Businesses need a contemporary understanding of core advertising principles, advertising’s strategic relationship with the broader field of marketing, and the fundamental shifts that have redefined how brands connect with consumers. Advertising is about earning attention, holding it, and converting it into measurable value.

This post will cover:

• What is advertising?
• What is programmatic advertising?
• Marketing vs. advertising.
• Digital advertising vs. traditional advertising.
• How can technology improve advertising strategies?
• What advertising strategies can a company employ?
• How does a company effectively advertise?
• What is the future of advertising?

What is advertising?

Advertising is the technique and practice brands use to bring products and services to the public’s notice, encouraging them to respond to what a brand has to offer, whether product, service, cause, or idea.

Advertising helps sustain brands. It’s focused on getting a message out to a specific customer type or audience to get them to take a specific action. Types of advertising include video, display, paid search, paid social, print, email, radio, TV, and outdoor.

Advertising helps brands inform, persuade, and influence a target audience to take a specific, valuable action. Today, advertising is fundamentally about creating a value exchange with the consumer. The global advertising market's projected size is $1.3 trillion, highlighting the immense investment and reliance on sophisticated advertising strategies.

This modern practice is built upon four crucial pillars:

• Building Brand Awareness: Advertising serves to make a brand visible and memorable. The goal is to ensure a brand is recalled by a consumer instinctively when a relevant need comes up. This involves a consistent and strategic presence across various media channels.
• Targeted Messaging: Advertisers can now deliver hyper-relevant messages to specific audience segments with precision. Leveraging large datasets that collect demographics, interests, and online behaviors, advertising ensures that communications reach the most receptive individuals at the right time.
• Driving Action: Advertising campaigns are designed to elicit a specific, measurable response from the audience. This desired action can range from a top-of-funnel engagement, such as clicking an ad or signing up for a newsletter, to a bottom-of-funnel conversion, such as making a purchase.
• Creating Emotional Connections: Advertising can create an emotional bond with the audience. When consumers connect with a brand on a personal, emotional level, they are more likely to develop long-term loyalty, becoming advocates and repeat customers.

In the past, advertising success was often measured by reach and repetition—how many millions of people saw a television commercial, for instance. Digital platforms introduced interactivity and basic tracking, allowing for the measurement of clicks and website visits. The emphasis on emotional connections and driving action signifies that success is measured by the quality of engagement and its impact on business outcomes. This shift requires advertising to provide tangible value to the consumer—be it information, entertainment, or utility—in exchange for their attention and data.

What is programmatic advertising?

Programmatic advertising is the automation of the advertising process: artificial intelligence (AI) software decides where and when ads are placed and automates the purchasing process. There are usually three types of people involved in programmatic advertising:

• The buyer, who places the ad
• The publisher, who sells space for ads
• The broker, who facilitates these relationships

Programmatic advertising automates the role of the broker. It helps people find where to place ads based on the criteria they've established to reach the people they are targeting.

The programmatic advertising process can be understood by examining the key players and their interactions:

1. The User and the Publisher: The process begins when a user visits a website or opens an app. The owner of that digital property, known as the publisher, has ad space (inventory) that they want to sell. To do this efficiently, the publisher uses Supply-Side Platform (SSP) software that manages their ad inventory and makes it available to the programmatic marketplace.

2. The Advertiser and the DSP: On the other side of the transaction is the advertiser, who wants to purchase ad space to reach a specific target audience. The advertiser uses Demand-Side Platform (DSP) software that allows them to manage their ad campaigns, set targeting parameters, define a budget, and automatically bid on relevant ad impressions.

3. The Ad Exchange: The Digital Marketplace: The Supply-Side Platform sends the available ad impression to an Ad Exchange. The ad exchange acts as a digital marketplace that connects many SSPs with many DSPs. Real-time auction for an ad impression takes place in the ad exchange.

4. Data and the DMP: To make intelligent bidding decisions, advertisers need data. DSPs often connect to Data Management Platforms (DMPs), which are large repositories of anonymized user data. A DMP can enrich the information about the user visiting the publisher's site, providing insight into demographics, interests, and purchase intent. This allows the advertiser's DSP to decide whether this user is a valuable target and how much to bid for the impression.

5. The Winning Bid and Ad Serving: The ad exchange conducts an auction among all the DSPs interested in the impression. The DSPs, acting on behalf of their advertisers, place bids in real-time. The highest bidder wins the auction. The ad exchange then instantly notifies the winning DSP, whose ad creative is retrieved and served to the user on the publisher's website.

Marketing vs. advertising.

While the terms marketing and advertising are often used interchangeably, they represent distinct business functions. Understanding their strategic difference is crucial for developing and executing an omnichannel strategy.

Marketing is the process of identifying, predicting, and satisfying customer needs and wants. It is the foundational framework that guides how a company positions itself in the market. The scope of marketing is extensive and includes the following aspects:

• Product: Developing goods or services that meet a specific market need.
• Price: Setting a pricing strategy that reflects the product's value and the market's willingness to pay.
• Place: Determining the distribution channels through which customers can access the product.
• Promotion: Communicating the product's value to the target audience.

