Biz Extra
Published: February 22, 2022 | Updated: 23rd February 2022
Daniel Smith, Managing Director at Fireworx, our Digital Partner, answers your topical questions.
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Q: What are the future marketing trends that you’re most excited about?
I’m not a futurist. There are others that profess to have this power, and I guess if I really knew that I’d be very well off! There’s so much noise and we have clients asking us about a lot of it most weeks.
We actually run events on this covering the ‘Fad or Future’ of different technology in marketing.
If you’re asking me to make measured bets on the future well we’ve heard a lot about Voice, A.I, Augmented Reality, Programmatic and, of course, The Meta Verse.
However, if business owners or marketing heads are looking to consider their options this is where I’d focus my immediate attention on the future:
A focus on Digital – it will continue to explode, more traditional media markets will shrink in comparison to digital, with areas such as; First Party Data, Digital Content and Programmatic continuing to explode.
To expand on a couple of these a little:
a) First Party Data is the information that companies can collect from their own sources. In other words, every information about customers from both online and offline sources, such as the company’s website, app, CRM, social media or surveys is first party data.
b) Digital content
c) Programmatic ad buying. This typically refers to the use of software to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves human negotiations and manual insertion orders. It’s using machines to buy ads, basically. You could shy away from this unfamiliar space, but then you’ll blink and suddenly 80% of digital ad buys are done programmatically and you will feel even more out of the loop.
Martin Sorrell from S4 capital is heavily investing in some of these technologies and the agencies he is amassing have different focuses covering a lot of these areas. I guess whether it’s 10 or 20 years in the future, marketing is always going to be about the same core things;
Q: A lot has been written and spoken about the notorious ‘Millennials’. Are they really that different to previous generations?
In short yes, to a degree.
We have enough reports and data to understand that the media consumption and buying habits are different for groups such as ‘gen x’ or ‘baby boomers’.
Every consumer group has its own wants, needs and quirks.
Broadly ‘Millennials’ exist, and, yes, they have differing media and purchasing habits to ‘silver surfers’ or any other group.
Millennials’ media consumption was more spread during the lockdown, but they are consuming more video content, video games as well as online TV and music streaming services.
Regardless of segment, people prioritise consumption by sorting products and services into four categories – Essentials, Treats, Postponables and Expendables.
