Digital, a year in review
What a year 2022 has been for the digital advertising industry. Growth, increased spend, and many changes across many platforms have led to numerous opportunities for advertisers and brands.
Digital spend and growth
In the first half of 2022, Search was by far the largest digital advertising format in the United Kingdom, accounting for 6.66 billion British pounds, which amounted to more than a half of the total spending of 12.52 billion. Display formats - both video and non-video - accounted for roughly 4.8 billion, with video slightly stronger. Online advertising has seen consistent growth and in 2022 was forecast for 74.3% of all spend in comparison to 73.5% in 2021.
What changed this year?
Here are some highlights of changes taking place in the digital landscape.
Klarna Spotlight.
Klarna is leading the way in innovative online shopping at the moment with Klarna Spotlight; which compares thousands of websites to find the right price for your product. It could even rival Google’s own shoppability feature. The new search function displays new and pre-loved products and can filter through options on what is important to you as a consumer- such as size, colour, features, customer ratings, store availability, and shipping options.
Not only that, but the feature shows a graph displaying the price history, to determine if right now is a good time to buy it, and at the checkout, Klarna will look for available coupons to help you save money.
the way we advertise on Instagram changed:
Music optimisation for Reels:
Instagram are rolling our free, high quality songs from Meta’s Sound Collection library that can be added to Carousel Ads on Reels. Businesses can manually select a song from the library or allow the app to automatically select the best music based on the ad’s content.
Explore home & profile feed:
Explore home, the grid people see when they first arrive onto the explore tab, will now feature ads to reach people in the EARLIEST stages of discovering content.
AI multi-advertiser ads:
When a person expresses commercial intent by engaging with an ad, the platform is now going to deliver more ads from other business that may be of interest, powered by machine learning.
Augmented reality ads:
Lastly, Instagram recently launched an open beta of AR ads, available both in feed & stories, offering an immersive augmented reality ad experience. Through the AR experience, powered by Spark AR, brands can encourage people to interact with effect through their surroundings.
TikTok Audio
In order to navigate through the legalities, retailers have begun partnering with artists and launching challenges on TikTok to reach more consumers in an on-trend manner.
For example, Pepsi announced a partnership with singer and actress Chlöe Bailey recently, to release a new version of the song “Footloose,” encouraging TikTok users to join a dance challenge using the sound. Pizza Hut also collaborated with Jon Moss, a TikToker with nearly 7 million followers, to create a Detroit-inspired anthem to celebrate the return of Detroit-Style Pizza.
For brands, a viral sound offers visibility and a higher likelihood for them to reach more users’ “For You” pages.
DV360 on DOOH
Google are making digital out-of-home ads available to all Display & Video 360 users so that they can reach audiences with the efficiency of programmatic technology. This includes screens in public places such as bus stop, stadiums, airports , shopping centres, elevators, taxis and more.
Consumers are constantly moving between touchpoints and formats, and brands need the right tools to keep up. Therefore, digital out-of-home is an increasingly popular option that brings the best of digital technology to a traditional advertising medium.
With digital out-of-home ads in Display & Video 360, brands can combine the emotional power and captivating formats of traditional out-of-home advertising, but mixed with the efficiency of other digital channels. Using DV360 with digital out of home marketers can activate, pause, and optimise their campaigns in near real time.
Google Marketing Live 2022 presented us with many changes to take into consideration when planning campaigns.
Performance Max upgrades. Google is helping more advertisers try their most automated campaign type, Performance Max. Performance Max is a new goal-based campaign type , and it’s a new way to buy Google ads across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps from a single campaign. In all, Performance Max campaigns will complement your keyword-based Search campaigns to help you grow your campaign performance across Google’s full range of advertising channels and inventory. We talked more about it earlier this year, here.
YouTube Shorts ads. Those advertisers currently running video action campaigns and app campaigns will now have ads that automatically scale to fit Google’s TikTok competitor, YouTube shorts. Shorts are one minute in length and this will be rolling out now to advertisers globally. One consideration is the length of the ads- make sure ads are fitted to that one minute time frame.
Product feeds for a shoppable YouTube experience. Following on from the above, later this year, advertisers will have the ability to connect product feeds to campaigns; creating shoppable video ads on YouTube Shorts. Google said this is a “key step on our road to developing a long-term Shorts monetization solution for our creators.”
Swipable shopping ads in search. A big, bold new ad display will pair organic shopping results with shopping ads for a highly visual shopping experience. This feature is for apparel brands only and will be available through Search and Performance Max campaigns.
3D models of products in search results. According to Google, “Augmented reality (AR) on cameras gets us close, and shoppers are ready for it. More than 90% of Americans currently use, or would consider using, AR for shopping.” That in mind, merchants will soon have the ability to have 3D models of their products appear directly within the search engine results pages.
Insights page updates. A new attribution section will show advertisers a better view of what drove conversions within accounts, which will also recommend a better attribution model if Google detects it can provide a better view on conversions. Another new insight is the support of first-party data; the insights page will help advertisers view which customer lists are driving performance for campaigns – with privacy at the forefront.
Google Audiences for Connected TVs. Advertisers will soon be able to use connected TV campaigns to target viewers across YouTube and “most” other connected TV apps. This exciting new development will bring affinity, in-market, and demographic audience segments to connected TV. The in-marketing and demographic audiences will be in beta for global advertisers at the end of Q2.
Checkout on Merchant. Google will be streamlining checkouts for customers that “have decided what they want.” With this implementation, customers won’t need to go through so many screens/pages in order to checkout. According to Google, Merchants will “own the customer” as the transaction happens directly in their flow. This change is a currently a closed pilot and Google is working to expand and move towards general availability in the coming months.
YouTube video creation in 60 seconds No video ads? No problem. Google announced that advertisers can create a video ad and publish to YouTube in as little as 60 seconds. This can be done with as few as 5 images, logos and text assets with the outcome being “an effective ad”.
That’s a wrap! It’s been a busy year in the digital landscape, so tune in later this week to see CTM’s predictions for 2023!