Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Developing Trends in Online Advertisements


            We have touched base on what cookies are and how they are connected to you, the end user. Browser cookies track what websites you visit on your personal computer. Once you leave a current website and visit another website, advertisements from the previous website will continue to pop up. So these cookies are embedded into browsers that haunt your every move after visiting a certain website, but is that an invasion of privacy? Some think so, some could care less. Right now these cookies are not accessible in mobile devices, but that will change over time. There are many future trends in the online marketing field that will change the way that we see and react to advertisements.
            On the Forbes website, author Jayson Demers discusses what he believes to be the seven new and growing trends in online advertising.  Ad retargeting effectiveness and cookies is one of the trends that Jayson discusses. Reminding customers of recent searches in ads psychologically can lead to a build in trust with the company through repetition and familiarity. Do you even realize how many ads you come into contact every day? No one really does because it is  becoming second nature to us. To increase the amount of ads you see, more companies are becoming more mobile. It is projected by Forbes that 87% of all sales will be connected through tablets and smartphones. There is no escaping it!
            Another trend that Jayson really picks up on is the appearance of the advertisements. Everyone wants his or her lives to be simpler with less stress. Our society today has no concept of relaxation or taking time to do leisure activities. Companies have picked up on this lifestyle quickly, so they know that when you go to Google to look up something, they need to catch your attention fast and get their point across.  This is why another trend that is growing is the fact that “less is more”.  Forbes did state it in the best way saying:  “there is a sense that from the hyper-connectivity of our highly-digitized lives to the bright, flashy, complicated sensory input we’re fed everyday, there is no way to continue at this pace. As a result, 2013 is likely to be a year where the most successful marketing strategies will be ones that are not only simple in nature, but promote goods and services that serve to simplify the consumer’s life, or even just their customer experience.”

            Along with this simplicity, you can see that these advertisements are using more images rather than words to get their messages across. Showing a wendy's burger rather than telling you about it has a greater sensory appeal to it. This method gets their brand and value across to the end user, which leads to more and more content being used. Companies need to be more witty and entertaining to grab people’s attention. I know when I am looking on twitter or Facebook, I immediately scroll past the ads with a bunch of information that I don’t want to read and go onto the ads that pop up that show me something that I want. That aesthetic appeal is growing more and more as it becomes more accessible. That being said companies are trying to grab their target market’s attention on any level of social media that it can. The more people are sharing and creating talk about your company, the more change in your pocket.

            Online advertisements are a huge growing industry that is evolving every second of everyday. When is the last time you went to the “Penny Saver” to see what great deals are coming your way? Will the Newspaper totally become paperless in the next few decades? Once every business starts adapting these current and future trends, what is going to have to happen next to get people’s attention? With this new innovation, it just makes up for new unanswered questions that the world is waiting to answer.

You can read more about these trends at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2013/09/17/the-top-7-online-marketing-trends-that-will-dominate-2014/