2022 is a pivotal year for the media industry. Marketers, agencies, and publishers will be challenged to adapt to the shifting digital advertising landscape and meet the needs of an evolving customer. In a recent Quantcast survey of almost 600 marketers and media professionals in APAC, a few clear trends emerged around media agency and marketer expectations for 2022.
1) Brand awareness activity will drive digital media investment growth.
Advertising budgets will increase and growth will be driven by digital channels that support brand awareness campaigns. As marketers seek to grow their brands and engage high-value audiences, they will need to tap into new and emerging channels and adapt to evolving consumer behaviour.
The survey revealed that 45% of marketers plan to increase their digital advertising budgets in the next year, with 50% noting budgets will stay the same. Results also highlighted that formats that support brand-building activity, including connected TV (CTV) and programmatic video, will grow. The full power of these emerging formats will be unleashed in 2022, and brands that get on board early will benefit.
With businesses recovering, brands that have halted or delayed growth plans will prioritise brand awareness in line with launching new products and services to a post-COVID market. Additionally, in this new ecommerce-driven world, which grew exponentially during the pandemic, online advertising channels will drive growth and provide a big opportunity for marketers to engage with their audiences effectively.
It’s time for marketers to lean in and adopt new technologies that can help them to scale digital efforts and support the evolution of their digital marketing strategies.
2) Collaboration with outsourced experts will help reduce digital marketing talent gaps.
Increasing digitisation and ecommerce growth within the industry, combined with the impact of COVID-19, has resulted in critical skill shortages and a lack of the ‘right’ talent. As the industry bounces back in recovery, marketers face pressure to develop their workforces for a new digital era in marketing. In fact, 15% of the marketers we surveyed stated that this would be a key challenge in 2022.
Marketing teams will continue to face skill shortages. They will need to rely on partnerships that can help fill the gaps in using and executing digital marketing activity, helping to upskill their teams and reduce barriers to entry within the martech and ad tech space. The digital landscape is complex–with unique tools, data, privacy, and regulations. Marketers will need to find and leverage digital partners to help navigate the landscape, keep up with trends, and ensure that they can plan, activate, and measure activity to demonstrate business results.
3) Early adopters of cookieless solutions will reap significant benefits.
This trend is certainly one that’s kept everyone in the industry talking over the past year, and despite Google postponing the deprecation of the third-party cookie, marketers that start testing early will be on the front foot.
Attribution is key in the cookieless world, but there is currently a lack of know-how. Our recent survey revealed that 2022 will be a pivotal year for media agencies and publishers as third-party cookies are sunsetted. They will be challenged to build their first-party data strategies and have a plan for ad planning, activation, and measurement in the post-cookie world. Savvy marketers will focus on future-proofing their digital marketing by testing new cookieless solutions in early 2022 to avoid the mad dash of Google’s 2023 third-party cookie deprecation deadline.
In our poll of leading martech marketers, we found that 60% are in the process of establishing their approach to cookieless advertising, with only 35% claiming they’re making great progress in the space. We are already seeing that those who advertise in cookieless environments early can reap the competitive advantage of access to new audiences, more inventory, and more scaled advertising results.
Download the full 2022 APAC Advertising State-of-Play Report to get more insights now.
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To further prepare yourself for 2022, check out these 5 resolutions for digital marketers.