As we gather steam in 2012, it’s clear that the display advertising industry is experiencing a renaissance. Once dominated by static banner-size images, display ads today are far richer, more dynamic, and more interactive than their early ancestors. They run on a wide range of devices that the earliest Web advertisers could only dream of, like smartphones and tablets. And unlike the pop-ups we all remember, today’s display ads increasingly engage and entertain: which means people actually want to watch them.
At the same time, it’s also clear that the industry has only started to flex its muscles. Currently, display is a $25 billion-a-year business. But it could be bigger—much bigger. In fact, Google estimates that the display industry has the potential to grow to as much as $200 billion a year. Getting there is going to take new technologies to make display advertising smarter, better performing and more efficient. It’s also going to take a new mindset on the part of agencies and advertisers everywhere, focused on showing the right ad to the right person at the right time.
With nearly one billion Internet users in Asia-Pacific and over 120 million Internet users in India, and more coming online every day, it’s safe to say that 2012 is going to be a banner year for the Asia’s advertisers, publishers, and users. As we get ready for 2012, here are three predictions to that will shape 2012 and will make it a year of display.
1. India’s advertisers will start thinking about buying audiences in addition to placement. Right now, many advertisers in India think that in order to get their message out to the right audience, they have to get it on a narrow list of “premium” sites. They think that way because in the old days of offline advertising, advertisers bought space based on the assumption that the kind of people who’d buy their product was the same kind of people who’d be reading that publication. Buying placement was the only way to target an audience.
In the digital world, that’s no longer the case. Modern display lets advertisers define their audience and then reach them across the web—rather than making guesses about what types of websites they’re likely to visit and hoping that consumers will stop in to see their ads. That means advertisers have to start thinking in terms of the wider web, which is after all the biggest business opportunity.
2. Consumers will grow even more demanding about the content that they are exposed to online—expecting advertisers to engage and entertain them with personalized, targeted marketing messages. These days, the right ad at the right time isn’t just a marketing strategy; it’s the only way to make sure your message gets out online. On the web, consumers decide what to watch and increasingly, when; the era where marketers could dictate the terms on which people would consume their message is gone.
The good news is that marketers can use a variety of technologies to tailor and personalise their display campaigns. For example, Google offers technologies like remarketing (which allows you to continue reach your website visitors with relevant messages as they browse other sites across the web), demographics, and interest categories. And, advertisers can take advantage of rich, beautiful ad formats and technologies like HTML5 to create ads to make ads that people actually want to engage with.
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3. Advertisers will be able to go beyond the click, harnessing even more extensive insight into their ads’ performance, through tools that show whether, where and how consumers engaged with their ads. Google is bringing the science of search to the art of display, making display as measurable as search advertising is today. In a world where consumers influence and even choose how they’ll experience digital ads that mean providing marketers with new sources of insights on how and where people engaged with their ads—and not just whether or not they clicked on it.
New ad formats like YouTube TrueView let people choose whether or not to finish watching an ad before their video, granting marketers insight into what ads work and which don’t. And that’s just the beginning: as display ads themselves grow richer and more interactive, the types of information we can provide advertisers is growing richer too. For example, we provide tools to help advertisers understand what exact part of an ad users clicked on, or whether a new online purchase was inspired by a display ad days or even weeks earlier.
At the end of the day, getting to $200 billion is going to take hard work, and we’re not going to make it there in just one new year. But the way forward is simple: show the right ad at the right time and place to the right person, no matter where they are on the web, and everyone wins.
The author is Managing Director & Vice President, Google India