6 Technologies That Will Reshape Marketing In The Next Decade
When the internet was beginning to be commercially adopted in the early 1990s, few predicted how it would completely overhaul the marketing industry over the next two decades. Ingenious search engines that navigate a plethora of budding websites, along with the first online display and search ads, marked a drastic turn of marketing dynamics as individuals’s active search behavior allowed for much more relevant and efficient ad delivery.
The emergence of social media represented an equally revolutionary milestone, whereby comprehensive data on user demographics, preferences and interests offered marketers unprecedented targeting options. The innovation of advertising is the foundation on which world-changing tech giants such as Google or Facebook are built upon. It has allowed them to claim a huge chunk of all ad spending and generate revenues surpassing the total GDPs of entire countries.
In a similar fashion, companies that manage to formulate the most scalable marketing ecosystems around the next wave of society-altering technology, coupling commercial with consumption intent more effectively, will experience astronomic growth and most likely become corporate superpowers — or further cement their dominance.
Early adopters who leverage those novel tools and unsaturated channels will gain significant competitive advantages, and new companies and agencies will emerge that build out their own tools or business models to complement the most impactful future marketing technologies.
Why are these three buzzwords seemingly just lumped together? Because their development is strongly interdependent, and combined they’ll underpin most major technology advancements. The synergy of AI and big data is already deeply rooted in the core marketing activities of both large and small digital enterprises: Recommendation engines account for a staggering 35 percent of Amazon’s total sales, multi-channel sentiment analysis informs the brand strategies of companies like Samsung, and every minor e-commerce retailer can already harness the effectiveness of chatbots.
AI thrives on mountains of information to fuel its continuous learning mechanisms, and once leveraged by the mind-bending processing speeds of quantum computers to tap ever-increasing sources of big data, its capacity to deliver unique insights, automate a multitude of tasks and even take over various decision-making aspects from humans will surge exponentially.
The likes of IBM, D-Wave and Microsoft are all investing heavily into quantum computing, and Google has already modelled quantum neural networks in a race to build the first stable and commercially viable quantum computer, a force of (artificial) nature that would enable the conception of a sheer endless number of potential AI-powered applications, some which we haven’t even imagined yet.
It’s safe to assume that the first commercial applications to emerge from the current research will serve the core functions of the companies at the forefront of their development. As a result, all pillars of online marketing — SEO, digital advertising, price matching etc. — will be subject to massive disruptions as they become more efficient and autonomous.
It also means many jobs will become obsolete. Various custom services provided by agencies, especially in the realm of data analytics, will inevitably become commoditized through respective AI tools. The cannibalization will even spill over to the more creative marketing segments, given algorithms that autonomously generate personalized assets, copies and content exist already.
The technological leap driven by the development of the holy technological trinity of big data, AI and quantum computing will open a treasure chest of unprecedented opportunities for online marketers in the form of novel applications to reach and monetize customers as well as an enhancement of the current digital marketing ecosystems.
