Advertising is as old as the Roman empire; it’s safe to say that advertising started when merchants had the need to create awareness to make sales. while that’s the case, it’s quite difficult to compare the degree of effectiveness of advertisement methods during ancient times to what we have now – what we know for sure is that the industry has been consistent in making new innovations.
In today’s advertising industry, there’s hardly a product or service that isn’t suitable to be promoted in one form of ad strategy or the other. We’ve even seen platforms like gamblingguy.com promoting bookmakers and casino companies – an industry which is often shied away from because of its addictive tendency on participants.
Whether we like it or not, advertising has always been and will continue to be a core part of making sales and closing deals. More so, the impacts of technology on advertising within the last three decades have really made it the go-to strategy for companies who can afford to capitalise on it to make sales.
Even though the fundamentals of advertising, “to inform and to convince,” hasn’t changed even with improvements in technology, there’s a huge difference between what’s obtainable today with extensive application of technology compared to when obsolete methods of advertising were still in vogue.
Size of Market
While this might be a no-brainer to most of us, the actual increment in value is still mind-blowing nonetheless. Just 30 decades ago, the entire advertising industry was worth just about 130 billion dollars; however, in 2021, stats at Imarcgroup says that the value has reached 590 billion dollars. More so, projections suggest that we can reach 790+ billion by 2027 – that’s more than 100% growth every decade.
With Google, one of the most valuable companies in the world, making over 80% of its revenue from advertising, it’s hard to deny the massive growth we’ve seen in the industry in recent years. As we’ve seen some tremendous evolution in adtech, it has created new media platforms, giving more brands advertising spaces and packages, thus increasing the overall market value of the industry.
Impact on Audience
The conversion rate of advertisement techniques has increased over the years to the extent that most companies will forfeit banking on the sheer volume of ads to targeted packages designed specifically for their type of audience.
The advertising method has long since evolved from the infantile scattergun approach to a level where user data is collated, allowing platforms to create more targeted and personalised ads. As the number of people who use the internet increase over the years, so does the ads algorithms get better at analysing consumer behaviours, feeding them the best ads that fit the types of content they consume or search for online.
In an interview, Michael Chidzey, founder of John Cabot, an SEO agency, talked about using SEO techniques to ensure that their clients make sales or get traffic to their websites. Things have gotten sophisticated to the extent that people take audience research and monetisation as a professional career.
Availability of More and Improved Platforms
In the 90s and early 2000s, there weren’t a lot of digital platforms to advertise on. Meanwhile, TV and Radio advertisements didn’t have a lot of conversion strength. Thus, most advertisers were spending more on ads than they earned from conversion. More so, Newspapers, TV, and Radio advertisement spaces were very limited and hard for SMEs to get ad spaces.
With websites and social media platforms pretty much on every corner, getting a deal with ad publishers to create exposure for smaller businesses hasn’t been any easier. More so, the addition of social media influencers into the scene has created an advertising method with an even higher conversion rate.
Meanwhile, with the outreach of TV dropping by about 10% every decade and the daily read on papers dropping by 34%, it’s clear that digitalised advertising has become the way forward for any business looking for exposure.
Overall, it’s hard to squeeze the impact of technology in the advertising industry into one mould. From what the modern-day audience demands, to what technology has made available, the contributions to the change in the advertising industry are somewhat dynamic.
