2020 In Review: Marketing Changes and Disruptions Part II

Keeping up with the latest in digital advertising can be busy work, even without a pandemic dramatically changing customer buying behavior across the board. That’s why we decided to look back on the biggest changes to digital ads in 2020 and the solutions that carried brands and businesses through it all.

In this latest installment of our ongoing end of year review, we’ve condensed the most impactful shifts in advertising by platform below. Read on to see how your favorite platform adapted to this year’s unique conditions and what might be on the horizon in 2021.

How Social Media is Changing

As mentioned previously, social platforms made several innovations this year to engage and entertain their massive user-bases through months of stay-at-home work and at-home learning for young adults.

Facebook stepped in to help advertisers streamline the online buying process with Facebook Page Shops, which enabled brands to set up digital storefronts and display entire catalogues of items to users without drawing them off of the Facebook app. Facebook’s goal to flatten sales funnels for its millions of advertisers also tackled the CCPA compliance rules this year by developing a tool called the Facebook LDU to determine whether someone is a resident of or operating within California and therefore subject to new CCPA data management regulations.

Instagram followed suit with Instagram Shop, giving brands the option to easily set up a storefront on the platform itself without pulling users off of the app by adding a “Shop” tab to their business profiles. Instagram also continues to push visual storytelling through the use of ads between user stories, giving brands the opportunity to leverage a slideshow format to millions of users flipping between stories. Between these new features and Instagram’s ability to tag shoppable items within posts both promoted and organic, 60% of Instagram users now say they discover new products on the platform.

Never one to refuse a challenge, Snapchat also began inserting shoppable ads between users’ stories, eliminating the need for users to swipe on an ad. The photo-sharing app also features your standard Discover section for both paid and organic visual content to attract browsing customers. The app continues seeking ways to connect with its massive pool of Gen Z users.

Programmatic Adapts to Cookieless Tracking

If a digital marketer’s goal is to match the right ads to the right audience, this year’s step forward in AI-driven programmatic strategies should be at the top of every marketer’s watchlist. AI’s superhuman efficiency at matching individual customers to ads that prompt action had eMarketer predicting US digital display ad spending (heavily concentrated on mobile, video, and programmatic ads) would rise by 19.2% in 2020 and reach almost $85 billion before the pandemic hit, based largely on advertisers’ increased faith in AI’s capabilities. Even in the wake of Covid-19, display ad spending still rose by roughly 5.5% and is expected to bounce back next year by nearly 23%.

Even as the digital landscape transitions away from a cookie-based ecosystem, some solutions are already in place through software like The Trade Desk to deliver relevant, data-driven programmatic advertising. There are also additional opportunities for programmatic advertising as wearable devices become increasingly popular — nearly a quarter of U.S. adults regularly used a wearable device last year.

Although new privacy regulations like the CCPA posed initial challenges to the programmatic industry, the future still looks bright across all programmatic channels.

Video Content Still Growing in Popularity

You probably don’t need us to tell you video is still the universal king of content on social platforms. As social channels and streaming services expand their offerings to make video a more routine part of a user’s experience, the expected minutes per day users spend watching video continues to climb and is expected to see an increase from 84 minutes to 100 per day by 2021.

The ability for advertisers to craft story-telling content through video and the options available across platforms to tell these stories in creative ways to different audiences has video content’s trajectory racing steadily upwards. In fact, it appears the coronavirus likely accelerated the transition from traditional TV advertising to digital video ads.

CTV and Streaming’s Influence is Growing

With video on the rise, it tracks that CTV would also experience a significant increase in consumption. CTV’s appeal is growing quickly alongside the increased dominance of streaming platforms, as “more than one third (35%) of US consumers have tried a new ad-supported streaming service since COVID-19 began and 79% will continue to do so.”
CTV’s targeting capabilities — using household demographic, location-based and economic data — make this expansion in popularity particularly appealing to advertisers. Even as several US States reopen public places and dial back Covid-19 safety measures, shared viewing on streaming services has achieved an exciting new audience for CTV ads.