The top trends that will dominate the advertising, marketing and media industry in 2020

• With the industry changing at a rapid pace, throwing a new set of challenges every day, experts are hoping that 2020 will be a game-changer that will help them redefine a lot of rules in advertising, with smarter marketing techniques.
• We spoke to a few industry experts to identify these new opportunities that 2020 will bring forth for the industry and here is what they had to say.

2019 was an interesting year -- full of ups and downs for the advertising, media and marketing industry. While we saw digital marketing taking the center stage and brands experimenting with newer formats on the medium, the economic slowdown affected consumer sentiments, and naturally, the industry. However, during this period of tough economy, the industry tried to squeeze out the inefficiencies to make themselves more productive.

As we enter 2020, the industry is hopeful to rise to its full strength together. They are all set to reap the benefits of AR and VR, voice, influencer marketing, and much more to stay ahead in the game.

We spoke to a few industry experts to identify these new opportunities that 2020 will bring forth for the industry and here is what they had to say:

Will Scougal, Director of International Creative Strategy, Snapchat:

I don’t think there’ll be one dominant trend but several interlinked trends that have emerged over the last decade all achieving scale and creating real shifts in the way we experience and interact with brands. Over the last few years people have increasingly shifted their attention to mobile and, as they have become more confident navigating the world with their handset, they’re looking for quality experiences. What we’ve seen at Snapchat is that people are choosing to spend time adding a creative layer to their world through AR (Augmented Reality).

As this format continues to scale, both on Snapchat and beyond, we are going to see more innovative, useful, and immersive experiences being built by brands embracing the marketing benefits of AR as a full funnel format. In addition to the growing popularity of AR, we are also going to see premium mobile video content gain more viewers. As audiences rise, we can expect to see more quality made-for-mobile shows from studios, publishers, entertainers and brands who are adapting to the mobile mindset of people.

Ashish Bhasin, CEO - APAC and Chairman India, Dentsu Aegis Network Asia Pacific:

Voice and performance will gain much more prominence than they did so far in the industry. With the emergence of OTT and data rates going down, there is a natural preference towards digitisation amongst younger audience. Equally, voice is so intuitive, it will be naturally driven more and more on a daily basis -- whether you are driving or use some voice assistant on your phone, which will be simplified with time. On the other hand, clients are also under-pressure to deliver results every quarter, hence, they will be far more interested in performance rather than just pure brand-building.

Prathyusha Agarwal, Chief Marketing Officer, ZEEL:

With consumption across platforms, the most dominating trend of 2020 would be brand and character love that transcends multiple screens.

Viewers will share their dining tables and living rooms with our content on television satisfying the craving for anticipation of a new story, the first bite to savour the emotion and relationship with our characters every day. They will then stretch it across multiple screens and interactions binging on it, dipping in, dipping out and gorging on it through time and space. As broadcasters, we need to gear up our backend to tailor-make our content such that it is adept to the multiple platform front-end user interfaces.

There is a shift needed from thinking of content development as an uncertain creative process to building a nuanced understanding the cultural core that makes viewers tick, what they want/ need, where do they need it and have the capability to evolve our craft to deliver that. To own multiple screens where stories and characters are loved beyond just television, content creators and curators, will have to manage the share of pie on each of platforms to maximise screen hours.

Sameer Saxena, Chief Content Officer and Head of TVF:

“For 2020, we will continue to strengthen our partnerships with OTT platforms and brands equally. We plan to venture into new genres like thrillers and romance amongst others. We will also explore non-fiction properties as there isn’t much happening in this space. Our aim is to release around 15 to 20 shows in the year including a few in regional languages starting with Marathi. In addition to new shows we're also planning the second seasons of some of our key shows like ‘Kota Factory’, ‘Cubicles’, and ‘Hostel Daze’.“

Dinesh Chhabra, CEO, Usha International:

“The consumer durables sector has shown a consistent growth and Usha International Ltd leads this growth from the front riding on new product launches like the Bloom series and Racer fans, as well as the introduction of a whole slew of colorful new kitchen appliances.

During this period of tough economy, Usha tightened its operating belt to squeeze out the inefficiencies to make itself leaner and more productive.

Usha believes in keeping the customer at the core of our businesses and hence ensures that all the new products that we have recently developed keeping consumer insights in mind and built to fulfil their needs, thereby transforming their daily lives.

We expect the New Year to fuel consumer demand and a stabilization of growth patterns in coming quarters. We, at Usha, will continue in our journey to launch new products and innovative technologies, and improve the depth of our distribution penetration specifically in the geographies which are growing at a GDP growth higher than the national average.”

