2015 marked another major year of advancement for marketing technology. The space is rapidly maturing andmoney continues to flow in from the VC community. As the trend will no doubt continue, 2016 will be even more dynamic as the space continues to evolve and mature. The next 12 months will prove crucial for businesses making a conscious effort to shift towards a customer-centric operating model. Consumers expect a personalized experience in-store and online, and marketers continue to be challenged by a more and more complex stack of tools that claim to be the “platform” for aggregating data.
Meanwhile, the advertising technology sector looks much different. Consolidation in 2015 brought players like Millennial Media into the fold of larger brands like AOL seeking to keep up in an increasingly competitive ad market. Venture capital decreased significantly in 2015 as investors felt concerns over crowded marketplaces and the unknown potential impact of ad blocking.
To have a better understanding how marketing and advertising tech will evolve during the next year, we’ve curated industry predictions for you.
These 5 marketing tech trends will be huge in 2016
Learn how senior marketing leaders from Amazon, Mondelez, and American Express are growing their businesses in a period of rapid technological change. In 2016, marketers will keep learning how to draw on the right types of information to understand consumers, without crossing the line and knowing too much.
Altimeter’s Top Digital Trends for 2016
Altimeter’s top trends for 2016 from analysts Charlene Li, Susan Etlinger, Ed Terpening and Omar Akhtar discuss the need for a consolidated MarTech platform, growth of predictive intelligence, and the birth of analytics for the visual web.
Seven marketing tech predictions for 2016
Radium One’s Rupert Staines sheds light into how solving viewability and ad-blocking, and embracing ‘dark social’ will drive the martech market in 2016.
7 not-quite-predictions for marketing technology in 2016
Now that you have gone over the marketing technology outlook for the year ahead, here are some not-quite-predictions that will share meaningful ideas and trends that we think are likely to impact marketing in the year ahead. Open source is coming to martech in a big way, and we’ll see a number of viable projects launched in 2016.
Digital Media M&A Growth Continued in 2015
Mergers and acquisitions in the digital media industry continued to accelerate during 2015, according to data from investment banking and strategic advisory firms. There were a total of 2,286 deals related to digital media, information and technology announced globally during 2015, according to Coady Diemar Partners, up from 2,218 during 2014. That represents growth in transactions of around 3.1 percent. But according to Diemar, much of that activity came from the agency, marketing and digital content sectors, which saw growth in transaction numbers of 30 percent and 23 percent, respectively.
Ad Tech Growth Hits Speed Bump
In this article, The Wall Street Journal takes a look back at 2015 and recounts how ad-tech industry growth slowed down in the fourth quarter as firms decided to conserve capital. According to an analysis of LinkedIn data by Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser, there was a noticeable slowdown in hiring at major ad tech firms in the fourth quarter. While some of the deceleration in employee growth may be due to the reorganization of a company’s business priorities or potentially due to a slowdown in business, Wieser said many ad tech firms are cognizant of conserving capital.