Noor Naseer and Kaitlin O’Brien from Basis’ Media Innovations & Technology team explore key digital advertising trends for 2025.
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Republished from the SiteScout blog
Programmatic was a prevalent force in 2014, with 80 percent of the advertising industry — including advertisers, publishers and marketers — executing digital advertising programmatically throughout the year. That accounts for over three-fourths of the whole marketplace.
Banners were still the dominant digital ad format, with more than 85 percent of the market using programmatic to execute them. Mobile was employed programmatically by over 60 percent of the market, preroll ads by 50 percent and native advertising by 20 percent of the industry, demonstrating how programmatic has progressed past display advertising.
Quality, however, was lacking in 2014, with viewability and ad fraud being the market’s main obstacles, with brand-safe environments also constituting a major concern for industry players.
2014 was a memorable year for mobile advertising.
Native advertising in mobile really started to come to the fore. Total spending on native advertising was projected to increase by about 47 percent to $3.2 billion in 2014. More demand and supply has fostered more innovation. While app discovery was a challenge in 2014, the development of in-app advertising proved to be a promising part of the solution. Watch for the development of new innovations in this area in 2015. Programmatic in mobile also took some significant strides in 2014 with improvements in the use of first- and third-party data in particular. Expect this trend to continue in the New Year.
Mobile advertising will continue to develop at a rapid clip in 2015, particularly in the areas of native advertising, scalability and app discovery.
Don’t count out the banner ad. It’s not dead yet despite what some might think. Actually, it’s starting to thrive.
The banner ad, of course, isn’t perfect. Web users generally prefer advertising-free environments, and there are many awful banner ad campaigns — awful by virtue of bad creative. Publishers will often forgo quality creative in order to maintain the integrity of their site’s user experience. It’s about short-term revenue gains versus long-term product reputation.
All that said, banner creative is getting better. Advertisers are figuring out how to speak more effectively. Creative is finally beginning to be designed specifically to suit the online experience rather than being repurposed. This improvement helps eliminate “banner blindness” and boost ad performance.