OPINION: Digital Advertising Is Here to Stay – But Its About to Go Through Yet Another Evolution
The year 2022 emerged as one of renewal – across health, home and business. At the same time, the effects of the pandemic can still be felt, particularly in the marketing industry where marketers are looking for cost-effective techniques as budgets have been drastically reduced. According to Gartner’s State of Marketing Budget and Strategy 2022, marketing budgets have dropped to an all-time low of 6.4% of company revenue in 2021 when compared to 11% in 2020.
This, along with the other rapid shifts taking place across advertising and marketing practices in South Africa, has meant the sector is undergoing an evolution even as marketers scramble to keep up with changing audience behaviour. In particular, privacy, mis- and disinformation, and customer-centricity are taking centre stage as an acceleration in the uptake of digital channels occurs. Pre-COVID-19, many South African businesses and agencies were heavily reliant on traditional advertising and marketing; few were using digital channels and those that were had only reached the tip of the returns that digital could offer.
Content (experiences) are king
This sales-driven, static approach has given way to more engaging, customer-centric experiences that have largely been steered by emerging platforms such as TikTok, which overtook Google as the most popular site in 2021 as well as became the most downloaded app of the year, overtaking predecessor Facebook.
Audiences themselves changed amid the lockdowns, isolation and ongoing bans on store transactions, travel and movement. Even those who had previously been resistant to technological innovation moved online amid changing socio-economic and lifestyle conditions. And while at home, they demanded interactive experiences that connected them to the world they had known and could no longer be a part of. TikTok became a perfect outlet for this with brands and agencies jumping onto the platform to engage with their audiences in a more authentic way and, as a result, providing more visibility of their business processes and cultures to these audiences.
With the increase in digital content consumption, audiences have become savvier and are more selective about the content they consume. One need only look to the drop in social-media influencer trust in recent months as well as the most recent failed VidCon meet-and-greet of a TikToker with half a million followers on the platform who received no fans on the day. Whereas previously, brands could send products to influencers and see a return on investment in social media follows and even sales almost immediately, the widespread adoption of these same channels has resulted in anyone being able to grow a following, thereby not only saturating the influencer market but also rendering loyalty to specific individuals moot. With more options, audiences can now easily swipe over the content they deem boring and are not easily influenced to spend money to attend a fan meet or purchase an influencer’s merchandise (‘merch’).
Additionally, audiences and customers are no longer passively consuming the ideas and information being relayed. Instead, they want to actively engage with the content and the brand speaking to them, as well as have the need to feel that they are being heard by these same brands. For a brand’s digital marketing to see success, a renewed focus must be placed on a two-way engagement strategy where the brand has discourse with its audiences, no matter how uncomfortable it may seem at the outset.
Privacy is power
While experiences will continue to inform the advertising and marketing sector, as cryptocurrencies, NFTs, the metaverse and the protection of personal information have been thrust into the limelight, there is more change afoot. Take the humble banner ad, for example, which started as a static image with text and then moved into gifs and even video, and is now becoming more immersive and personalised to consumers’ interests. Marketers now have the opportunity to use NFTs to increase brand awareness. A great example is that of Marriott Hotels, which leverages NFTs through its Marriott Bonvoy rewards programme. Marriott’s NFTs were unveiled at Art Basel through a raffle and winners received 200,000 Bonvoy points along with their NFT – smart marketing that increased brand awareness and built excitement around the Bonvoy programme!
Email marketing continues to be a popular medium, too – even before Google removed the built-in ads that appeared as emails in inboxes – despite numerous tech companies devoted to ‘Unsubscribe from emails. Instantly’ (Unroll.me), ‘Easily unsubscribe from unwanted emails’ (Leave Me Alone) and ‘Clean your Inbox of emails you don’t need. Then keep it clean’ (Clean Email), amongst others. However, marketers now have privacy bills to contend with as audiences display renewed efforts to protect their personal information and privacy and customise their digital interactions further. When the European Union introduced its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, it ushered in a significant change to the ways in which the media and businesses could retrieve, collect and disseminate consumer information as well as introduced guidelines for how this information could be utilised and the rights of the consumer. South Africa followed suit in 2021 with the implementation of the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), first introduced in 2013 and that has many similarities to the EU’s GDPR. Consumers rejoiced while companies pulled out all the stops to align their information and data policies.
Laws such as the GDPR and POPIA have provided audiences with some semblance of the origins of social media, which aimed to connect audiences digitally with friends and family. Whereas audiences were quick to sign up for offers and consume media back before the world entered lockdown, work-from-home and digital connectivity have led to a ‘digital fatigue’. And while an entire shift from digital to real-world experiences is unlikely to take place – after all, much of the world’s systems heavily rely on digital today – there is a growing trend to move from the static to the engaged, and to an expectation of boundaries, especially when it comes to the privacy of audiences. These changes must be noted by digital advertising and marketing teams, who will need to emphasise and highlight the more human side of their offerings, with less of a focus on the tactical and more on emotion, connection and flexibility that places customers and audiences front and centre and provides them with a transparent, safe and personalised advertising experience.
There has certainly been a great shift in the ways audiences consume digital content and as social and digital media undergo further innovation, it seems likely that an emphasis on experiential, interactive, long-form content may become in vogue again. Digital advertising is certainly transforming again and marketers and advertisers must take heed to recognise and interpret these changes as well as the impacts that incorporating them into their marketing plans will have on audiences.
Razia Pillay is the newly appointed chief executive at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) South Africa, which manages The Bookmark Awards. The IAB SA aims to understand and unpack changing trends in the digital marketing landscape to assist and equip its members and the broader digital advertising community in South Africa to embrace these changes and implement them into their own digital advertising and marketing efforts.