Social and Digital Media Trends To Watch For In 2015

2014 has been an exciting year for Digital as e-commerce touched newer heights and on the whole digital video commercial became a common term with every other brand launching its own digital centric video strategy.

Overall Digital and Social media saw a step up in maturity and evolution both from the client side and the agency side. Clearly brands now understand that social media can be very unforgiving and one bad move could have you trending on twitter for all the wrong reasons. There has been serious evolution in the social media scale and advertising options as well with Facebook and Twitter both looking to monetize their inventory. Social Content sharing too has scaled in 2014 with the likes of Scoopwhoop getting funded. While larger platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Linkedin have matured towards monetizing smaller platforms have moved towards growth as the internet expands in the country. Today brands are looking to leverage Instagram, Quora, Whatsapp and Snapchat inorder to tap the new age digital users.

Blogging and Influencer Management too had its share of monetizing with pay per tweet becoming a norm and influencer led campaigns becoming frequent.

As we look towards 2015 some things become quite clear. Digital is here to stay as a growing and in many cases central part of advertising for the next 5 years. Sir Martin Sorrell who controls more 50% of the advertising market in India through his network WPP was quoted recently stating that Digital shall be bigger than any other media by 2020 in India.

But in specific, 2015 could be a landmark year for digital and social media marketing industry. Here are 5  trends that I believe with either start or scale up in 2015.

Rise of the Digital Led Integrated Campaigns– Till recently Digital Display campaigns, Microsites, Social Media Management and Mainline Advertising were handled separately and mostly mainline would come up with a  master campaign and digital would adapt. But in 2014 I've noticed that digital led campaigns are starting to be established around which other media channels are integrated. The idea in itself is a digital idea with other media playing the supporting or amplification role. This I believe will increase In the year to come.

Social Media ROI Will Emerge – Social Media has always been associated with branding, engagement and buzz. But ROI has always been a question mark. Mostly ROI driven campaigns have been run by ecommerce brands which have been able to connect click to sales. 2015 will definitely see reach, branding and engagement ROI evolve. One will also see brands and agencies working on engagement to leads campaigns that serve both business and brand needs.

Video will be at Center for All Campaigns – Video is the last mile of communication and today with Youtube commanding more than 60 million viewers each month. 2015 will see mainline agencies pitching digital video content for brands and branded commercials being made purely for digital platform. We will also see several video innovations with interactive video led campaign and realtime video sharing campaigns.

Mobile Innovations And Apps Will Explode – Mobile is growing faster than any other digital subset medium. Its surprising that its taken this long for Mobile marketing to scale in India. 2015 will see Mobile innovations and branded apps stand out in campaigns. It will still not dominate digital but will become more significant than ever before.

Programmatic will be the buzziest word in Media Buying - Display ad buying and impression and clicks will all move to programmatic buying very very quickly. The targeting will shift from platform buying to audience buying. Cross device targeting and geo fencing based targeting will increase multifold. And in general everyone and anyone will be talking about Programmatic.

Digital Agency Acquisitions Will Multiply So Will Niche Independent Agencies – 2014 saw the rise of several niche video centric creative shops and this will be a trend that shall continue to grow. We will see many mobile centric technology agencies spring up in 2015. What we will also see is multiple Social and Digital Agency acquisitions in 2015.