In today’s digital landscape, change isn’t just happening; it’s accelerating. According to Gartner’s 2023 CMO Spend and Strategy Survey, 25.6% of marketing budgets are now dedicated to paid media, underscoring its critical role in marketing strategies. The combination of new technology, changing consumer behavior, and updated regulations means the old ways of reaching customers aren’t going to cut it anymore. It’s crucial not just to keep up but to lead.
This blog is your roadmap through the key trends in paid media that will shape not only 2024 but also the years ahead. Identifying these trends is step one. The real game-changer is knowing how to use them to get real results—increasing engagement, driving up ROI, and building meaningful connections with your audience.
We’re diving into the essential paid media trends for 2024, showing you how to thrive in a digital advertising world that never stands still. This isn’t about keeping up with the future of advertising; it’s about defining it.
Understanding Digital Paid Media
Paid media is all about strategic promotion. Brands buy exposure and visibility across digital channels like search engines, social media, display networks, Connected TV (CTV), and other online spaces. The main goal? Target the right people, drive traffic, and convert leads.
Let’s break down paid media into five key elements:
1. Search Engine Advertising (SEA): Have you ever noticed those ads at the top of your search results? That’s paid search in action. When you search for something, like “best pizza near me,” those businesses have paid to appear there. Platforms like Google Ads allow companies to bid on keywords to increase ad visibility. And it’s a significant industry. According to eMarketer, 42% of all digital marketing spending goes into search marketing. Its popularity stems from its effectiveness.
2. Social Media Advertising: You’ve probably seen sponsored posts pop up on. your Facebook or Instagram feed.edia advertising at work. Advertisers can target their campaigns based on your age, interests, and even what you’ve been chatting about online. According to a recent report from Datareportal, more people discover new brands, products, and services via social media ads than word-of-mouth recommendations, brand and product websites, and consumer review sites.
3. Display Advertising: You know those flashy banners or videos that sometimes show up on websites? That’s display advertising. They’re there to catch your attention and get you to click through to learn more. Google has the largest display ads network, reaching 90% of internet users worldwide. It includes over 35 million websites, apps, and Google-owned properties.
4. Native Advertising: Ever read an article online or caught a show on your favorite streaming service and noticed a recommendation for a product or service that fits seamlessly into the content? That’s native advertising. It blends right in with what you’re already reading or watching, making it feel like a natural part of the experience. And they work. Native ads can increase brand lift by as much as 82%, based on the 2024 Gitnux Marketdata Report.
5. Content Promotion Advertising: Sometimes, brands want to get their content in front of more people. That’s where content promotion comes in. Whether it’s a blog post, a video, or an infographic, companies can pay to boost it, making sure more folks see it and engage with it. And it continues to grow. In 2024, 45% of content marketers expect their content marketing budget to increase, according to Zippia.
Unlocking Growth: The Strategic Power of Paid Media
Paid media isn’t just a checkbox on your marketing to-do list; it’s a strategic powerhouse that fuels growth and amplifies your brand’s impact. Here’s why paid media is an indispensable part of any integrated marketing strategy:
Amplification Beyond Organic Reach: Paid media extends your voice beyond the confines of organic efforts. It’s like turning up the volume on your brand message, ensuring it resonates with a broader audience. When your organic reach hits its limits, paid media steps in, ensuring your content and messages reach the right people at the right time. Based on data from Techjury, PPC traffic converts 50% better than organic site visitors.
Laser-Sharp Targeting Efficiency: Imagine having a precision-guided missile for your marketing campaigns. That’s what paid media offers. You can zero in on specific demographics, behaviors, and interests with granular targeting options. Eliminate concerns about wasting resources on irrelevant audiences. With our outstanding strategy team backing you, your message resonates with the precise audience your brand aims to engage.
Driving Conversions and Revenue: Paid media isn’t just about impressions; it’s about action. It funnels traffic to your landing pages, product showcases, or lead forms. When a user clicks, subscribes, or purchases, that’s where the magic happens. Paid media directly impacts conversions and revenue.
Evolution of Paid Media
Over the years, paid media has evolved significantly:
Early 2000s: Keyword-Centric Approach Intense bidding wars for keywords with advertisers competing for top spots in search engine results.
2010s: Segmentation and Personalization Targeted ad placements based on demographics, behavior, and interests, thanks to more sophisticated platforms.
2010s-2020s: Mobile and Video Dominance Content optimized for smartphones and the rise of video ads, with platforms like YouTube becoming key for engaging video ads. Streaming platforms like Netflix and Disney+ gained prominence, offering a vast library of TV shows and movies. CTV became the technical core for programmatic TV (PTV), enabling precise audience-based targeting.