Advertising is the execution of a promotional strategy defined by the broader marketing plan. While market research might identify that a target audience is increasingly concerned with automated project management, it is the role of advertising to create and disseminate a campaign that communicates a brand's project management software.

Furthermore, their roles can be distinguished by the types of media they influence. A comprehensive marketing strategy will incorporate three forms of media:

• Owned Media: Channels that the company controls directly, such as its website, blog, or social media profiles.
• Earned Media: Publicity and exposure gained organically through public relations, customer reviews, word-of-mouth, or viral content.

• Paid Media: The domain where a company pays for its message to be placed in third-party channels. This is the primary territory of advertising.

Advertising is the paid, public, and persuasive messaging that brings the marketing strategy to life. Marketing sets the stage by defining the audience, the message, and the objectives. Advertising takes that message and broadcasts it through carefully selected channels to achieve those objectives.

Digital advertising vs. traditional advertising.

One of the benefits of digital advertising over traditional methods is that it provides an easier means to track a customer across their journey. Compared to traditional advertising, you get more information about your customer and can build a better understanding of their behavior.

Traditional advertisers couldn’t track a customer’s interests and past purchases and then make accurate purchase predictions based on them. With digital advertising, you can understand customer behavior in greater detail. And in turn, customers can develop a better understanding of your brand via digital advertising.

For example, say somebody finds your web page through a search and then goes onto your social media platforms, starts following you, and sees your Instagram photos. If you want people to understand and further research your brand, digital advertising tends to be the favorite.

But digital advertising can also be expensive, so if you don’t know who your target audience is or how to reach them effectively, you could spend a lot of money and not get the return you expect if you aren’t tracking your audience.

Traditional advertising can still be relevant, depending on the brand or your specific goal.

Print advertising — that appears in newspapers or magazines — can help capture the essence of what the brand is and what it stands for, and it projects that concept to the audience. The problem with print advertising is that we don't know all the people it reaches.

You can make assumptions based on a publication’s brand, but you lack the actual data on its audience. But you still get the benefit of building brand awareness and associating your brand with a specific idea. For example, suppose you run an ad in a publication like Vogue. In that case, you’re connecting your brand with the lifestyle offered by Vogue, which is different from the lifestyle provided by, say, Harper’s or Cat Fancy.

Television advertising has generally adapted to the new market, as many people now watch TV online. Advertisers can now track and connect with those customers through either source.

Traditional TV advertising remains a valid option for marketing professionals, as it enables them to convey a story visually. It’s interactive, in a sense, because it's more than just a phrase or one static image. With both TV and podcasts, you get to tell a story about your product or service.

How can technology improve advertising strategies?

Technology can improve an advertising strategy by automating ad circulation, thereby targeting an interested audience from the start.

Using Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) to look at historical data is key. Doing so helps companies make decisions regarding how to pinpoint those moments when customers, who behave similarly, might potentially engage or convert. Technology that tailors ads to customers and sends them on a specific journey based on their past behavior and needs allows companies to understand and convert or retain customers.

Companies need to be careful not to over-automate, though. Advertisers still need to have a hand in some of these decisions balancing , as AI has its data interpretation limits. But AI and machine learning are helpful and effective in helping brands get the most out of their digital marketing budgets and run more efficient campaigns that have a better return on investment (ROI).

What advertising strategies can a company employ?

Encouraging customers to develop an emotional connection with a brand or product is key to conversion. Another strategy is making a specific claim about your brand. You need to establish a connection between the customer and the product. For example, you might imply that eating a particular food will make you feel healthier or happier, or that a specific brand of body wash will help you feel beautiful and luxurious.

You can also convince a customer to join the bandwagon. You show them how other people are enjoying the brand, and ask why they haven’t engaged yet, since so many others have. To further convince them, you can offer promotional rewards. If the customer chooses to interact with your brand, they will receive a discount or other promotional benefits.

Repetition is also key in keeping up brand recognition. And here’s where AI comes in: By targeting an audience and with brand exposure, you can encourage conversion little by little over time.

Many companies run simultaneous ad campaigns across different channels. They may show the customer a display ad, then later show them a video ad describing a few additional benefits of the product. All the ad types play into each other to solidify the brand’s significance and reliability, as well as the product being offered.

How does a company effectively advertise?

To effectively advertise, a company must have a goal. They often view advertising as a non-tangible tool that showcases the brand's greatness. While that can be helpful to tie your brand to a specific product and reinforce your brand name, it’s essential to make sure there is some goal you’re trying to achieve.

You can adjust the goal as you receive results, but it's crucial to have a clear objective and analyze the data to inform your next steps. If you aren't, then you're not getting the ROI, and you're not sure how effective your advertising is.

