More sophisticated marketing technology will drive increasingly targeted online advertisements this year, as marketers now have the tools they need to segment markets.
Acceleration director Richard Mullins says online advertising is becoming more sophisticated and marketers can now make use of tools that will enable them to specifically target their consumers.
Mullins says 2011 “is likely to be all about the continued maturing of the country's online industry, as marketers and publishers refine their digital strategies and extend their use of existing technologies”.
Acceleration has offices in London, New York, and SA, provides digital marketing consulting, outsourcing and technology services.
Among the tools that will become more prevalent this year are those that aid in behavioural tracking, says Mullins. He explains that tracking behaviour through the use of cookies will allow marketers to display advertisements that are linked to people's behaviours.
“With behavioural targeting, marketers are able to use information collected about users' Web-browsing behaviour, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have conducted, to choose advertisements to display to them.”
Mullins says this allows advertisers to improve communication with consumers by focusing their messengers. “The reason that behavioural targeting will start to become bigger in SA in 2011 is that the technology to segment and target users by behaviour has finally matured to a point where it is sophisticated enough to produce significant results, yet easy enough to use.”
Better data
analytics tools to better track campaigns, in order to understand how online elements such as e-mail, display and search work together, and with offline advertising campaigns.
These strategies will be supplemented by the marketing message being linked to good content, he adds. Mullins expects to see marketers looking to buy up content from publishers for use on their own platforms in a bid to provide relevant information to customers.
Mobile advertising is not expected to “really take off” this year, says Mullins. However, 2011 will see the groundwork being put in place for strong growth during 2012 and 2013. “It will be a good year to experiment with the technology with a view to understanding what it can do for you,” he says.
Video will increasingly become an important advertising tool as broadband becomes cheaper, says Mullins. “We believe video will finally become a major part of the advertising landscape during 2011.”
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