By: Tim Bosch, AdForum
Businesses worldwide are ramping up their social ad spending. Social media advertising is slated to reach nearly 40 billion dollars by 2017. Social ad spending has reached new heights and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Social ads have efficiently evolved with digital consumer behavior and marketers are realizing the value of highly targeted creative that’s scalable. Here are a few trends to keep an eye on with regard to social advertising.
Vertical Video
We are spending more and more time with devices that are best held vertically, like smartphones and tablets. That time spent is growing quickly, and on tall screens, vertical videos simply look and work better than those shot horizontally.
Embracing vertical video poses technical challenges for brands who would like to repurpose their video content on other platforms. This change also requires a different artistic eye.
Object Based Targeting
Typically users are served ads based on what they search, the content their viewing, or by user demographics the advertiser can infer based on a user’s web-based behavior. Snapchat has proved to be anything but typical. Snapchat has filed paperwork to secure a patent that, in my view, will be one of the most important pieces of ad tech in recent memory: Object Based Targeting. For example, instead of targeting users because they have shown previous interest in coffee, you would be able to target users who have coffee visible through their camera. Imagine drinking your Starbucks coffee and Snapchat serving you a filter because you have coffee in front of you.
Ad Blocking
1 out of 5 smartphone owners uses ad-blocking to get around mobile advertising. Luckily, most mobile social media users are not using a browser but are viewing the ads “in-app” which is currently out of reach for most ad blocking software. However, this may not always be the case and the desire to block advertising is unlikely to go away. This will have a significant impact in the near future for social advertising.