Koshy George, Chief Marketing Officer, Marico Limited:

One big trend for me will continue to be digital. You will continue to find a lot more digital adoption because the rates, while they have gone up, continue to be rock bottom in the country. And you will find that a lot of time that consumers spend will move into digital and hence the focus to continue to build brands and invest there will be one big trend that we look at. And as part of that, there are a lot of medium like TikTok that have suddenly come and exploded out of nowhere. We have recently worked with the platform and seen really good results so that'll be an area of focus. Secondly, while the economy has been witnessing a slowdown, there is still a room for a lot of premiumization. And there's a big trend in sustainability that is slowly but surely picking up momentum and is something we will see more of in 2020.

Amer Jaleel, Group CCO & Chairman, MullenLowe Lintas Group:

I see content saturation coming. We have to start seeing consumers as audiences in the Media Age. Everybody is creating content with ease through apps. While this explosion leads to satisfying the creative urge among people and that surely is a good thing, but coupled with the march of platforms and production, this is leading very rapidly to content fatigue. Once we see our consumers as an audience, we have to account for the fatigue they have to overcome to see the frankly poor quality of brand content that most of us are putting out. The only way marketeers and their brand partners have is to be ahead of and fresher than the content that's being dished out. I can clearly see that the phrase 'break the clutter' is outdated. We will have to preempt all the evolution of what we call clutter and be ahead of the thinking of the clutter makers.

Gurmeet Singh, Chairman and Managing Director, Johnson Controls-Hitachi Air Conditioning India:

To stand out from the crowd, companies are putting the customer at the heart of everything they do. This has led to the emergence of exceptional customer experiences. Marketing in the modern era has to play a significant role in shaping these experiences. Artificial Intelligence is certainly going to be a game changer driving the marketing landscape in 2020. This Next-gen technology will create new avenues of effective marketing and customer experiences.

One of the trendiest topics across the world, both in B2B and B2C spaces, AI is going to take the charge as it holds the power to evolve businesses, accelerate customer experiences and boost sales like never before. Audience segmentation with in-depth understanding of the demand is key to success in any B2B module. Here AI will empower and align business, marketing and sales teams to accurately analyze the demand touchpoints much before a lead generation. This will ensure faster and concrete conversion of leads resulting in enriched customer experiences. Artificial Intelligence can play a significant role in influencing marketing strategies and predicting favorable product and service outcome. With AI things will become faster, easier, more convenient and affordable for business ecosystem to meet the ever evolving customer expectations.

New India’s smart customer is globally connected and is curious to explore, experiment and experience. Today, customers are considering exceptional experiences as a critical aspect of their buying decision. In the B2C segment, AI has a huge role to play. It is also the responsibility of businesses and marketers to ethically leverage the power of this impactful tool. Without invading the privacy of customers, AI should aim at significantly providing intelligent and informed customer experiences by equipping marketing and product teams to effectively analyse consumer behavior, acceptance, demand and delivery points. This will ensure a smooth end to end customer journey that is more customized and interactive in the most natural and ethical manner. AI will also support the marketing landscape by enabling powerful and high-impact consumer insights to disrupt customer satisfaction and enhance success factors of product and service innovations.

TikTok spokesperson:

In 2019, we saw a drastic shift in online content consumption behavior. As the internet continued to democratize, Indians moved beyond the traditional consumption of entertainment content and are now avidly looking at videos to educate themselves on variety of topics such as self-improvement, health, fitness, e- learning languages, among others.

In 2020, we foresee this trend to grow, with brands and NGOs leveraging short video formats with platforms such as TikTok. At the same time, given shorter attention spans, it will be critical for content to break through the clutter, be creative, fun and engaging, in order to attract audiences.

Shamsuddin Jasani, Group MD, Isobar South Asia:

Voice as a technology is coming into its own and is going to be a big trend in 2020. With Hindi as a language being made available on Alexa, it will open up huge opportunities in the future. Secondly, with advancements in technology, augmented reality is going to take off in a big way. And the third biggest trend will again come from the world of vernacular content. Local languages are going to explode as we go into 2020 and you will see more OTT players investing on local languages.

Pratik Gupta, Co-founder, FoxyMoron:

"2020 will be the year for digitally evolved agencies and digitally involved clients. Hyper-personalization of content through all digital platforms should be the biggest trend this year. Along with the innovation on digital; Voice, OTT, Social, Progressive Web Apps, the use of Hyper-Personalisation are going to be imperative. While the entire ecosystem believes that the consumer does not want to see advertisements, I believe that ads & communication served to an exposed cookie pool at the right time and at the right place is the future.
This year we will be working on creating workflows, technologies and teams to cater to this need for brands and consumers alike."

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