Special Digital Advertising Report – Economist

The current edition of The Economist runs a Special Report on the online advertising sector and makes for some interesting reading.

Across a series of articles, it gives an interesting overview of how rapidly the advertising and media worlds have been turned on their heads in a breathtakingly short space of time (it quotes a poll of marketers whereby they state they have seen more change in the last two years than the previous fifty).

The emphasis of the report is on the rapid personalisation of targeted advertising – driven mainly by social and the uptake of mobile. Personal Data is clearly becoming the world’s most valuable commodity. Interesting nuggets include a remark by the head of advertising for the New York Times in relation to the migration from desktop PCs to mobile/tablet platforms: ‘It took 150 years for the newspaper industry to contract. The desktop industry will contract because of mobile in a tenth of that time.’

Another interesting assertion is that, from a commercial point of view, a mobile’s best feature is its location tracking capability; the shampoo brand, Pantene, offer one fascinating example of how location tracking can be used: they got together with the Weather Channel to target people with ads for specific hair products to suit the weather in their post code.

The report features quite a lot of commentary on the rise of Real Time Bidding, and makes the point that the advertising industry is going through something similar to the automation of the financial markets in the 1980s.

The report also looks at the threats and the wins and opportunities for the ad agency sector (one nice quote was that the mad men have to hire the maths men); and it explores the wider threats to the rise of digital advertising; one interviewee makes an interesting point about the threat of a consumer push back against the clandestine gathering of their data – he cites the Michelangelo virus from the 90s that inspired everyone to run out and acquire anti-virus software.

There is plenty more, so well worth a read – http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21615869-technology-radically-changing-advertising-business-profound-consequences. Might be paywalled though, so if you don’t wish to subscribe you may have to pick up a print copy : )