Ogilvy releases key trends in digital marketing for 2018

As the year nears its end, international advertising giant Ogilvy released its top trends and predictions for the upcoming year.

The advertising giant has been releasing an annual report to "spot the key trends in digital and social media marketing that are likely to be important in the coming year,". This year's release will be the fifth in the row.

Some of the key predictions for 2018 are shared below.

1. Safeguarding the digital space

On the official website, Ogilvy talks about the fast-paced growth of digital marketing which also makes it imperative to guard the medium against probable security threats and other attacks.

"There is also an array of initiatives to address problems with fraud in digital display and confront client concerns about programmatic buying. Platforms are working to make measurement more transparent and deliver a clearer link between marketing activity and business outcomes. Governments will have to make progress on state-sponsored hacking," as mentions the official release.

"We’re even doing passwords wrong. That annoying protocol that forces you to change your password every six weeks? And have different passwords for every system at work? And use crazy combinations of special characters so passwords are impossible to remember? Pointless," noted the release.

2. A departure from typing

The following year is predicted to see a move away from typing onto to a space that encourages the visual and the audio modes.

"Every form of technology, user interfaces are evolving away from fingers and thumbs and towards less tactile forms of interaction like voice and images," shared the release.

3. Next stop, Augmented Reality

The proliferation of good mobile tech and vastly improved AR platforms have now enabled mass-user penetration of said platforms.

Facebook has been one such brand promoting AR-user interaction, the extension of this will continue to be seen in the coming year as well.

4. Amazon, the dominant digital advertiser

Amazon "might soon rival Google and Facebook" when it comes to digital advertising.

"This is not about product pages. It’s about thinking of Amazon as a useful platform for advertising in every part of the sales funnel," said the release.

5. Influencer marketing, a bane?

Influencer marketing is predicted to grow in the following year as well, however, cracks might begin to show, "especially at the high-end where digital influencers straddle the line between influencer and celebrity". as mentioned by Ogilvy.

The complete list of Ogilvy's trends for 2018 is exhaustive and includes over 90 predictions some of which, apart from the one mentioned above, are mentioned below:

- The emergence & domination of video content.

- Search is moving towards voice ComScore - 50% of searches will be done by voice by 2020.

- Search will get more visual.

- More serious measures for digital privacy, data security.