Crystal gazing into 2023: Digital trends - From Privacy to Personalisation

Authored by Rajani Ranjan, AVP - Digital Strategy, Zenith.

The year 2022, despite 2 years of pandemic, saw high digital adoption amongst consumers, leading to digital media as the biggest contributor to advertising spends, surpassing TV. We are now bracing for 2023, which is going to forefront economic challenges in light of global factors, Russia Ukraine war, the extreme volatility of crude oil prices, high inflation in Europe and decline in the US GDP. All of this potential marketplace uncertainty will mean optimisation of resources across all fronts for companies, including advertising.

We will look into five areas to focus for winning 2023:

3P Cookies to Zero Party data - You can delay it, but cannot avoid it

Chrome has the largest market share in browsers. Any changes to the process of collection of 3P cookies will severely impact the revenue streams for marketers and agencies.It will be very critical for advertisers and agencies to move away from cookie-based methodologies to 1Party (1P) data collection. Advertisers need to put in practices around data collection and enrichment to stay ahead of the curve in cookie-based retargeting and remarketing campaigns. The more robust practices an advertiser has, the better is the ROI from digital ad spends.

This in turn will give rise to collection of 0P data collectionthrough form building. Zero-party is a term coined by Forrester Research. According to Forrester’s definition: "Zero-party data is that which a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a brand. It can include preference centre data, purchase intentions, personal context, and how the individual wants the brand to recognize [them].”

Data Driven Marketing - Moving beyond cohorts & segments to personalisation

We’ve seen advertisers investing heavily into technology like CDP and CRM systems all in an effort to acquire, understand, convert and retain customers.

Insights and analysis into customer behaviour and preferences and predictive modelling to anticipate better will form the core of a successful digital marketing strategy. Therefore, advertisers need to create processes that collect and unify 1P data from multiple sources to build a single, coherent and complete view of each customer. This data can include behavioural data, transactional data and demographic data.

The video play button continues to be the favourite

With the launch of 5G services, the video consumption in India will further go up. India is a mobile first market and 60% of users consume videos on their handset. With the urban market reaching saturation in terms of new mobile users, the next wave will come from non-urban centres. The fortune lying at the bottom of the pyramid needs to be unearthed and hence publishers, as well as ad tech providers, will focus their energies on this audience segment.

CTV will grow fast due to the reduction in the cost of owning a device, scaling of infrastructure and low-cost subscription models. For advertisers looking at premium audiences, this has been the lowest hanging fruit and hence a strategy needs to be built to gain mileage. However, there are challenges around measurement and call to action on CTV. Advertisers and ad tech partners will have to come together to build solutions around this and make it an indispensable part of the planning process.

Short-form video platforms have grown thick and fast in the country and have around ~200 million users. The creator economy continues to rise, which is around $75-150 million. This has grown on the back of short-form video platforms wherein people binge on short, snackable forms of content.

Game on!

India has around 400 million users who game at least once in a month and is expected to reach over 650 million by 2025. Gaming continues to emerge and become bigger and better. 5G will act as a catalyst to accelerate the adoption further in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets.

While YouTube continues to be the choice of platform for game streaming, Amazon might bring in Twitch to India. OTT platforms have also started offering dedicated gaming streaming services. Therefore, it is critical for marketers to have a dedicated strategy around gaming with focus on in-game presence, owning IPs and content partnerships.

eSports will be a part of 2022 Asian Games (postponed to 2023 owing to Covid). This will also provide further growth to the arena of gaming and esports in India.

Programmatic Retail Media - Sitting on wealth of transactional data

As the e-com sector experienced a considerable boom, a new space gained prominence – programmatic retail media.These networks operate as closed-loop ecosystems like ecommerce, e-pharmacy stores, online grocery, etc. The platforms leverage consumer data on their platform mostly around transactional behaviour (for example, Amazon, PayTM, Flipkart, Big Basket, etc.). The hordes of deterministic data on how a user shops and searches on these platforms makes them irresistible to a marketer. These platforms can play a very critical role in driving middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel.

With the ever-growing avenues, there is room to test and learn and continue to evolve our marketing strategies keeping consumer in the centre.

With this, we wish you a Happy 2023.