Trends which will define the year 2021 for programmatic advertising

• While digital advertising has been attractive and has been growing in terms of total marketing spends year after year, in particular, this year in the COVID-hit world, digital advertising will deliver you even better results.
• Rita Sahajpaul, Head of Product & Marketing Science, Xaxis India writes a few trends that would define 2021 for programmatic advertising.

The following digital advertising trends will influence the shift to programmatic buying and help brands optimize ad spend.

Data & Cookie deprecation

There has already been a lot of talk around data and how the third-party cookie deprecation is going to allow media industry to evolve, looking into news (or old, think contextual) ways to help the brands reach out to their consumers. 2021 would be the year where marketers, publishers & adtech stakeholders will become increasingly self-reliant in establishing their own CDPs, DMPs and unique audience identifiers. We also see the emergence of mediator technologies such as data clean rooms on the back of blockchain architecture that will allow these siloed data sets to talk to each other in a privacy-compliant way.

Media Commerce

Ecommerce spends have been steadily increasing YOY and with COVID, some categories like Grocery, FMCG, Apparel, Health & Personal Care have grown tremendously. In the next 3 years, the share of eCommerce is predicted to be just shy of 8% of total retail in India, hitting approximately $120Bn in revenue by 2024. According to the research published by Kantar on the State of E-commerce 2021, the online purchase journey can be complex and spans across multiple online & offline touchpoints. Thus brands need to be able to build a cohesive omnichannel strategy across all digital platforms be it search, social, email, retail or marketplaces. In addition to winning the product promotion on retailers or marketplaces’ own inventory, marketers should be looking to leverage the strong deterministic eCommerce data signals to reach their audiences across all digital platforms outside of O&O inventory. With media commerce driving awareness, consideration and final conversions brands should look for both qualitative and quantitative signals to measure effectiveness of their media investments, and not just ROAS.

Creative innovation & hyper-personalization at Scale

We’re already a mobile-first market, which is getting even bigger with better network performance on 4G and 5G. This has opened a huge opportunity to drive creative innovations across all channels – video, audio, gaming, commerce. Tech advancements and low latency mean advanced features such as AR/ VR will load easily - visual search, social media lens, shoppable media, immersive gaming formats are certainly on the horizon. Ad formats such as interactive Video, conversational Audio & Voice search ad-formats are already creating a true intent-based dialogue and engagement with consumers. Apart from the innovations-formats, data-driven creative storytelling will allow marketers to deliver personalized communication to their audiences at scale.