It's tradition, Stroom does the 2019 media forecast. What will change and what will stay? In addition to the future, we also take a look back at 2018, because it was another great year! In addition to our wonderful current clients and their campaigns (Diabetes Fund, Red Dead Redemption II, Blokker, Sanquin and Braun, among others), we also welcomed new clients such as BiFi, BDO, Nationaal MS Fonds, Fleurop and Dierenbescherming.
What are the trends for online in 2019?
2018 was the year of the AVG. Cookie notifications popped up like mushrooms. Everyone wanted permission for all sorts of things, but experience shows that far from everyone accepts cookies unthinkingly. Opportunities to target very specifically or apply retargeting have become a lot more difficult in many cases. The big challenge for marketers now is to gain consumer trust. You will have to communicate openly and honestly about what you do and what you stand for as a company.
Not surprisingly, content marketing is a hot topic (know how it works? check out our in-depth interview!). Instead of realizing the largest possible reach, more and more companies will choose to offer personalized content in order to better meet the needs of their customers. This can be done, for example, through collaborations where you as a company can hitch a ride on the reach and image of an appropriate influencer (from YouTubers to news platforms).
The amount of content produced will continue to grow, even though there are really only 24 hours in a day. Therefore, the main challenge for 2019 is how you as a company manage to grab the attention of your target audience with your content. Should this succeed, 2019 could be a very great year!
-Steven Ripken, Online Planner
Rutger on 2019 and a little bit of 2018
Always fun, looking ahead to the new year. And predicting trends that we know rarely come fully true anyway. Still, every year I make an educated guess.
Much of what will happen in 2019 is already showing itself now. And it can be summed up as a huge fragmentation of (mass) media consumption. The use of linear TV, still the big reach medium, is declining rapidly. Although a number of influencers now certainly have a large following, they fail to appeal to millions of people daily. In any case, video is having a hard time; it is not for nothing that major advertisers are pulling back budgets. The effect of video, in relation to the huge investments, is too little demonstrated.
For TV, with fewer viewers, operators can sell fewer GRPs. To maintain their turnover, they therefore raise their prices. As an advertiser, this pretty well forces you into a split: there are fewer viewers to reach, and if you can reach them, they are more expensive too. See here the revival of outdoor and radio in 2019. But they do lack AV power, and we will see that the prices of these media will also rise. In short, to reach a large part of your target audience in 2019, you will still have to try hard.
And then some practical trends: podcasts are not going to break through yet (people don't always want to actively choose their media/radio at all), John de Mol takes a stake in Wehkamp and Stroom becomes media agency of the year again in the Adfo Christmas report. I'm already looking forward to it.
-Rutger Mackenbach, Director Stroom
But what will 2019 bring when it comes to research?
In particular, online information overload means that in many cases the consumer buying process today has become too complex for advertisers to properly understand. More than ever, they are therefore looking for smarter, faster and cheaper ways to gather relevant audience insights in the hope of spotting patterns in consumer behavior.
Based on this fact, we expect to see the greatest development in the coming years in the rate at which qualitative and quantitative research will assimilate. Both disciplines have existed for decades, but until recently often lived in two different worlds. It is precisely by combining, but really literally combining, the unique insights that these methods bring that the gems can be uncovered that people are so eagerly looking for. Qualitative techniques, such as Storytelling in which one shares his or her experiences with a product or brand, and Think aloud in which the respondent has to formulate his or her thoughts aloud during the online purchase of a product, when combined with a quantified questionnaire, can provide a wealth of additional insights.
At least at Stroom , we expect much from the fusion dinner of these two research islands in the coming year.
-Remco de Stigter, Research Director
Credits header photo: City Guide Rotterdam