Only one month of 2022 has passed, but it already looks very promising. In fact, the end of the last year prepared several innovative surprises for the advertisers. What innovations will bring 2022 into the marketing and advertisement industry? Let’s glimpse the interplay of the hidden and see what to expect from the near future.
2022, the year of the Tiger, will make the marketing industry Roar again. The global economic growth and the stabilizing impact of the pandemic will provide a favorable environment for marketing. At the same time, the privacy aspects, such as stricter GDPR laws and other privacy regulations, can fundamentally change the digital marketing approach of many organizations. Nevertheless, marketing spending grows every year, making 2022 a pretty advantageous time for the mar-tech and ad-tech industries.
Let’s take a closer look at the marketing trends in 2022. It is important to mention that some of the marketing trends will remain from 2021 and 2020 and continue to grow and develop. Meanwhile, there are also entirely new trends, which have the full potential to become the next gamechanger in the upcoming years. Metaverse is one of them.
In 2021 the concept of interaction in virtual reality became a popular topic of discussion in many sectors, including in marketing. Others have already started launching their services related to the metaverse and investing millions in this market. Will the metaverse create a revolution in the digital world, or is it just another overhyped trend – this year will show.
The metaverse concept existed long before Mark Zukerberg announced that Meta (former Facebook) would develop its own metaverse. Metaverse will broaden the opportunities for advertisement. It can create a new stage that will go beyond traditional advertising. Metaverse allows creating absolutely new experiences, which will be more engaging and interacting. At the same time, the ad in the metaverse will be less invasive than we usually experience with digital advertising.
The Metaverse market size is forecasted to reach about $800 billion by 2024 (comparison to 2020 with $46 billion).
Today, the average person spends about 7-8 hours looking at their mobile screen. Indeed, Mobile phones have become an undivided part of our life. And this fact broads the horizons of traditional advertisement.
It’s no secret that buyers more and more are using their mobile devices for online shopping. M-commerce acquired 72.9% of the total-commerce share in 2021. Moreover, this number will grow in 2022. In fact, M-commerce is more convenient for the users, at least that’s what statistics say. 85% of buyers prefer mobile apps to mobile websites.
Mobile-friendly design for shopping is becoming a priority with the growth of M-commerce. Already now, shopping apps developers create their UX first for the mobile version and only later adapt it to the desktop version.
Influencer marketing is continuing to develop and surprise marketers with a high ROI. One of the reasons for the high popularity of this marketing method is the study, which has shown that people trust influencers more than the information provided by brands. Moreover, another survey showed that half of Gen Z and millennials take the opinion of the influencers in social media before making a purchase.
The services and platforms which will identify influencers and measure their performance are gaining popularity. Even though influencer marketing cannot be fully automated yet, the platforms which provide the AI for facilitating influencer marketing can save time and, more important, money. Now the users would have to pay only for the conversions and sales.
The amount of viewing on CTV has increased from pre-pandemic time. That can be explained that more people started to spend their time at home. Another explanation of the CTV rise is the accessibility to the new emerging entertainment and streaming services. For instance, when Disney+ was launched, it gained 54 million subscribers worldwide in less than 6 months. For comparison, Netflix needed more time to achieve the same numbers in the last years. The speed of streaming services conversion rate is expected to grow. The number of paid TV subscriptions in the US dropped by 2.7 million as people switched to streaming in the last few years.
Speaking about CTV advertising, it provides more opportunities than traditional TV advertising. Thus, CTV ad is more effective: viewers are 42% more likely to buy products advertised via CTV.
We already wrote about product placement and its benefits. The biggest advantage of the product placement strategy is that this kind of ad can’t be skipped or muted. It is inseparable from the content and can stay in the show forever. Now product placement is becoming more automated and data-driven by moving into the programmatic world.
How will “In-Show” programmatic advertising work? The last year the companies TripleLift and Amagi declared about their partnership agreement to scale "In-Show" programmatic advertising. The companies with programmatic product placement services would provide SaaS platform access to the content owners, TV networks, and news/sport content providers. The SaaS platform will be integrated into the CTV ecosystem. Cloud-based services connect to dozens of consumer media platforms. The product integration will be available across hundreds of streaming TV channels in near real-time very soon, including Discovery Networks, Fox Networks, Fremantle, NBCUniversal, USA Today, Vice Media, Warner Media, and others.
Product placements on the video seem to be very promising. In 2021 it reached $23 billion.
Video content took off last year and brought fruitful results. 93% of consumers shared that video is helpful when they’re buying a product. This tendency will be kept for the next several years.
Instagram claimed that they are no longer a “photo-social media” and switched their focus to video content. In 2021 the reels gained their popularity. However, Instagram reels are different from TikTok by their identity and content. The main factor of such difference remains in the demographics: TikTok’s audience is younger than Reels’.
The preference for visual content will grow in 2022. According to HubSpot, 70% of businesses invested last year in content marketing, which, as a rule, includes visual efforts. By the way, more than 75% of video views are mobile 😉.
But what about audio? It may seem that audio advertisement has lost relevance with consumers fading interest in radio. However, the audio ad got a second life. Spotify launched its first-ever B2B audio campaign for Spotify Advertising (their new ad platform), and it proved to be more immersive and engaging than traditional radio and TV.
Moreover, audio advertisement is relevant when promoting audio services, for example, music and audio services.
The 2022 year looks very promising for the radio ad. People started to listen to podcasts more. According to the forecast, the number of US podcast listeners will increase 16.0% to 106.7 million in 2022. Moreover, this year, 16.5% of digital radio advertisements will be transacted programmatically. At the same time, the US podcast ad spending grew by 43,8% (from -17 to 26.8 billion dollars).
The marketers will have to accept the fact that 3rd party cookies won’t be an option since the GDPR will come into force in 2023. Thus, the marketing agencies would have to find a relevant alternative that will be more ethical and at the same time effective.
The good news is that that solution already exists. As a rule, those are the framework produced by different tech companies. Another solution is so-called Zero-party (0P) data. Zero-party data are collected from people who voluntarily and proactively provide information about themselves to brands.
Zero-party data has a great advantage in that the information is transferred directly from the source (customer). No doubt, this method requires building a trust relationship with customers and thus requires more effort. Nevertheless, it can be a good alternative to the 3rd party data.
2022 looks very exciting full of new innovations and the comeback of technologies from the past. And this is only the beginning. Let’s be curious about tomorrow and look forward to what other innovations that will improve marketing will bring us in 2022.
