The Growth of Advertising

When I was growing up in Los Angeles, some of my classmates were print models for Old Navy, Abercrombie, or The Gap. Back in the 90s, the most high tech advertisements would be gloss-printed catalogs that involved a Windows Paint inserted Word Art. Today, Advertising has taken a completely new look; from online catalogs, digital ads, to slideshows, and now video is the next big thing.

We all know how the world of Advertising came about but where is the world of Digital Advertising/Adtech going?!

With buzzwords like Programmatic, everything is getting faster, clearer, and more accurate. Most households now in 2016, have started to "cut the cord" so traditional offline-TV advertisements are losing it's audience. In a world of Hulu, Netflix, HBOgo, and more, online video is where everyone is now to avoid the commercials.

In 2010, an average American spends a little less than an hour encountering digital video but now the average american, spends more than 2x the amount of time watching digital video. Due to the attractiveness VoD (Video on Demand), brands are now turning towards these OTTs (Over-the-Top Content Providers) to push their advertisements in front of consumers.

Due to the boom of online video content being pushed out, many social media platforms started building their own online video software. Facebook started the battle and then Twitter and Instagram joined shortly after.

On top of being able to access your consumers online, advertisers are now able to work within mobile applications to capture their attention. Video advertising has moved from your TV set at home, to your computer, to the iPhone 7 that is hopefully not burning a hole in your pocket.

With all these approaches to target the right consumer with ads, every brand wants to maximize outreach and minimize the costs. In the era of Big Data, that is where Programmatic advertising has been able to provide a great amount of help. Instead of paying for ad space and hoping for the best, Programmatic technology has been able to utilize structured data to pinpoint the specific parameters a video needs to maximize it's revenue.

Perhaps I'm a nerd to really enjoy where the industry has come from and is going but Advertising has really come a long way since handing out flyers for the new movie.

With all the emerging technology and start ups, where do we see the next big thing?