Paid Media Predictions For 2023

The story of the last five years of paid search, and paid media more generally, has been a growing obfuscation of important data – from keywords to demography and many more – and an increasing push from large advertising platforms to ‘trust’ the better judgement of their machine learning.

These trends are unlikely to reverse in the coming year, but it will be interesting to see what impact the economic and political headwinds faced by some of the tech giants (and the privacy movement) will have on their ad offerings and whether increased reliance on machine learning – which requires as much experience as manual ads ever did to achieve the best results – will push more ad spend to platforms that offer a greater degree of control.

My predictions I will always defer to our experts in paid media matters – it’s an area I have always needed to keep up with more and learn more about. Still – as far as my tuppence-worth goes – I’d suggest that there’s a coming audio revolution in digital advertising.

Although the pivot to video has almost become a cliché in digital marketing, a pivot to audio (specifically using Google’s audio ads) to target low visual YouTube creators – podcasters, for example, which may be ‘watched’ without being watched, could reduce costs for advertisers on YouTube and increase effectiveness for advertisers seeking to reach podcast audiences.

In addition, should these ads find broader acceptance, it could power further growth in audio only advertising through podcasts which offer highly engaged and generally very specifically targeted audience access.