Predictions in Significant Developments in Digital Advertising

The three most significant developments in digital advertising over the next five years that I’m predicting are TikTok ads, artificial intelligence, and influencers. TikTok isn’t just one of the most popular social media platforms with over 1.5 billion monthly active users and predicted to have over 2.2 billion by 2027 (West, 2024). TikTok ads are also a popular form (if not one of the quickest-growing) of advertising platforms. Many companies partner with smaller creators to give them the ability to show off their products for free (including myself, I just got my first free packages this week to promote and I’m beyond excited) and have short ads curated from the company’s platform that follow a trend or go along with a pop culture fad. Because I and many other marketers don’t see TikTok going anywhere in the next few years along with the fact that a staggeringly high 83% of users were entertained by the app’s advertisements as well as 25% of TikTok users worldwide purchasing items off the app after viewing an ad, I see this development improving digital advertising drastically (Southgate, 2024).

Artificial Intelligence will be able to help us make more personalized advertisements because of all the information and data it’s able to harvest from customers (DMI, 2024). This is clearly key to any marketer- being able to know what kind of campaign to run, who to target it to, and what location would be best. Then, once the campaign has launched- where a campaign went wrong, where it went right, or where things went just okay. Artificial intelligence provides us with so much more information about customer insight than we ever would have had without it. AI learns to make predictions from patterns, and then it grows and improves on its own, making it one of the most useful tools in not only marketing but technology in this century (Kaput, 2024).

Ad spending on influencers alone is predicted to grow from 30.81 billion in 2023 to 56.28 billion in 2029 (Influencer…2024). Working with influencers is such a versatile experience because you can reach different results by working with different influencers. Large-scale beauty influencers might be able to sell a large makeup brand, while a medium-scale food influencer might be able to sell out a local pizza place. One thing for certain, people trust the people they’ve built parasocial relationships with.  Working with influencers, especially local influencers, cultivates more authentically compelling content for the followers/audiences (Ormos, 2023).

DMI. (2024). Ai in Digital Marketing – The Ultimate Guide. Retrieved from https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/ai-in-digital-marketing-the-ultimate-guide#:~:text=The%20advantage%20of%20AI%20is,using%20feedback%20and%20new%20data.

Influencer advertising – global: Statista market forecast. (2024). Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/outlook/amo/advertising/influencer-advertising/worldwide#ad-spending

Kaput, M. (2024). Ai in advertising: Everything you need to know. Retrieved from https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/ai-in-advertising

Ormos, O. (2023). Council post: The future of influencer marketing and the expanding creator economy. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2023/07/07/the-future-of-influencer-marketing-and-the-expanding-creator-economy/?sh=5549cce958e6

Southgate, C. (2024). Are TikTok ads effective?: The power of tiktok. Retrieved from https://chs.agency/insights/are-tiktok-ads-effective/#:~:text=TikTok%20is%20the%20fastest%20growing,app%20(source:%20TikTok).

West, C. (2024). 27 tiktok statistics marketers need to know in 2024. Retrieved from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/tiktok-stats/