A three-member Media House delegation participated in the NextM advertising technology conference held at the end of April. The foundations and trends of marketing are the same – the most important component of advertising is visuals, the triumph of video continues, and consumers want increasingly personalized ads. Almost all of these are covered by the TikTok platform, whose algorithm is the most successful today and which Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are trying to copy. However, here are, in our opinion, the three most exciting development trends in the world of advertising technology.
Programmatic DOOH
Only 6% of digital outdoor media, or DOOH, is currently programmatic, which is predicted to grow to 20% in three years. This means that you can buy advertising on outdoor advertising surfaces just like with Meta or Google – upload designs, they go through review – designs are on the streets in minutes or hours. No intermediaries or printing houses.
The solution significantly reduces OOH costs and makes management many times easier. Budgeting is also not based on one bus shelter or billboard, but on impressions. Phone positioning makes OOH measurable in terms of brand awareness, purchase intent, and ad recognition. Targeting based on weather, interests, events, etc. is arguably the most useful feature of programmatic DOOH for personalization. Such a solution is offered, for example, by Hivestack.
AI, AI, AI
Both technical and creative AI tools are popping up like mushrooms after rain. AI solutions are mainly divided into three groups:
- Generative – is a branch of artificial intelligence that can create new data, images, texts, or other content. For example, ChatGPT, Gemini, Midjourney, RunwayML, and WonderStudio.
- Predictive – predicts future events or behavior based on past data and patterns. Examples include predictive analytics tools, marketing automation, and predictive models in the financial sector.
- Suggestive – provides recommendations or instructions, taking into account the user's preferences or context. Examples include personalized recommendations on an e-commerce site, software-assisted features, and virtual assistants.
Which AI tool to use? The selection is wide on the market, so you have to experiment and find the one that suits your needs. Also, programs are evolving very quickly, so what is the best choice today may not be tomorrow, and vice versa. We need to be very flexible.
Currently, there are more providers than users on the market, so development companies have to work especially hard to compete with the big players (Google, Amazon, OpenAI). The advantage of the aforementioned is the huge volumes of first-party data, which allows them to optimize their tools. Today, the situation is that large companies grow even larger, and smaller ones draw inspiration from them.
It is positive that AI has made large companies cooperate. For example, Adobe created the C2PA standard to be transparent about the use of AI in visuals thanks to the entries added to the image metadata. For example, Google, Intel, and Microsoft have also joined this initiative.
Personalized advertising with opt-out cookies
If you provide people with understandable information about cookies and tracking, 96% of them will refuse on the iPhone. This leads to irrelevant ads that do not fit with the personalization trend and therefore new approaches are needed. We must also keep in mind Google's removal of third-party cookies, which was originally supposed to come into effect in March of this year, but has now been postponed to 2025. Sooner or later, it will happen anyway and it makes sense to prepare for it.
Ogury has created a solution where the portals have found the right target group for each surface using surveys. So you are targeting the right surface, not a specific person. A la Delfi's tower banner in the first position of the homepage appeals most to food enthusiasts.
In light of all this, a strong brand is increasingly important. It must be remembered that a serious channel (e.g. a news portal vs. a casino portal) increases the credibility of the brand. Although AI is taking over around us, we recommend using it with caution, because if it is too recognizable, the person will feel disappointed and the brand value will decrease.
If you are interested in new and exciting advertising technologies, please contact digital@mediahouse.ee.
