4th March 2014

5 Advertising And Marketing Trends To Watch

2014 is here and with it comes big opportunities (and big challenges) for those of us in the advertising and marketing world. To help you navigate the year and make the most of the opportunities that come your way we’ve put together 5 advertising and marketing trends that look to shape the future.

A picture is worth a thousand words

If you’ve ever doubted the power of visuals just consider that Pinterest is the fastest-growing platform for online content sharing, outpacing even LinkedIn and Facebook. Pinterest is of course completely visual based. The huge growth in other visual platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and Vine are further testament to the power of visual communication. This year and the future will see a huge growth in visual communications, with brands focusing more on visuals to tell their story. The trend is clear; it’s time to move away from text-heavy ads to a more visual led communications. Not only will you get your message across faster, a more visual based communication allows for easier sharing and a far greater impact in social media. So don’t just say it, show it.

Short is sweet

With more and more people starting to consume content on their mobile devices, the need to scale down content to smaller screens has grown and as mobile usage grows so will the need for shorter forms of communication like short form video, Info-graphics and short easy to digest content. The huge growth of short-form video and text platforms such as Vine and twitter clearly point to this being a trend of the future. To capitalize on this brands will need to move away from long-form videos, content heavy websites and complex branded apps. Instead brands will need to concentrate on short, punchy easily digestible forms of communication that consumers can grasp quickly and share easily. Remember, the quicker they get your message, the more they’ll engage with you and the faster you can close a sale.

Location. Location. Location.

Location based marketing has taken its first steps to joining mainstream marketing and is set to be a big driver of marketing, especially for small and medium sized businesses. From the local pizza shop targeting a customer in the vicinity to supermarkets informing customers in which aisle to find a product, location based messaging will only grow faster. Social media, Bluetooth, Near Field Communication (NFC) and Apple’s iBeacon are technologies that are making it easier to not only know where a customer is, but know who they are and what they like, so we can target them more effectively.

Video advertising

According to Nielsen YouTube now reaches more US adults aged 18-34 than any cable network. YouTube receives more than 1 billion unique visitors every month, and over 6 billion hours of video are consumed on it. Clearly video and with it video advertising, is here to stay and the ability to share video easily on social networks is key for the success of online video advertising. That means marketers will need to focus on creating great content that people want to share, rather than overt marketing messages. With new video advertising formats emerging to engage users for longer, video advertising is set to become an even more powerful medium of advertising.

The beginning of the end for the Desktop?

While the desktop is far from going extinct, 2013 saw the desktop lose its place as the head of the e-commerce heap to the combo of smartphones and tablets. With mobile device usage growing in double figures, it’s time to look beyond the desktop. In fact optimizing content for mobile devices is now a mandatory for any marketing effort rather than just an add-on. That means it’s time for marketers to shift their attention to making everything mobile-friendly. In fact the success of most campaigns in the future will depend on how well you target mobile users. So while it may not be the end of the desktop yet, it’s clearly the start of the mobile platform. Marketers, take note.

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