Marketing and Advertising technology trends for 2021

Posted On July 14, 2021

Marketing and Advertising technology trends for 2021

Marketing technology (Martech) is the blending of marketing and technology. Since digital by its very nature is technologically-based, anyone involved with digital marketing is dealing with martech. The term “martech” especially applies to major initiatives, efforts and tools that harness technology to achieve marketing goals and objectives.
Advertising technology (Adtech) is the term refers commonly to all technologies, software, and services used for delivering, controlling and targeting online ads. It refers to all the digital methodologies in the marketing language, you’d use as a marketer to interact, engage and convert.
Some of the martech and adtech trends for 2021 are listed below:

Martech trends for 2021:

The rise of no-code tech: 75 per cent of organisations in 2020 had a long way to go in terms of digital maturity, according to a survey by Deloitte. This coupled with the do-or-die need that businesses facing in digital transformation would likely see the rise of no-code or low-code martech solutions in 2021. These no-code or low-code martech solutions, with minimal technical capabilities, can be easily used by marketers and sold to top management with simple data visualisation.

Future-proofing existing martech stacks: Already many businesses have some form of martech solutions. According to Gartner, over 80 per cent are sitting on a short-sighted or out-dated martech roadmap, while 33 per cent feel their existing tech is useful.
To examine their current martech stack and employ efforts to either maximise, improve, or even re-evaluate their current stack, will be the first order for many businesses. Also, to accommodate innovation, emphasise on business differentiation, or even just simple updating for records, this is a signal that it is high time for many martech stacks and roadmaps to go through a level of audit.

Martech to drive business growth: All businesses have had to revisit their existing playbooks or analytical frameworks that had served them well over the years, as more businesses are moving to digital, with many for the very first time. Attribution will become the key as more marketers ventured into uncharted waters, saddled with the burden of reduced budgets and higher targets.
Currently, 36 per cent of marketers are happy with how they measure return on investment (ROI), while 80 per cent are dissatisfied with the tools they have to measure this business impact, according to Harvard Business Review. Attribution will be vital to elevate marketers back into the position of trusted business partner over being viewed as a cost centre.

The race for a single view of consumers: The value of personalisation represents trillions in revenue to businesses, but by the year 2025, Gartner anticipates that marketers would have all but given up on achieving personalisation. Usually a lack of data, making it difficult for marketers to gather, store, classify, and implement of insights on their consumers are cited as the main reasons.
Given the rapid restrictions being imposed on third party data, businesses now also need to consider improving the way first party data is used. At its peak, the utilisation of an effective customer data platform (CDP) would provide a single view of your consumers and accurate predictions of customer lifetime value. In short, if done properly, it would allow marketers to return to the coveted position of being “the voice of the consumer”.

Executional efficiency: Creating a greater dependency on leveraging marketing technology for operational efficiency, budgets are being shifted away from human resource. Marketing leaders will look to tech not just for automation and to free up workflows, but also to create greater cross-departmental collaboration, as more businesses opt for leaner and more agile structures. Especially with the continued work from home or virtual operations, leaders will start looking at tech to seamlessly take care of marketing operations and managing tasks.

Double down on engaging and personalised content: Like never before, consumers are flooding digital spaces, creating an influx of both traffic and data. It also creates a heightened expectation from the new digital consumer as marketers can now reap the benefits of being able to track and monitor consumer behaviour to an even more granular level.
Between 55 to 75 per cent of consumers now expect to be served with personalised content, according to Salesforce. The anticipation is the rise of tech solutions like creative automation tools to help marketers manage and make sense of the influx of digital content that it needs to create, monitor, and track.
Marketers, in order to leverage these upcoming trends, need to understand that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. The speed of implementing new technologies has now become a question of survival instead of having the luxury of trial and error they had in the past. As COVID-19 has hit the reset button on virtually every facet of the business, martech implementation is no different.
Leaders today need to take into consideration how martech should impact the way they draw consumer insights, derive business strategies, engage with customers, and deliver business outcomes post-pandemic.

Adtech trends for 2021:

Verification will still be a top priority for advertisers, but the adoption of attention metrics will signal advanced marketing campaigns: The success of a marketing campaign is severely impacted by the lack of transparency and trust between advertisers and their publishers. So, use measurement partners and trust to engage consumers with shorter attention spans and more choices. Remember that attention is the key to branding, and false positives erode trust and create operational hurdles and missed opportunities for monetization. Technology unifies buyers and brands so that the collaboration results in a seamless storyline stemming from an approach based on a proactive investment in metrics.

Connected TV’s (CTV) continued growth increases emphasis on inventory fraud protection: According to Innovid’s fall 2020 US Video Benchmark Report, CTV made some imposing waves in ad impressions, growing 55 per cent from 2019 for the third quarter, while its share in 2020 came in at 41 per cent, a 23 per cent increase. And, mobile video took the lead with its 27 per cent increase year-over-year.
Advertisers will need to beware of fraudsters targeting known flaws in streaming-TV ad-serving technology and the supply chain. They fool marketers into paying for ads that viewers on real devices and apps never see.
CTV shows strong evidence of growth and the adtech industry will stand to benefit by investment in measurement, identity, interactive formats, and programmatic buying.
Consumer attention wanders as cross-platform and Omni channel advertising campaigns become the new standard: According to a Verizon Media survey, 152 digital advertisers were asked by the organisation to gauge their ad spending plans for H1 2021, out of which more than half fully expect to increase their campaign spending. A much larger portion of their own lives is spent online and will continue for the foreseeable future as online activity keeps rising. Naturally, advertisers follow, and CTV/over-the-top spend has increased to take advantage of significant ways to enhance the marketing palette.

Solutions from new identity technology will replace the reliance on universal identifiers: You don’t need a weather forecaster to see which way the wind blows, and we anticipate that the loss of universal identifiers means that marketers will hunt for an appropriate, transparent, and scalable solution they can operate in a consumer-centric, privacy-friendly ecosystem.
Enhancing our ability to understand data usage patterns and to identify the smallest data sources for a more refined approach, new methodologies will emerge with machine learning playing a critical role in establishing data strategy with audience, context and measurement at the forefront. We’ll also see new industry-standard ID systems and the continued expansion of registration-based integrations.

Contextual targeting solutions will experience a renaissance: As context reveals the true meaning of a web page, it matters a lot. To gauge content safety, keyword blocking and URL block listing rely on a rudimentary verbal interpretation, in short, its suitability for targeting. To loom larger and minimize the likelihood of lost audiences, reduced scale, and inadequate advertiser protection, the bigger picture of what content truly means is expected.
Contextual intelligence will offer deeper insights by analysing how people interact with specific content, which topics trend online, and how those trends evolve to serve advertising campaigns over time.

Expect a further strategic convergence of adtech and martech: According to Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience EVP Rob Tarkoff, the way brands and consumers connect with one another has already begun to merge as a growing share of marketing targets personalized, data-driven, hyper-contextual experiences. An opportunity for real innovation arises to prevent fragmentation across martech and adtech, given what’s next for universal identifiers and the move to first party resources.