What is the future of advertising?

Hopefully an agreement on what advertising actually is.

The future of advertising is going to be heavily mobile and tablet centric. Already an increasing number of consumers are engaging with most of their content http://marketingland.com/beware-as-mobile-grows-desktop-may-decline-50499. Traditional online services and media are pouring money into finding ways to optimize for their mobile traffic and growing user base. The increased usage of smartphones and tablets provides advertisers a more granular lens of their users activity. The ability to target users based on their geolocation, past purchases and browsing history enables advertisers across all sectors to better serve more relevant, user specific content. A Deeper Dive: The Future of Mobile Advertising: Being that their are already strong indicators of this shift to mobile it is important to note that mobile advertising is still quite new. Much of what works on desktop advertising has yet to be properly appropriated to mobile. For instance while currently mobile advertising companies have been able to leverage Facebook and other Ad Networks to incentivize users to download their native applications or go to their mobile web page where they have an option to download or open the app, the concept of driving a user to a “landing page” within an application to perform a specific action is still quite novel.

The future of advertising isn't quite clear. Today the advertising industry is in front of a big change. The future of advertising will be on Internet, this is sure, but here “advertising as usual” models doesn’t work. Today we must think over about some facts: Lack of effective on line advertising strategies No connection between advertisers-publishers-people Small and fragmented budgets Internet as a supermedia (including all the others) No more intermediaries with no added value Users can recognize good companies and products, despite advertising campaigns We need to define new models of advertising. And we need to free our minds from the success of traditional advertising.

Pulling a few common threads together. The future of advertising? contextual, personalised, locational. I also think agency people (even the young dudes) will want to make 'art' or at least legacies for their generation (and Groupon promotions ain't that). So I there's a bit of a renaissance model going on. Early renaissance was defined by naive wonder (the internet). High renaissance is defined by scale, energy and high art. I think we're in the middle right now, which is about intellectual idealisation (ie personalisation, localisation, contextualisation). And I think there's an aspiration in the industry to start to do the really big, meaningful stuff. Hey - there's a presentation in that!

Context aware advertising. I think that this is one of the things that will define the future of advertising. Since the majority of people now travel with a cell phone (or connected device) and the cost of RFID is getting cheaper and cheaper I think we will see a push to implement this sort of targeted, 'in the moment' advertising.

So much masquerading as the future of advertising is anything but. 99% of social media case studies are essentially promotion based. Facebook is continually refining yet persists with crappy little ads. Twitter has been on the verge of being the next big thing for as long as I can remember. Most location based stuff revolves around percentage off offers and digital coupons. So much new technology. So much opportunity. Yet very little evidence of what the future holds. I shall be watching the answers to this question very closely.

What is the future of advertising? Few topics can be as interesting and promising as this one!  In a very broad sense, Advertising would include all types, formats, delivery medium and channels (Ex: print/online, word-of-mouth/traditional, TV/mobile, etc). However, assuming that your assignment focuses a lot on the future of "Online/Internet Advertising", I'll mention what the future looks like. Here are some trends that should help you get started, collect data and prepare your deck. Some of these are already being implemented but the impact is bound to increase in future as advertisers get equipped with better technologies. 1. Multiple devices - Online advertising is no longer about ads displayed over websites, mostly for large screen. More and more people are now consuming content over smartphones, smart wearable devices (Ex: Apple Watch, Google Glasses), Smart (Internet) TV, Gaming consoles, etc. All of these have potential to target audience for ads. In future, we'll see ads being specially designed and delivered for all of these device types and screen sizes. 2. Multiple formats - Banners, Rich text, Video, Audio, Native; online ads are available in all formats. This is definitely not an exhaustive list. In future, we'll see more such formats that allow greater audience interaction. 3. Audience Targeting - We use multiple devices, have profiles on various social media portals and perform search on multiple forums. All of this in a way defines who we are, what we are interested in and what kind of ads would have the biggest impact on our purchase decisions. In future, technology will help advertisers identify very specific audience needs and serve ads based on these needs. 4. IoT - Internet of Things is a massive wave that promises to get our ecosystem of devices interconnected and greatly determine that way we interact with them. Any of these devices that are capable of communicating via images, video or audio are potential channels for very targeted ad campaigns.

The future is going to focus on mobile technologies like phones, tablets, and any future devices that are portable and can connect to the internet (or whatever the future equivilant is). Unfortunately, it seems as though print and television are dying out as mediums due to both cost and inconvenience.

It's fascinating to read some of the answers here from a few years ago. The world's going forward really fast. I think advertisers will use every opportunity and every platform, though in a creative way, matching possible needs instead of just delivering a punch at every turn (like those ads in Spike Jonze's Her - that just won't happen - it's very easy to hate and reject a brand that pushes things in your face). Just today I read (via AppleInsider) that most shopping searches for the holiday season are now being done on mobile, and it didn't sound that surprising, even though it's the first time this is happening. Mobile will likely continue to be a major market for advertisers. So will wearables, especially smartwatches, though that will take some adapting to (a few things I wrote http://espeo.eu/blog/5-things-about-adtech-for-smartwatches/ But I also think 'smart' advertising may become more regulated in the years to come. Sure, some companies will find ways around the restrictions (like with push notifications - App Store Review Guidelines 5.6: “Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind”, do they use them anyway? Yes.). There are already concerns about the privacy of our data, especially all that wearables data we're collecting all day - it's intimate stuff. Also, any wearable device is the closest you can get to a person, and the closer you get, the more subtle you'll have to be.