WeSEE pinpoints 2014 digital advertising trends

Mobile behaviour trends will continue to evolve in this way in 2014 and as people’s mobile browsing and buying journeys become even more visual and location-based, there will be more opportunities for advertisers to target content to users’ multi-screen devices in a more ‘episodic’ way.

Video advertising will prove its worth

Mobile isn’t the only place where we see continued growth of online video. It has taken off across all platforms – PC, tablet and mobile – in a way that few would have predicted a few years ago. As the number of countries supporting 4G networks rises, so proportionally does the number of people worldwide using smartphones to consume media content, including online video.

Faster streaming speeds, and a trend for short video clips such as on Vine, mean that mobiles become an access point for streaming video content. YouTube is now the second largest search engine, full of both user-generated and branded content, and video streaming sites like 4OD and ITVPlayer attract huge audiences. Consulting group Accenture reported that 90 per cent of consumers globally regularly consume video content over the Internet.

However, the advertising solutions that support these free video-on-demand services are still in their infancy. The advertising is targeted based on the keywords that have been used to describe the video by its creators. For professionally created content like TV shows and films, this can best be described as a hit-and-miss approach to targeted advertising, and for user-generated content this is almost certainly ineffective.

Technologies that can ‘read’ and classify video content as well as automate and improve the whole process of placing video ads already exist. In 2014, the use of such technologies will become more prevalent amongst brand marketers looking to engage consumers with highly targeted advertising content. As this happens we will see a huge improvement in the relevance, engagement and targeting of video adverts.

This will improve the return on investment that brands get from video advertising, both through desktop, games consoles and mobile channels, thus spurring both investment and business consolidation in this area. In doing so, the market will continue to consolidate, and we foresee acquisitions and strategic deal-making between video networks and major platforms similar to that of the recent AOL and Adap TV acquisition.

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