Programmatic Trends 2023: 10 Agency Expert Roundup

For good and bad, 2022 is coming to an end.

What lies ahead in 2023 nobody knows for certain. However, we will do our best and that's why we asked 10 industry experts to give their insights into what they expect from a top level view with everything from new technology, economic climate, and changes in markets.

So grab your coffee, sit down and get inspired by programmatic experts from media agencies around the world in 2023 programmatic trends expert roundup post.

‍1. How do you see brands becoming more efficient at advertising in 2023?

Digital transformation is accelerated by Covid. Since then, most advertising brands have been even more open to testing digital advertising capabilities. More and more advertisers are having some kind of data strategy thanks to the slow death of the 3rd party cookies. But brands that can manage to establish dynamic messaging via proper data strategy are going to be the winners of 2023.

2. Which new formats, technologies, and platforms do you expect to grow in 2023?

If publishers can also provide sufficient inventory, we expect video advertising to increase in digital. CTV and in-game advertising are also expected to increase.
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3. What are your predictions for programmatic advertising in 2023?

Due to the overall price increases and inflation, I expect more budgets to be allocated to programmatic from traditional media. Technical difficulties, technology/data costs, and lack of data opportunities are the main barriers of programmatic advertising. We work hard to overcome these obstacles. Programmatic is going to grow either by additional connected devices (CTV) or media inventory (mobile gaming, etc.).

If agencies can find a solution for stopping laser-targeting programmatic expectations of advertisers, then programmatic expenditure can naturally increase with the focus on reach and scale campaigns. Data insights that are available in programmatic are not aimed at disservice our campaigns via over-targeting but for earning great learnings.

‍‍‍1. How do you see brands becoming more efficient at advertising in 2023?

Consumer-centric approach. What does it mean? Communication will be built around the consumer, placements, and content; messages will be adapted to each consumer and placement.

2. Which new formats, technologies, and platforms do you expect to grow in 2023?

Advertisers in Digital want to segment the audience and communicate with each segment separately in order to be relevant to each consumer. The importance of third-party data will increase in 2023. The lack of DCO in our market when the system itself knows what specific content to show at the right time.

3. What are your predictions for programmatic advertising in 2023? 

Definitely a growth against the backdrop of constantly rising TV prices.

‍1. How do you see brands becoming more efficient at advertising in 2023?

We believe personalization will take a better place during 2023, as 2022 was a big start of it among some advertisers in Armenia and abroad. Also, some ways of avoiding extra limitations in retargeting because of the IOS 14.5 updates. Some advertisers currently struggle a lot to catch the users at the right time and place, we believe that during 2023 there will appear better and easier ways to gather more data.

2. Which new formats, technologies, and platforms do you expect to grow in 2023?

Ads that are relevant for the users, innovative ads that are catching attention / interscroller ads.

3. What are your predictions for programmatic advertising in 2023?

We’d like to see better transparency to make sure no fraudulence is implemented. Sometimes, we see the same ad running on the same website in several spots, so we’d like to have better control over the ads.

‍1. How do you see brands becoming more efficient at advertising in 2023?

Strong focus on ROI in digital performance campaigns, finding the proper way how to distribute the budget effectively in omnichannel communication.

Focus on people's attention with specific formats, and the agency should take into consideration further metrics for post-evaluation of the campaigns.

2. Which new formats, technologies, and platforms do you expect to grow in 2023?

Growth of Tik Tok, shorter videos on Social networks, audio ads in podcasts, and in-game advertising.

3. What are your predictions for programmatic advertising in 2023?

Still growing amount of investment into programmatic advertising, the higher budget allocated in video formats, increasing of DOOH and CTV advertising.

‍1. How do you see brands becoming more efficient at advertising in 2023? 

Brands are going for full-funnel digital channels where 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party data is utilized to remarket/retarget for higher ROAS.

Measurement and Attribution being at the center of data collection, analysis, and optimization.

2. Which new formats, technologies, and platforms do you expect to grow in 2023?

Gaming, AR, VR, Attention Economy, …

3. What are your predictions for programmatic advertising in 2023?

Move into Pay Per Result (CPA & CPL) over CPM and CPC.

Clients have been asking for real-time trigger-based campaigns, of course, higher quality inventory to maximize Revenue ARPU and ROI / ROAS.

‍1. How do you see brands becoming more efficient at advertising in 2023?

Global Brands aim to centralize their Marketing and Execution by choosing a good local partner (Agency) and then trusting their expertise.

2. Which new formats, technologies, and platforms do you expect to grow in 2023?

There is a demand for inobtrusive yet eye-catching formats with high-quality standards that deliver the Ad Message.

3. What are your predictions for programmatic advertising in 2023?

Continuing growth, testing new opportunities, evaluating and consolidating platform mix to maximize effectiveness.

‍1. How do you see brands becoming more efficient at advertising in 2023?

The Modern consumer purchase journey is more complex, fragmented, and driven by multiple digital channels. Brands that adopt omnichannel advertising Retargeting tools will stay ahead of the competition. 

The death of third-party cookies will give rise to zero-party and first-party data advertising strategies that will build a better and more valuable connection with customers. These data-driven changes will see greater adoption of conversational marketing. Brands will lean more towards artificial intelligence for personalized engagement and targeted advertising.  

2. Which new formats, technologies, and platforms do you expect to grow in 2023?

Brands are getting out of the COVID-19 Pandemic that increased the growth of “Over the Top” advertising due to increased online consumer shopping. With the streaming giants expected to invest more, brands will spend more to capture the younger youthful audience glued to Connected TV and OTT. 