Furthermore, you must understand who your target audience is, how they’ll respond emotionally to an advertising campaign, and what it takes to lead them to conversion. Advertising can encounter problems when people struggle to associate their product with specific patterns.

In a perfect world, you’re reaching your target audience in the right place, at the right time, and with relevant content. To effectively advertise, you need to target the right audience at the right point in the sales cycle. Do you want your ad to target a customer at the beginning when they’re trying to decide on a brand, or do you want to target somebody who’s already picked your brand and is now in your store looking at their options?

Each ad is going to be different depending on your goal and what you want the customer to do, but it’s essential to understand where that customer is in the sales funnel to better tailor that advertising to them.

What is the future of advertising?

Advertising is growing increasingly specific, with a hyper-focus on first-party data. The trend involves identifying customers and their particular behaviors, and then understanding how to target or retarget them.

The fastest-growing sectors in advertising are:

Retail Media: Retail media spending is projected to reach $100 billion by 2028. This is driven by advertisers' desire to reach consumers at the digital point of sale, leveraging the rich first-party purchase data that retailers possess.

Creator-Generated Content: Advertising revenue generated on platforms dominated by user-generated content has disrupted video entertainment. This reflects a shift in what media consumers engage with, providing content creators with an ability to build large, engaged audiences.

Connected TV (CTV): As audiences continue to migrate from traditional linear television to on-demand streaming services, advertising dollars are following. Advertising on CTV platforms is projected to grow dramatically, with revenues expected to reach $51 billion by 2029. This channel combines the high-impact, lean-back viewing experience of television with the advanced targeting and measurement capabilities of digital advertising

How do companies know which customers to target with ads?

Choosing which customers to target with which ads comes down to collecting first-party and behavioral data about user activity, and understanding how different users come to your site.

You need to find out how customers learned about your brand, whether it was via:

• A paid media ad
• An organic search
• Email advertising
• A link from another domain (a referral link)
• A social media campaign

If your brand attracted a far smaller number of website visits during an email campaign than after a series of ad placements, you know more about your customers than you did before: They aren’t meaningfully responsive to your email campaign. Any elements contributing to the success of your paid media campaign should be applied to your email marketing strategy. Alternatively, you may decide to shift your email budget to paid media to maximize the impact of fewer channels to your bottom line.

How can companies advertise on a small budget?

If you can’t pay, then you have to put in the work. There are a lot of free resources out there, such as social media pages or search engine optimization. You don’t have to go all in on a paid search campaign — you can choose a few keywords and craft some text-based ads to appear on a search engine results page.

You can craft an info-rich homepage and effective landing pages. And there’s no replacement for good content. Long-form content, in particular, yields high conversion rates.

How can companies ensure their ads stand out without becoming annoying?

There are a lot of little things that marketing channel publishers are doing to try to force the hand of customers to engage with an advertisement. For example, when YouTube first incorporated ads into videos on their platform, people were suddenly getting bombarded with ads they didn’t want to watch.

As a solution, YouTube added an option where users could skip an ad after five seconds. Customers are still exposed to the ad, and can continue to watch it, but they have the option to skip it if doesn’t appeal to them. And it gives the advertiser five seconds to convince the customer to engage with their brand.

As advertisers look for ways to stand out, they need to explain the value of their product to their customers in a succinct way. They also need to know which customers to target, what they’re likely to respond to, and what calls to action will drive conversions.

What does poor advertising look like?

Advertising can be considered bad when it isn’t prudent, thoughtful, or conscious of what’s happening in the world. It can usually be tied back to some kind of social inappropriateness or a lack of awareness about the current market. There’s a lack of consideration about how an ad will be perceived.

Inauthentic advertising is also a problem, like one brand copying another brand’s spontaneous moment. Inaccurate advertising — advertising that misrepresents a product — can also be considered bad.

Also, any advertising that doesn’t target correctly or speak to the brand’s customer base won’t be effective.

What is the future of advertising?

Advertising is growing increasingly specific, with a hyper-focus on first-party data. The trend is identifying specific customers and their specific behaviors and then understanding how to either target or retarget them.

Privacy laws and regulations will also have an impact since data collection is so vital. We’ve seen some challenges already, such as how limited data can make it difficult to get the right ads or get the right information in front of your customers. And further restrictions on customers' first-party data will probably present some more challenges.

But what we're finding is that there's a level of acceptance that customers have in the Americas. They understand that without giving some information to advertisers, the advertising experience will diminish. The ads you see won’t necessarily be relevant, and that’s one thing that creates a frustrating experience.

Deloitte predicts that that AI and programmatic advertising will dominate, and that “traditional processes involving RFPs, human negotiations, and manual insertion orders will vanish from the digital advertising space.”

Kate Scott-Dawkins at Essence Global concurs that AI will play a major role in the future of advertising. However, she doesn’t discount the importance of the human element in advertising, stating that “companies will need to become more transparent, sustainable, and purpose-driven to meet the expectations of post-Millennial generations over the next decade.”

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