Advertising, the Next Chapter…
By Raymond Reid (CEO) | March 15, 2019 | Opinion
Explore Canada’s evolving digital advertising landscape and challenges. Are you ready for the next wave? Dive in now!
We now live in a marketplace in which everything is becoming digital, and as with every maturing technology, sooner or later a few entities secure dominance while the remaining grapple for the scraps. This is the state of digital advertising in Canada 2019.
Canada is a unique market for many reasons and has served us well from a technological adoption perspective, but it has also exposed troubling signs revealing how a select few companies can dominate an entire industry and market. According to eMarketer, ‘Google and Facebook command three-quarters of all digital advertising dollars in Canada, a much larger share compared to the US and UK’. As seen in mature industries where dominant players have out-maneuvered, out-innovated, and/or leveraged dominance in one market to establish a significant beachhead in another, both Google’s and Facebook’s current strength in Canada is probably a combination of all of these, but perhaps more heavily weighted towards the latter. Despite this and the various issues they both face, Google and Facebook have achieved significant accomplishments and have ushered in a new era of advertising in a similar way to that achieved by Microsoft with desktop processing in the 1980s.
However, the benefits of a maturing market come with a downside – the death of innovation. As the below graphic illustrates, the introduction of the first display banner ad in 1994 was the start of a constant flow over approximately 17 years of innovative technologies and companies who introduced new advertising opportunities to our increasingly digitally connected lives. These companies delivered greater insights and targeting capabilities than that achieved, or could be achieved, through traditional channels. The flipside of this market growth as the dominant players emerged and established a stranglehold on the industry, innovation started to slow, moved to a crawl or even dried up completely leaving digital advertising to be less about innovation and more about consolidation and entrenchment of market positions to maintain dominance.
Soon the phrase itself, and the reliance on, ‘digital advertising specialists’ will fade as all mediums, including television, become digital. The challenge, as well as the opportunity, that we will face in this next chapter of advertising is to determine whether we will lazily cede all our advertising dollars to these digital ad age winners, or start asking the questions we should have been asking all along.
Will we simply stand back, or will we move forward and determine if these are the best choices for achieving our business objectives or just shiny objects that distract like a baby’s rattler.
We are now in a new era of advertising, one in which digital advertising is no longer an option, but remarkably one that is still not well understood by the very advertisers pouring billions into companies without fully recognizing the value in return. With the increasing demand by advertisers for greater control and transparency, hopefully there will be greater awareness of the true efficacy (or lack thereof) of digital, and exposure of the weaknesses of current technologies and players, in order to spur a new stage of innovation that will offer greater choice and market dynamics.
We may not be in Kansas anymore, but OZ can be a great new place.
Sincerely,
Raymond Reid
Founder | CEO, advertience Inc
