Advertising is becoming more prevalent almost everyday. Everywhere you look, you are, either consciously or subconsciously, being exposed to some form of advertising. The most influential sector of advertising one could argue, would be that of digital advertising. From banner ads, to product placement, to social media endorsements, digital advertising is here to stay. But have you ever wondered, where did this industry come from? How has it evolved in such a relatively fast time? What does the future of this industry hold? That is exactly what we are going to be taking a look at today. First, let’s start with a brief recap of all the good stuff you might have missed. All information in the timeline came from oko.uk/blog/the-history-of-online-advertising.

As you can see, digital advertising has come quite a long way in a relatively short amount of time. The question I want to examine now is, what’s next? The industry has been making increasing strides towards more efficient targeting of users. Despite the recent controversy of these companies’ uses of personal data, tech gurus push on in search of the key to digital advertising. A major trend we see encompassing the industry is direct-to-consumer advertising. Larger companies have decided they can be more profitable by providing their own advertising versus paying a third party for their services. Another major innovation that is on the rise is interactive advertising. It feels as if you can’t scroll through Instagram and Snapchat without playing a simulation for the latest top hit game on the app store. However, interactive advertising takes many other forms, these include surveys, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. It is likely that as the Augmented and Virtual Reality platforms rise, so will the advertising industries behind them. An additional shift that is being foreseen is related to the rise of streaming services. Many around the world are leaning towards abandoning live tv completely, which opens the door for immense advertising access on the many streaming services available. Emarketer, a market research company, predicts that the ad-spending on these platforms will hit a whopping $14.1 billion by 2023, securing it as one of the industry’s leading revenue producers (https://smartyads.com/blog/the-future-of-digital-advertising/). 

Another major, mostly untapped industry for the future of digital advertising is inside of video games. There has been numerous studies conducted regarding the effect of in-game advertising, and it came with a wide variety of results. However researchers are confident that with more information about these effects, the video game industry could be the next major sector of the digital advertising. In contrast, the rise in social media has provided digital advertising a near infinite outlet, and with the addition of reaction sets, advertisers can get real time feedback on their ads, and they rate at which users “like” them (Digital Advertising). This will prove to be instrumental with the innovation of artificial intelligence, as the AI systems will eventually be able to adjust the ads they are putting out almost instantaneously, therefore providing companies with the absolute most effective ads.

However, with the innovation of advertising, comes the innovation of ad-blockers. The current issue with ad-blocking is that you can either choose to turn on or off ads, with not much in between. The new technology would allow users to determine what ads they wish to see based off of user privacy and content. This innovation would be groundbreaking for both industries, as it would force advertisers to up their game by providing higher quality ads and even more transparency on how they attain and use user data (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2996466).

There is no doubt that digital advertising will continue to evolve, likely into ways that would be impossible to predict right now. So now I ask you, where do you think the future of online advertising will go? Is there anything you think I may have missed? Take this poll and let me know what you think in the comments below. Until next time.

-C

“3 Trends That Will Change the Future of Online Advertising.” WordStream, www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/05/04/future-of-online-advertising. 

Bagnall, Dolly. “The History of Online Advertising – 1994 to the Present: OKO.” OKO Digital, 17 Nov. 2020, oko.uk/blog/the-history-of-online-advertising. 

Parra-Arnau, Javier, et al. “MyAdChoices.” ACM Transactions on the Web, vol. 11, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–47., doi:10.1145/2996466.  https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2996466


Rodgers, Thorson. Digital Advertising: Theory and Research. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2017. Web. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wlu/reader.action?docID=4809760&ppg=470