It’s that time of the year again when industry and subject matter experts alike are predicting what will happen in the coming year in media and advertising.
Rather than look ahead to 2016, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look back and talk about some of the predictions and trends that did not happen in 2015.
Here are some of the hot predictions the experts were making at this time last year — predictions that didn’t quite live up to the anticipation.
The Rise Of Programmatic TV
One of the big promises and hopes of 2015 was the rise of addressable TV and programmatic TV ad buys. Unfortunately, people — not smarter algorithms — are still buying most of today’s TV spots.
We ended 2015 with the technologies and capabilities in place, so maybe 2016 will be the year.
Apple Will Revolutionize TV
Between all the rumors and leaked details about potential deals with networks, Apple fans and advertisers alike were holding their collective breath for Apple to revolutionize the TV model.
Given that all we saw in 2015 was a couple of false starts and some marketing hype, we might have to wait another year for Apple to create the cord-cutting television viewing experience it promised will change the way we watch (and interact with) TV.
Ad Targeting Will Be Nearly Perfect
The right ad for the right person at the right time. That’s one of the promises I really hoped to see come through in 2015.
Unfortunately, we are still seeing ads for things we already bought and ads for products we definitely don’t need. So there’s more work to do on this, no question.
Programmatic Will Finally Become Creative
One of my biggest hopes for 2015 was that the union of creative and programmatic would lead to programmatic ads becoming more human and emotionally appealing.
Creative agencies were supposed to partner with developers and media agencies to develop advanced automated capabilities that produce and deploy smart ads with self-customizing creative elements. Instead, we are still seeing boring, non-personalized boilerplate templates.
Twitter Will Finally Mature
I know I am not the only one who was hoping for Twitter to really mature in 2015. But between CEO changes, a hard start for Moments and weak ad products, we continue to look for a more mature Twitter in 2016.
Perhaps Twitter’s new “interim” CEO will be able to focus his new “part-time job” around growing the platform.
The End Of Newspapers
While it might sound a bit gloom and doom, many expected the majority of newspapers to fold in 2015.
Although some have, and newsrooms continue to cut back, we have seen some interesting pivots that buck this trend, like the Washington Post’s growth in online viewers since Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of it in 2013, along with the rise of digital journalistic platforms like Vice.
Print is not dead yet — and newspapers are surviving in their digital editions.
Wearables Will Drive Marketing Insights
In 2014, data geeks and marketers fantasized about how wearable technology would dramatically change the advertising industry. Since wearable devices focus on collecting personal data to either enhance user experience or deliver specific content, marketers and advertisers saw a big opportunity to leverage this new source of hyper-personal information.
Although we made a lot of progress in hardware (iWatch, Fitbit and more), we have yet to see meaningful marketing applications of this new data treasure trove.
Visual Storytelling Will Explode
With the rise in mobile and social and the increase of noise in advertising, marketers expected more and more brands to leverage visual storytelling to make more emotional connections with their consumers and stand out from all the chatter.
However, outside of memes traveling the social networks, this trend never picked up.
Death Of The Desktop
Many technologists and marketers expected desktop sales to fall to nearly zero last year; however, a look at sales numbers shows that instead of declining, desktop sales remained almost flat when compared to 2014 (which is actually positive for the manufacturers).
As we can see, many of the hyped and hoped-for trends never ripened or came to fruition in 2015. I do believe that once some of the platforms start to mature and define their role in the marketing ecosystem, we will experience a quick growth in some of these trends.
It will be interesting to see how the analysts’ predictions will change now that myriad new technologies have been previewed and released at CES.
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