Interactive advertising in 2015 (part.1)

This article is written by my colleague Adrian Mihaltianu.

- Advertising as social interaction will be commonplace
- Interactivity that drags you in and follows you everywhere
- The dawn of Hive Advertising
- Drag and Drop Advertising

Managing to be coherent when talking about interactive advertising five years from now is pretty difficult, especially during a time when technology is the leading factor influencing the way people consume advertising.

Anyway, we should discuss this, in order to set the correct priorities for the next few years. What factors should we take into consideration when talking about interactive advertising in 2015? Let’s see only four of them, and let’s start today with the first one, shall we? :-)

a) Advertising as social interaction

Humans socialize from the dawn of history. It’s in our blood. The way we exchange information is an evolutionary advantage over any other species. It helped us evolve rapidly and progress through relevant decisions within our social group. That’s why we’re so interested in any tidbit of information coming from our circle of social contacts, information that would be irrelevant to others.

On the other hand, technology is making the world smaller, so in five years we will be permanently connected with practically everybody – all the time – transiting seamlessly from the working space at the office to our home. That would make no sense in itself, but the ability of accessing instantly the pool of knowledge created by your social contacts whenever you are will make all the sense in the world.

This means that we will be able to take with us our social network everywhere we go. We’re already doing this to an extent with Twitter and Facebook mobile, but the next generation of mobile devices will mean this circle of relevant social contacts will be always around us, 24h/24. And that it will start to communicate with us all the time – to the extent that we allow it.

Advertising will have to use this as leverage. Display advertising – be it mobile – will have to make place to social advertising.

Advertising will have to find ways to embellish the content provided by your social network (reviews of shops, product recommendations, movies reviews etc) and to make it attractive to push you towards a decision – even using rich media and augmented reality for this. So advertising will have to build around the information content provided by your social networks in a way that will lead you to action: right then and there.

For example, if you’ll walk into a mall, you’ll receive buzz from shops that were already used and recommended/reviewed by your social contacts (if you allow this, of course). The shops will pay for this service, while you’ll end up with things and services that you’ll trust and like.

People everywhere will be incentivized to review and to express themselves about products, shops, services and restaurants – and this content will not only be present on specialized websites available only through a PC – it will be aggregated by new apps from the whole Internet and pushed towards you through social networks apps on your mobile device.

It’s already happening to a small extent, but in 2015 this market will already be mature and change the way we interact with commercial entities – be it from banks that have negative reviews or products on the shops shelves. We will have instant information about practically everything, and not from advertisers, but from the consumers. The advertisers will have to pay for the service, and their agencies will have to find the best ways to use that content.

Advertising will finally make the transition from passive display to interactive display and eventually to social interactive display – that is instead of receiving one-fit-for-all advertising you will receive relevant information from your social network or according to your social profile, that will help you progress. This is beyond nowadays profiling.

Who knows, perhaps we’ll also start to see less and less huge billboards advertising perfect people and more and more interactive displays showing recommendations from people who think like you.

And that leads us to the second thing: interactivity that drags you in and follows you everywhere. But about this, next week :-)