach to the consumer base. With many people operating on more than one social network or similar username-password sites it is becoming more efficient to advertise across a broad array of these website as opposed to putting all your eggs into one basket. Also, to aid in the cost of advertising on different platforms there is a shift to make advertising material easily digestible for the reader. Too much clutter and reading and you will lose your client. This means that advertising should become a little less expensive for the companies.

The future of advertising may also possibly take a turn for a more simplistic, quick, and image based style. This is due to the fact that the world is only becoming faster paced and people don’t have time to dive into an advertisement to discern what product is being marketed. Consumers want to see what the product is at a glance and not have to waste time. We can tie this back into diversifying advertisement because if you only spend a fraction of a second overlooking an ad but see that ad or one similar a couple of times a day you begin to grow some brand recognition which is exactly what was intended. Obviously the ads that you will come across while you browse the web aren’t random. They are specifically targeted to you and tailored to what firms believe you will be most interested in. Specific marketing will overtake most of the content marketing in the near future solely because companies do not want to throw away their money to advertise unless it is going to generate revenue. The last technique we will begin to see is known as retargeting. Retargeting is a feature where companies will track you after visiting their site without any transaction being made and serve you advertisements in the websites you visit from there on out, further specifying the content marketed toward the consumer.

All of these techniques are the guidelines for effective advertising in the future with an emphasis on consumer-specific targeting. We can only assume the Internet at home and mobile browsing will become transparent as well. Don’t plan on being left alone by the big firms out there chasing your buck, but at least there a chance that you will be marketed something you have always wanted.

DeMers, Jayson. "The Top 7 Online Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2014." Forbes. 09 17 2013: 2. Web. 30 Oct. 2013. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2013/09/17/the-top-7-online-marketing-trends-that-will-dominate-2014/>.