Breakthroughs in Polish online advertising in 2016
Event of the year
The event of the year was the debut of the AdReal study. Previously, marketers had known a lot about their online advertising campaigns but they hadn’t been able to analyse those of the competition. Now marketers, media agencies and publishers can precisely analyse the online advertising operations of a chosen organisation. Today, we know who was advertising on the web yesterday, what formats they used, what they were communicating and on what sites, whether the adverts were visible and what reach they attained. It is no longer a secret how many adverts appear on individual web pages, what elements were displayed in the field of vision and how long internet users were in contact with them for. Today it is a simple matter to determine benchmarks for specific sector indices, identify SoV in a category, or compare the communication strategies of competing brands.
In my mind, this study opens a new chapter in the planning of online advertising campaigns.
Success of the year
In the internet market last year, changes made in monitoring the Polish web have undoubtedly been very significant. The new study makes it possible to analyse daily audience data, track changes in consumption of online content at work and at home, and provide greater information about mobile Internet.
PBI’s decision to again entrust Gemius to conduct internet audience studies is, for me, the success of the year. It is also a very motivating example for various companies grappling with difficulties, as it shows that misfortune can be turned into success.
Failure of the year
The word ‘failure’ sounds threatening; I am decidedly in favour of milder terms. I think that every misfortune is a lesson, a sort of signpost pointing to an area in need of serious attention and additional effort. For me, one such event which showed a weakness and imbalance in the market was the fact that for two years Facebook had been giving advertisers inflated statistics about time spent watching video content. And it is not an issue unique to that social site; to me, the incident is evidence that advertisers and media agencies should not simply look at publisher statistics when calculating and planning their campaigns, but that external and independent measurement and verification of publisher data is needed.
Person of the year
The internet user – quite simply, the actual person. Not cookies, not browser ID, not clicks, but the actual recipient of the online content reappeared as the focus of the sector’s attention.
Campaign of the year
The HejtStop campaign
Trend of the year
In this past year, we have observed further growth in programmatic buying, but this year a parallel trend was observed – the use of external tools to provide additional scripting and reporting for campaigns bought in automatic models, because marketers need information on what they are buying and from whom.
One important trend for me was the increased engagement of media auditors in the online part of campaigns. In media tenders and during strategy and media plan evaluation, auditors’ attention has always been on television, but is now directed towards the Internet. There has been an observable growth in the importance of benchmarks based on qualitative indices and significantly deeper analyses of the entire online advertising market.
My third important trend is the sector’s systematic discussion of common measurements for diverse types of media, which is particularly heated when it comes to combining online video and television.
Forecast for 2017
I predict that 2017 will be a year of evolution and not of revolution. We will experience further stable growth in the online advertising market, in which the importance of rich, engaging mobile content and video will continue to grow. It will also be a year of intensifying battles against adblockers, one of the hardest brakes on growth in this market. And a further issue – standardised measurement of advertising audience, comparison and measurement of effectiveness.
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