Gartner's First Hype Cycle Ad Report: 5 Digital Trends Forecast To Have Greatest Impact

Gartner released its first Hype Cycle for Digital Advertising 2020 report Monday that lists five technologies analysts expect will have the greatest impact on marketers' ability to respond and adapt to emerging trends. 

The technologies most tightly connected to these trends that are causing the most disruption include advanced supply-side bidding, ad blocking, identity resolution, brand safety, ad verification and viewability.

Colin Reid, senior director analyst at Gartner for Marketers, believes changes in ad tech will cause some supply chains to wither and vanish. These changes include cookie obsolescence and dominance by Facebook and Google, combined with a rising level of consumer mistrust in big tech.

Mobile marketing analysts, brand safety, and shoppable media will plateau in less than two years. Generative AI, Visual search, content and preference management, conversational marketing, advanced supply-side bidding, account-based marketing, location intelligence, identity resolution, ad blocking, and ad verification and viewability will plateau within two to five years.

Blockchain for advertising, data clean rooms, retail media networks, over-the-top TV advertising, personification, and AI for marketing will plateau within five to 10 years.

Visual search capabilities are available in apps such as Google Lens running Android, the Google App running Android and iOS, and Prism running iOS. Google, Microsoft, Pinterest and Snapchat offer visual search.

Pinterest, for example, processes as many as 600 million visual searches per month, according to Gartner, supported by tools including Shop the Look and Pinterest Lens. Snapchat’s visual search allows users to take a picture of an object and then search for it on Amazon.

Visual search has been around for years, but with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic there have been several major advancements in the digital advertising industry -- not just the technology, but the way brands use the technology.

While COVID-19 has dealt a major setback, it has also made a path for innovation as the market rebuilds. One of the more interesting issues involves consumer trust and how it continues to accelerate the need for advertisers to adopt measures to monitor their ad placements. As consumers determine what is appropriate to them, brands must ensure that their assets are placed in appropriate contexts as well as manage and monitor the platforms, publishers and domains they interact with.

Another  is the use of artificial intelligence in images, video, text, audio and how it’s produced through a variety of machine-learning techniques. And while AI offers the opportunity to solve for creative complexities, data clean rooms offer many possibilities for cross-media measurement and standardization.

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