• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 31, 2021

It’s a wrap for 2021. 

That is what the Google doodle signifies. Similar to the descending crystal ball in New York’s Times Square, Google’s doodle on its search engine home page marks the transition to another year -- 2022. 

The animated Google Doodle features a candy popper that reads 2021 on it. The letters of Google are also decorated with jacklights and a party cap on top of the letter “G.”

Click on the image and a new page opens with confetti expanding across the screen. There’s an animated confetti cone. Click on it and confetti spreads across the screen.

New Year's Eve ball in Times Square is a geodesic sphere 12 feet in diameter that weighs 11,875 pounds. The ball is covered with a total of 2,688 Waterford Crystal triangles. The Waterford Crystal location in Ireland showcases a replica. 

Many consumers and businesses will welcome a fresh start to a new year, as 2021 ends amidst concerns over the rapidly spreading new Omicron variant of the Coronavirus. Similar to 2020, restaurants in some states have begun to close in-door dinning, and schools have gone back to virtual classrooms.

Those across the advertising industry have a few predictions. Here are a few.

"Subscriptions are the new consumer experience," says Sheri Bachstein, CEO of The Weather Company and GM of IBM Watson Advertising. "The subscription economy will see another period of tremendous growth and revenue in 2022 and beyond."

She also believes that effective data will make or break a company. Many will "double-down" on data strategies, not just for advertising and monetization, but data that can provide insights for processes like supply chain, logistics and operations.

Joe Hirsch, General Manager, SpringServe, now part of Magnite, believes unified auction will enable competition between programmatic and direct -sold campaigns and will gain more momentum within programmatic buying in 2022. He believes that server-side header bidding is reaching its tipping point and will become mainstream in connected television (CTV) buying in 2022. Ad-free subscriber growth will hit a ceiling in 2022.

The long-term revenue generator for CTV publishers will be through advertising. Amid fierce competition to win over engaged audiences and convince viewers to keep tuning in, CTV publishers will be more focused on providing an impeccable ad quality and viewer experience rather than maximizing ad revenue in the short term.

Clean rooms will become the measure for measuring effective advertising, according to Libby Morgan, senior vice president and chief strategy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

"As we face a cookieless future, clean rooms will emerge as the answer to providing more advanced analysis around attribution and measurement," Morgan says. "Clean rooms are where the walled gardens like Google, and Facebook are able to share aggregated data with advertisers while still adhering to privacy laws and data restrictions."

Here’s to a healthier and happier 2022.