Media trends 2014

Power of video

Dom O’Neill, managing director, Digit

If 2013 was the year for Instagram, 2014 will be the year for short video. Apps such as Vine and other short video applications that are bound to launch next year will form a key element of brands’ digital strategies and consumer interaction.

However, there will be more of an emphasis on quality over quantity. It’s important to keep interaction with audiences focused, valuable and engaging. It is only once this is achieved that the consumer will, for example, grant a brand permission to feature on their social pages, be it through shares, likes or retweets – a goal for many brands online.

Along with video, sound-focused apps like Shazam and Chirp.io will also become more influential. The latter for example, allows you to share your photos, webpages, contacts and more with friends using sound by singing information from one phone to another.

OOH advertising

Romain Greze, managing director, Limited Space

It’s been a bumper year for out-of-home (OOH) advertising. The industry has embraced innovation and technology like never before, collectively investing to upgrade digital and interactive capabilities around the world to take advantage of the combination of online, social and mobile media and help brands boost their interaction with consumers. This trend is set to continue in 2014.

Apart from interaction and digital displays there are strategies being applied online that will soon be helping OOH advertising to innovate. For example, social media platforms have already begun letting customers check into displays and receive corresponding benefits, allowing for deals to be given out at different locations and relating back to targeting and reliable measurement.

We are now seeing these engagement channels being developed to a stage where an audience has the ability to directly affect the output of a campaign, with their interactions becoming a foundation of the display.

Combining elements of digital interaction such as social media contests and check-ins with displays in places like shopping centres can provide advertisers with the opportunity to directly boost spend and increase brand perception.

This level of cross-platform marketing allows for companies to experience a level of interaction with customers and deliver potential for trackable conversion that has previously been unattainable.

Paid search

David Towers, director of search and digital projects, EMEA, MEC

2013 was certainly a significant year, with numerous changes demonstrating how Google is putting mobile at the heart of its future. Our top five paid trends for this year include:

– Enhanced Campaigns
– Time & Location Based Bid Management
– Dynamic Remarketing
– Ready Image Ads & Ready Ad Gallery
– Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

The most significant change of the year was Google launching Enhanced campaigns and with that more advertisers entered the pool to buy mobile ads. Alongside this, we saw the growth in importance of ad formats within auctions, with Google including ad formats into the Ad Rank formula in September. Google has continued to push these formats in 2013 and we’re seeing product listing ads really dominate e-commerce related queries now that Google Shopping is purely paid for results.

There has been an array of exciting new ad formats developed, including the surprise test of the banner ad within the US. All these developments deliver significantly higher CTRs than standard ads but at higher CPCs. We have seen also seen Bing experimenting with dramatic formats including Hero Ads. On the whole, these are good news for advertisers. Both are a far cry from traditional paid search listings and point to an inevitable future for the medium.

This is a trend which will continue into 2014; we’ll have access to more impactful and relevant ads, and while they will get more clicks, they will also cost advertisers more.

Organic search

In Organic Search during 2013, Google got much tougher, clamping down on spam within the index with the introduction of new iterations of Panda and Penguin. These updates, coupled with the effect of the SEO community embracing the Link Disavow tool which was launched in late 2012, has seen a marked change in Google’s tolerance towards paid links.

Google sent shockwaves through the SEO community when it announced at the end of September that it was rolling-out encrypted search to all users which would prevent websites knowing what keywords brought users to the website. This disarming of SEOs of their data was seen as a direct assault by Google by many within the industry.

However, this news was overshadowed by a later announcement that Google had launched Hummingbird, which represented the first completely new algorithm in over a decade.

Hummingbird is the real story of 2013 for the Search community as it encompasses a lot of what’s been changing within the industry. Hummingbird enables users to now search conversationally, something that is growing significantly with mobile voice search.

Users can now ask Google a succession of conversational type questions such as: “Who is the Prime Minster?”, “When was he born?”, “Who is he married to?” with Google providing answers to a user’s query rather than simply a list of results. This is how Search has been changing and will continue to change.

We are going to see more and more of the Google Knowledge graph (Google providing answers), and these answers will be delivered cross device: desktop, mobile, tablet and voice (via Glass).

Behavioural economics

Richard Shotton, head of insight, ZenithOptimedia

Behavioural economics has been a hotly discussed topic for a while now, but 2014 will see it move from the realm of theoretical debate to widespread practical application. Behavioural economics offers a more accurate theory of behaviour change than we’ve previously worked with. It suggests that consumers are too bombarded with decisions to rationally weigh them all up.

Instead they rely on instinctive short-cuts to guide their decisions. Since these short-cuts are prey to predictable biases if marketeers account for them in their messaging and positioning then they can significantly boost performance.

In the year ahead, we will see the industry fully embracing behavioural economics by moving away from a reliance on claimed data when ascertaining what motivates consumers. We’ll also see more clients using their websites, their comms, and their promotions as testbeds for behavioural theories. For example, we’re already seeing many clients harness social proof – the idea that our decisions are as much guided by the behaviour of others as the innate characteristics of a product.

This is manifesting itself in reminders about the scale of popularity of the brand in above the line messaging, harnessing customer reviews in search and brands highlighting their popularity on social media. We expect the pace of adoption of behavioural ideas to increase rapidly in 2014.

2014 will be the year of PPC branding

Greg Shickle, head of performance media, MEC

This year has prompted significant changes within Search, particularly for the SEO community, and we’re excited about what 2014 has in store for us.

Rather than the traditional use of Paid Search Listing Ads as a form of direct marketing, we envisage the rise and domination of Paid Search Ads for branding purposes in 2014, moving towards an offering of richer, more engaging brand experience on the SERPs.

With marketers beginning to realise the full potential of the PPC brand offering, there is an increasing need for paid search to be as reflective to the core values as in traditional ATL media. Looking at the experiments around banner ads in search earlier this year, it has demonstrated Google’s aspirations to sway brands and advertisers towards embracing paid search listings as a pure branding tool.

Traditional marketers with a strong conversion focus may struggle to move away from their e-commerce stance, not immediately realising the potential to offer consumers a highly impactful first experience. This presents the opportunity to redefine established perceptions and first impressions, particularly useful for rebranding.

The question now is will search advertisers be fast enough to adopt a new way of measuring these branding metrics, or will they remain sceptical at a loss for the client? 2014 will certainly be an interesting year for search.

Content marketing

Shafqat Islam, CEO, NewsCred

In 2014 in the growing content marketing industry, we’ll see many more UK and European companies tapping into creative technologies and solutions. Brands and agencies will be looking to hire new content-related roles – don’t be surprised to see titles such as Content Marketing Manager or Director of Content popping up in your LinkedIn.

We’ll also see more agencies partner with marketing software vendors to provide technology-based solutions to their customers. We’ll see the top agencies use real software to power content sourcing and creation, distribution and measurement, similar to our Content Marketing Cloud.

LinkedIn will be both a more popular news source but also a beneficial distribution channel that can drive real, quality leads for businesses. As I’ve said before, the platform is giving business publications a real run for their money, and in 2014 it will also capture the majority of distribution budgets for marketers wanting to reach a business audience – especially through LinkedIn’s sponsored posts product.

With 142 million unique visitors a month, LinkedIn is already the world’s largest news site. There’ll be no stopping them in 2014 thanks to the size of their audience and the targeting capabilities they offer.