Sauer forecasts that the headline at the end of 2023 will not be about the introduction of new immersive technologies, but about the story of opinion leaders’ continued work in space, with the rest of the industry trying to catch up.

The ROI of AI (and other technologies)

For many agencies, despite operating during difficult economic times, the cost of not investing in new technology is greater than the price of adoption.

“With many contracting budgets cut, IT budgets don’t always work out the same because the cost of delaying technology implementations can be greater than the cost of investment,” said Julia Linehan, CEO and founder of The Digital Voice. “AI, for example, has advanced by leaps and bounds and can reduce manual process and budget waste. Meanwhile, disruptive programmatic ad buying is helping open the doors to premium advertising for all advertisers, democratizing access to high-quality, qualified traffic at wholesale prices for merchants without the deep pockets of big-name names.”

Linehan also pointed to CTV growth in 2023, with Netflix embracing programmatic advertising in recent months, allowing brands to track users from their couches.

“Ultimately, embracing and growing from the necessary change requires flexibility and a willingness to let go of old ways of operating,” Linehan said. “And it’s always important to marry technology capabilities closely to business goals and strategies, rather than rushing into technology for technology’s sake.”

But when that technology means cost savings and revenue growth, especially in the context of a looming recession, the rush can be worth it, said Adam Helfgott, founder and chief executive of Madhive, the TV streaming infrastructure that powers efforts of broadcasters like Fox, Scripps and TEGNA.

“In times of economic uncertainty, the ad market is starting to shrink and the focus is on efficiency,” he said. “To optimize TV spend, we are helping advertisers take a business results-based approach, similar to social platforms like Facebook and Instagram,” she noted. “This means allocating every dollar to a KPI, such as reach, awareness, website visits, app downloads, and even sales.”

Helfgott also noted that unlike social media, TV is often experienced on a shared device within a household, so you need to identify “who’s on the couch.” That’s why dashboard data is having a moment because when you overlay it with automated content recognition (ACR), you can start to understand who’s watching within the home, he said.

“Closing the gap between panel data and ACR will be integral in the coming year as the entire television industry tries to solve this co-viewing problem and stop being just an awareness channel,” Helfgott said.

Creator Content – Let’s Be Little

As brands find themselves needing to get more and more creative with budgets, stretching spend as much as possible, the importance of creator-driven creativity has also grown.

“Right now, we’re seeing our clients turn to creator marketing to help drive payout, ownership and earned efforts,” said Tim Sovay, director of business development and partnerships at CreatorIQ, the influencer marketing platform that it fuels the efforts of advertisers like Unilever and AB InBev. . “One of the main reasons for this is that creator content consistently outperforms traditional branded creative. Not to mention that it is also more efficient to produce at scale.”

Sovay noted that once creator content is developed, real-time data analytics can enable an always-on approach to monitoring campaign impact, giving teams insight into performance every step of the way.

“And forward-thinking technology like machine learning is optimizing campaign amplification by mapping ad spend behind creator-driven creative against business results in real time,” he said.

Others point to the importance of micro-influencer content in this context of tightening budgets, offering more accessible ways for brands to reach customers.

“As brands look to do more with lower budgets, I see the rise of micro-influencer marketing emerging as a prominent tactic,” said Steven Blutstein, chief marketing officer at The Social Standard. “Brands will work less with celebrities and influencers with huge followings and more with authentic customers, employees and fans for future content needs.”

Blutstein said brands need a lot of vertical video and will have fewer marketing dollars to get there.

While no one has a crystal ball, the future looks exciting for agency leaders like Brian Yamada, VMLY&R’s chief innovation officer, who sees the following three trends taking shape in the coming year:

• integrated AI. Yamada noted that recently, walking the floors at CES 2023, AI was everywhere, powering seamless experiences and services. AI is embedded into devices along with evolving hardware and sensors to enable incredible new experiences. Respiratory abnormality detection with connected stethoscopes, intruder identification using AI analysis of Wi-Fi waves, driving autonomous baby strollers and much more. GAN and ChatGPT are accelerating AI in the way we creatively conceptualize and create. There will be an explosion of use cases across our industry.

• Spatial issues. Yamada noted that we are moving from a 2D to a 3D world as we move toward XR/AR/VR experiences that can be spatially aware and accurate. That’s been happening in select categories like furniture, to see exactly how a piece fits into your space. That will spill over into more functional categories, so you won’t have to guess how clothes or shoes fit you. And it will spread to more creative spaces this year. There will be emerging tools like Google’s Geospatial API to leave experiences in a specific location and react to the space around it. The key question is, how important are space and dimensions to your customers?

• The metaverse changes to utility, value. All the technologies that power the metaverse are getting better, faster, smaller, so they won’t disappear, they will adapt. After the cryptocrash, we will see an era of utility and access where brands focus on building community and value. And we will move away from the speculative age where brands rush to explore and consumers get rich quick.

The future is fast approaching

Ultimately, the innovation coming up in the coming year may look different than what we’re used to seeing. With a baseline now firmly established for the proliferation of artificial intelligence, we can likely expect progress to come at a rapid pace.

“Traditionally, we are used to thinking and operating on a linear scale, continuous progress in everything we do,” said Diederik Veelo, founder of Ambassadors and Lab & Cube. “But today it is becoming increasingly clear that what seemed like linear progress was, in fact, just the lower end of an exponential curve. The effort it took us to go from A to B last year will only take six months this year.”

Veelo went on to ask where this leaves us in the ad space. Veelo awaits the first fully automated ads, unlocking scale and speed of iteration, allowing us to pull video scenes out of thin air with just a few prompts.

“Once that happens, the ad serving platforms will be disrupted by the ad generating platforms,” Veelo said. “By then, general AI will have passed the Turing test and we will have accepted it as a natural part of our society.”

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