OPINION: The Continuing Evolution of Digital Advertising
It’s no secret that the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) greatly upended the ways in which companies did business, with traditional advertising and marketing practices and models being laid to waste as new technologies and innovations emerged. Two years ago, in 2020, the world witnessed an acceleration of 4IR as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe. In particular, lockdowns, isolation and ongoing bans on store transactions, travel and movement forced a shift in consumer behaviour. Audiences – even those who had been resistant to technological innovation previously – moved online amid changing socio-economic and lifestyle conditions. In 2022, yet another shift is about to occur as privacy, mis- and disinformation, and customer-centricity take centre stage.
The impact of emerging technologies and regulations around them
When the pandemic hit in 2020, many South African businesses were still relying on traditional advertising and marketing practices. Few were using digital channels and those that were, had only reached the tip of the returns that digital advertising offered. Fast forward two years and digital advertising is once more undergoing a rapid shift. Where previously sales-driven, static approaches reigned supreme, 2022 embraces change to accommodate the need for more engaging, customer-centric experiences which will be a defining factor of digital advertising.
In order to fully comprehend this evolution, it’s important to understand how digital channels in particular changed the ways in which audiences consumed content. Just a few years ago, static digital advertising banners were trending, with companies spending thousands to ensure their brands were front and centre on major news websites. The role of this type of advertising had to change, with banners evolving from static words and images to gifs and even video and is now becoming more immersive and personalised to consumers’ interests.
Standard email marketing, just as well, became extremely popular, with everyone from large corporates to bloggers collecting email addresses and sending out thousands of mailers to audiences on a daily basis. Email marketing was so effective, that the world’s most popular search and email platform with more than 70% of market share, Google, even enabled built-in ads to appear as emails in inboxes.
Then, in 2018, the European Union introduced its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR was significant in many ways as it introduced a guideline for media and businesses as to the types of consumer information these companies could retrieve, collect and disseminate as well as the ways in which this information could be utilised and the rights of the consumer. Global companies scrambled to align their information policies with the GDPR and consumers in the EU rejoiced at no longer having to view unsightly ads or be spammed with email marketing. In 2021, South Africa’s own Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) was implemented, having already been delayed by a year due to the pandemic. POPIA was first introduced in 2013 and bears many similarities to the EU’s GDPR in the ways in which it protects consumers. Once more, companies had to pull out all the stops to ensure they complied.
Privacy – and personability – are power
According to Statista, approximately 25 million South Africans are on social media (that’s more than one-third of the country’s 60.7 million-strong population) while 38.13 million are active internet users, with 36.13 million accessing the internet on their mobile phones. While many businesses had been plying their wares on social media platforms for years, with the first ad introduced on Facebook in 2005, the content these companies were posting to social media was mostly sales-driven and directed at audiences. And as brands continued to push sales on social media and with web banners, savvy consumers were downloading ad blockers and hiding ad-driven content from their social media feeds in order to enjoy a more personable experience.
This harks back to the origins of social media, which was aimed at connecting audiences digitally with friends and family. To some extent, laws such as the GDPR and POPIA have provided audiences with some semblance of this once more and, this year, there will be renewed efforts by audiences to protect their personal information and privacy and customise their experiences in the digital world even further.
Whereas audiences were quick to sign up for offers and consume media at the start of the pandemic, two years of work-from-home and digital connectivity have led to a ‘digital fatigue’ of sorts. This is not to say that there will be an entire shift from digital to real-world experiences. After all, much of the world’s systems heavily rely on digital today. However, a growing trend will be a move from the static to the engaged – and to an expectation of boundaries, especially when it comes to the privacy of audiences. To this end, digital advertising and marketing teams will need to learn to emphasise and highlight the more human side of their offerings, with less of a focus on the tactical but rather more on emotion, connection and flexibility which now puts consumers front and centre of taking control of their advertising preferences, which allows for a more transparent, safe and personalised advertising experience.
Truthful, unbiased content: an expectation
If endless reams of content - any content, from written to static imagery to video – was the order of the day in 2020, 2022 will see the rise of more digitally savvy audiences who are selective of the content they consume. One need only to look at the drop in social-media influencer trust in recent months for an example of this. Perhaps as a result of digital fatigue but also, to a very large extent, as a result of the mis- and disinformation experienced in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, audiences are now looking for credible sources and content that is not only truthful but unbiased.
Audiences and customers are no longer content with sitting back and passively consuming the ideas and information being relayed. Instead, they want to actively engage with content and the brands speaking to them, and in turn, want to feel as though they are being heard by these same brands. For a brand’s digital advertising to see success in the coming months, a renewed focus must be placed on a two-way engagement strategy and having a discourse with audiences and customers, no matter how uncomfortable it may seem at first.
A new frontier for digital advertising
While the majority of changes in digital advertising will continue to be more on the theoretical side for now, practical innovations have by no means been slowed. In the past few months, audiences and customers have been introduced to technologies such as mobile e-commerce, cryptocurrencies, NFTs and the metaverse, both of which will have huge impacts on the digital advertising space.
The metaverse, in particular, will further bring engagement into the spotlight. Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) has already been flighted by many brands and will become more immersive in the metaverse with approximately 85 million global users predicted to have experienced one or both of these technologies at least once in 2021. In the digital advertising and marketing realm, there is an expectation that the metaverse will not replace real-life marketing but will instead run parallel to real-world marketing efforts, offering experiential and immersive experiences as opposed to simple placement of ads on website or social media platforms. Examples of these include concerts and fashion shows held in the digital realm and revenue streams that originate online. The latter also relates to cryptocurrencies and the ways in which businesses are using innovations such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – a non-interchangeable unit of data stored digitally and associated with digital files that can be sold or traded – as entry points to the metaverse for their audiences.
The last two years have certainly seen a shift in the ways audiences consume digital content and the coming months will likely see more of an evolution as social and digital media undergo innovation that looks to place an emphasis on short videos, the metaverse and NFTs.
Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) models have even evolved, by adapting to and adopting a more omni-channel approach that involves programmatic media and a diverse selection of digital channels to engage with audiences and customers.
At the IAB, it is our aim to understand and unpack these changing trends and assist our members and the broader digital advertising community in South Africa to embrace the changes, and to equip them with the knowledge that includes the challenges and opportunities to plan and implement into their own digital advertising and marketing efforts. Digital advertising may once more be undergoing a transformation but we hope that our concerted efforts in recognising and interpreting the changes taking place will be of use to those in the sector.
Our Councils and Committees steered by digital marketing, media and advertising experts are at all times keeping track of the constantly evolving digital media and marketing landscape to ensure that businesses are always relevant and always thriving. Thanks to the IAB Council and Committees, we are able to help drive digital marketing forward.
Razia Pillay is the newly appointed chief executive at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) South Africa, which manages The Bookmark Awards. Razia founded FOUIR Digital Academy, a digital academy for women that aims to teach women in developing countries the digital skills needed to navigate the 4IR future. Pillay also lectured and facilitated the Digital Marketing Unemployed Learnership Programme at the Red & Yellow School of Business.