Trends 2016: The rise of Ad technology

By Kiran Gopinath

Businesses need to keep their customers’ needs in mind and address them in a timely manner. Consumers are ever demanding and impatient in the information age, where if business A doesn’t meet their expectations they will move on to business B in a blink of an eye. In this environment, what a marketer needs is to foster loyalty and trust by understanding the needs of this consumer and aligning the products or services to the right consumer. To achieve this, technology will play a critical role and understanding this is step one for any marketer in the coming year. 2015 saw a lot of flux and friction in the Indian ad ecosystem, but 2016 holds more promise.

Some of the trends we feel will dominate 2016 and are listed below:

Adoption of Programmatic: Marketers don’t want to chase customers across all mediums; they want to target them based on behavioral patterns. Various analytical tools provided by the Ad tech vendors can help them analyze the available data and target the customers with appropriate ads. Programmatic advertising in India is estimated to be around 10-15% of display advertising (Rs 300 crore), while it constitutes more than 50% of display advertising in the US. This is a powerful technology that marketers need to be embrace in order to stay relevant to their target audience. Online companies, especially e-commerce players, are gradually making the shift towards programmatic buying and are mining user consumption data to customize offers and deals. FMCG, automotive, BFSI companies on the other hand have a long way to go.

Cross Device Tracking: Historically marketers have tracked online customers based on the cookies they received when a customer visits their website. However, this is not sustainable as consumers are increasingly making purchase decisions over hand held devices. Tracking consumers across multiple devices is difficult for marketers. Numbers suggest 213 million Indians accessed the internet via their mobile devices by June 2014, and this makes India uniquely positioned to adopt mobile based shopping way more than desktop. E-commerce companies are trying new methods to track their customers in a cookie less environment and ad tech vendors will have to keep pace with this evolving space and enable marketers to target users across devices using cross device targeting tools and methodologies.

Mobile Marketing: As much as 60% of internet users in India access the internet via their mobile phones now and this makes adoption of mobile marketing methodologies more critical to any marketer than ever before. What this means for a marketer is ensuring they have a responsive website to adapt to any hand held device, having an app version of the website, ad campaigns optimized for a mobile audience and robust  tracking methods to identify conversion numbers from the App vs. browser.

Integrated Customer Experience: Brands need to identify the channels where their target audience is spending significant time, whether its video, mobile, display or yet another channel. In order to remain top of mind and really see a huge lift in conversions in a direct response environment, a key component is having an arsenal of creative across all channels- display, mobile, native, video- for your clients that can be optimized programmatically to truly deliver a consistent experience across channels. Creating a story that resonates across channels and one which is still relevant to the consumer based on their intent and behavioral date will be important.

Content Marketing: As ad tech vendors find innovative advertising methods, marketers will realize the potential of content and power of native advertising. Context is more important than ever with the evolving needs and the shortening attention span on the consumer. Marketers need to tell better stories, so consumers can really engage with a brand and not feel like they are being bombarded with products they do not have a need for. Utilizing data to the fullest will come in handy here and it will also ensure that a business is not losing out due to use of ad blockers (which is also on the rise lately) by consumers.

(The author, Kiran Gopinath, is Founder & CEO, Adadyn