Six of the best: key trends to drive campaign success in 2017

The biggest challenge marketers’ face today is understanding their consumer in real time.

The pace of their lives has never been faster. Technology is making attention spans shorter and consumption patterns more complex. The world overall is getting smaller yet consumers have never been more elusive to reach.

Therefore, the demands on brands to connect with consumers have never been greater. Advertising is getting harder to deliver and linking marketing investment to business return is of paramount importance inside boardrooms. Thus, marketers need more proof their media investments are working so leaders across our EMEA business looked into their crystal balls to share the dominant trends that will drive successful business outcomes in 2017.

All Systems Go: death of the silo
Organisations have too many silos and there are too many links in the media and marketing supply chain. This inefficiency affects business performance and every business will be looking to reshape their organisations to prepare for a different future. Brands and agencies that connect the dots by adopting a systems-led approach to data-driven marketing will win. The importance of connecting a brand’s system of paid, owned, earned or shared channels will change the distribution map for both content and media.

Mobile ‘Moneyball’: a very personal assistant
We now officially use our mobile devices more than any other device. That represents a large data set that we’re only just beginning to tap for a whole host of marketing purposes. It means a great deal for marketers, private and public services, as well as a conundrum for regulatory, legal and consumer privacy groups. We’ll see a watershed for how we want this extension of ourselves to be used by commerce and government. In advertising terms, it will become the compass and monitor to build more personalised communications.

Marketing taps into the Unknown: the rise of Dark Social
More and more consumers are using private channels for online content sharing. RadiumOne estimates 83% of online sharing is done privately through Dark Social channels such as email, IM, forums and secure sites….this is a huge consumer ‘signal’ that not enough brands understand or can actively harness. The likes of O2, Adidas, Boots tapping the potential of Dark Social will see many more advertisers look to harness this significant digital marketing blind spot to connect their dots and drive better outcomes.

Data Tsars: the rise of marketing’s new superstars
Data is the oxygen that businesses now crave - high performance, data-driven marketing solutions are being adopted by more brands, making the role of the data scientist a critical piece of the marketing organisation. The evidence from various leading brands using data to fuel their business success is now too big to ignore and it's a central pillar for any business in today’s digital world. Data Science changes the game – it will unlock unseen insights, spot trends and identify consumer signals in real-time.

Precision Politics: a new era in campaigning
Following the extraordinary 2016 US election result, expect there to be a clamour by political parties around the globe to employ data science specialists to unlock the power of voter data through hyper-targeted messages. UK firm Cambridge Analytica did exactly that for Trump, unlocking multiple consumer data sets to target advertising messaging. He was outspent by more than two to one in media terms so the mixture of PR headlines, Twitter and hyper-targeting clearly worked! With German, French and Italian elections all due in 2017, such data specialists will be in high demand and hyper-targeting will become the new norm for election campaigns. 2017 will see data scientists become the new industry superstars!

‘Martini Media’: Programmatic Anytime, Anywhere
Agencies like Dentsu Aegis have set aggressive targets for having 100% of their media buying done programmatically by 2020. The jury’s out on whether this will happen, however, what’s clear is that 2017 will see more innovation and experimentation in programmatic media across all channels, digital and non-digital. Surprising and exciting partnerships between media owners, agencies and technology businesses will unfold to take programmatic to a higher level of sophistication and capability.

This article was originally featured in Campaign.

Rupert Staines is European managing director at RadiumOne.