The growing adoption of audio content by Gen-Z will see a shift to audio programmatic formats to assimilate this generation of the consumer with growing purchasing power. 

A post-COVID-19 Marketing strategy will see brands embrace Digital out-of-home programmatic ad buying to executive creative and impactful digital communication campaigns.

3. What are your predictions for programmatic advertising in 2023?

Brands will gravitate towards in-house programmatic ad buying to save cost, effectively use zero/first-party data and optimize return on ad spend (ROAS). The focus on zero and first-party data will create programmatic advertising experimentation and innovation that will lead to the development of customized programmatic algorithms to deliver the hyper-targeted advertisement.

‍1. How do you see brands becoming more efficient at advertising in 2023? 

As the end of 3rd party cookies is coming next year, brands should focus more on gathering as much as possible 1st party data and prepare to invest more to brand building than small targeting campaigns, as targeting can become more complex. Also, all advertising tactics should be flexible and easy to change, as brands will be more sensitive regarding economic and consumer behavior changes.

2. Which new formats, technologies, and platforms do you expect to grow in 2023?

We expect to see growth of mobile advertising, short video content, podcasts, in-game advertising. Influencer marketing popularity is not showing any signs of decreasing, however brands will be searching for a new ways how to stand out, such as using more micro influencers, creating more authentic and value-driven content instead of non-personal content with just a mention of the brand. Also all global porgammatic platforms (Google, Meta, Adform) are searching for solutions regarding cookie-less world, so they will definetly introduce new solutions which will be worth to try. Google Analytics 4 will also change the way of e-commerce measurement.

3. What are your predictions for programmatic advertising in 2023?

We predict, that it will grow +10-20%.

‍1. How do you see brands becoming more efficient at advertising in 2023?

The consumer journey in digital media is already a myriad pattern. It will become even more complex & vexing in a cookie-less world. Every digital platform is aware of and pushing advertisers to build their own audience, i.e 1st party data. In my view, I believe that understanding and well-preparedness to embrace 1st party data management will be very crucial for us in 2023.

2. Which new formats, technologies, and platforms do you expect to grow in 2023?

It is getting more evident day by day that people are spending more time on their mobile phones, but they are surfing across thousands of content on so many platforms, and their consuming patterns gives us the direction that Short videos, Vertical Formats, and Gaming will continue to grow. Another significant shift will be through interaction/Gamification, which is driven by experience, for example: Augmented and virtual reality.

3. What are your predictions for programmatic advertising in 2023?

Surely Programmatic gives advertisers a lot of flexibility in terms of the scale of reach, automation/agility, targeting, and minimizing waste. In the coming years, more clarity on ad serving and placements (where they are being served, benchmarking, etc) linked to Brand Safety, 3rd Party Viewability will surely be in place.

Another growth lever can be of educating and bringing more advertisers into offers like guaranteed/preferred deals and how this can help advertisers more into efficiency.

And also, meaningful metrics need to be proactively fed to advertisers, for example, interaction, events within the creative, engagement rate, time spent, etc these can be very interesting and sweet points to make good cases and highlight the impact of Programmatic in digital.

‍1. How do you see brands becoming more efficient at advertising in 2023?

One big change I hope to see for the coming year in B2B marketing is Brands moving away from a Product focus mindset to a Promise type mindset. I like this type of thinking going forward as we stop looking at and trying to sell the features of a product itself, but more at what the product promises to deliver to the customer. It’s all about building a connection with your customers, and a product or service itself is incapable of delivering on that. But, a promise of what the product can do for the consumer or customer holds much more emotional weight. The keep point, though, is not over-promising or making promises that are not able to be kept. If you fall into this trap as a brand, it’s a difficult place to come back from.

2. Which new formats, technologies, and platforms do you expect to grow in 2023?

We may be seeing in 2023 a lot more pushback against the big social platforms and a trend towards decentralized social media and the creation of Super Apps. Citing the big, messy changes at Twitter, I think everyone has seen just how vulnerable large social media platforms are to the whims of Billionaires who own these platforms.

I think there is a call and need out there for social media platforms that are truly communal in nature and are built by the users themselves, such as “Mastodon”This new type of social networking could offer us a fresh sense of freedom and independence from large corporate platforms.

3. What are your predictions for programmatic advertising in 2023?

The gaming sector is seeing huge, unprecedented growth year after year. And with this growth, there are evolving new opportunities to monetize gaming. Programmatic offers several options for monetization with In-Game ads, such as retargeting, which helps increase overall ROAS and ROI for advertisers. 5G Technology will not only boost streaming and multiplayer gaming but will also heavily improve the impact of in-game ads. Because In-Game advertising is still relatively new, I feel that there is a long way to go to develop and leverage this opportunity for advertisers in order to reap big rewards.

Topic summary

• Death of 3rd party cookies: Umut Yasar, Hasan Faruque, Justin Ongeri, Rimvydė Rimkūnaitė, Vergine Simonyan, Martin Muli, Alexey Roshonok
• Video advertising: Umut Yasar, Hasan Faruque, Józef Sajdik
• CTV advertising: Umut Yasar, Józef Sajdik, Martin Muli
• In-game ads: Umut Yasar, Józef Sajdik, Mike Herrera
• Eye-catching creatives: Richard Szabo, Józef Sajdik, Vergine Simonyan
• Audio: Józef Sajdik, Martin Muli
• DOOH: Józef Sajdik, Martin Muli
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Ready for 2023

2023 is coming whether you are ready for it or not. Being prepared, and well-equipped for what is coming is essential to provide value to customers. We can't wait to share what we have in store for you next year.

A big thank you to all participants in the expert panel, we appreciate taking time out of your calendar to help inspire and educate.