Present: Data-Driven Optimization Use of advanced analytics and machine learning to fine-tune campaigns in real-time, informed by every click, impression, and interaction. CTV ads are streamed through smart TVs, connected devices (Roku, Amazon Fire Stick, etc.), gaming consoles, and more. Advertisers leverage CTV’s flexibility to communicate with customers along their buying journey. CTV ad spending has surged, projected to reach over $41 billion by 2027.
But that’s just the beginning! Next, let’s review the top trends to watch in 2024 as paid media continues to evolve and shape the digital landscape.
6 Top Paid Media Trends to Watch in 2024
As we look at media trends for 2024, innovation is driving key shifts in advertising strategies. From location targeting to the rise of AI and machine learning, each trend brings unique opportunities and challenges for marketers seeking to stay ahead of the curve. Let’s explore these trends and their implications for advertisers in the ever-changing digital ecosystem.
Trend 1: Location Targeting
We’re witnessing a significant shift towards local advertising targeting. Location targeting is becoming a key player in delivering highly relevant content to specific audiences based on their location.
Location-based targeting tactics include geofencing, geoframing, and geolocation targeting:
- Geofencing allows you to draw a virtual fence around a location and serve ads to mobile device users inside that geofenced area.
- Geoframing collects mobile device IDs from users who have entered a predefined location at a specific time and allows you to target those users after they’ve left.
- Geolocation targeting allows you to target countries, cities, neighborhoods, or regions by postal code.
By leveraging these tactics, you can increase brand visibility, compete with more prominent brands, and capture the attention of your target audience at the right place and time. The Choozle advertising platform is purpose-built to excel in location targeting, delivering impactful results for our clients.
“Choozle was incredibly supportive by increasing our website traffic and inbound marketing leads. I also like that they have solutions for CRM audience matching, geofencing and geoframing campaigns.” – Nicole C., G2 Review
Trend 2: The Rise of AI and Machine Learning in Ad Optimization
AI and machine learning are reshaping the paid media landscape, fundamentally altering ad targeting, bidding, and personalization. These cutting-edge technologies deliver unparalleled precision and efficiency, utilizing algorithms to forecast audience behavior and optimize campaigns in real time. Marketers are experiencing substantial improvements in ROI and campaign effectiveness as a result.
AI workflow streamlines processes and levels the playing field, empowering all stakeholders to prioritize strategy and outcomes. This AI-driven transformation enhances scalability and agility and equips marketers with deeper insights into campaign performance, facilitating data-driven decision-making and strategy refinement. As AI continues to advance, its pivotal role in paid media will undoubtedly redefine the future of advertising.
Trend 3: Interactive and Immersive Ad Formats
The emergence of interactive and immersive ad formats, such as AR, VR, and interactive video, reshapes how brands engage with their audiences. These formats allow for deeper and more engaging experiences, capturing consumers’ attention like never before. Brands leverage these technologies to create compelling experiences that resonate with their audience and drive meaningful interactions.
Trend 4: Social Commerce and Shoppable Ads
Social media platforms are evolving into full-fledged shopping destinations, with the integration of e-commerce capabilities directly into ads. Shoppable ads transform social platforms into valuable sales channels, allowing brands to turn engagement into revenue. Marketers are exploring best practices for leveraging these trends to drive sales and foster customer relationships.
Trend 5: Third-Party Cookie Alternatives
Google’s decision to eliminate third-party cookies from Chrome by early 2025 has sparked uncertainty among marketers and advertisers in medium-sized businesses regarding the future of tracking, targeting, and measurement. Despite the impending changes, this transition also opens doors for pioneering new and inventive strategies with the potential for substantial returns.
At Choozle, our approach to advertising in a post-cookie world is proactive and solution-oriented. While there are concerns about Google’s progress raised by the IAB, We see this shift as a significant opportunity for industry collaboration to strengthen the open web.
We’ve outlined five key actions to address the core challenge:
- Implementing Privacy-First Frameworks like UID 2.0: Once they gather a critical mass of opted-in emails, publishers should seamlessly incorporate this signal into ad placements. Privacy-first frameworks like UID 2.0 enable secure interactions without relying on third-party cookies.
- Geospatial Data Drives Better Insights: Leveraging technologies like Geocoding transforms digital maps for retailers. By understanding customer behavior and demographics, precise geotargeting becomes possible. This alignment with privacy regulations benefits advertisers and the broader regulatory landscape, leading to tailored marketing campaigns and increased foot traffic.
- Enhancing First-Party Engagement for Advertisers: Advertisers, especially beyond e-commerce, need authentic strategies to collect first-party engagement. This challenge persists in non-e-commerce spaces like CPG, where retailers often mediate interactions.
- Ensuring Compliance and Security for Third-Party Data Providers: Third-party data providers must prioritize compliance and security when collecting identity data.
- Collecting Opted-In First-Party Data from Publishers: Publishers and streaming content providers are adopting paywalls and daily caps to incentivize email collection from logged-in users, yielding valuable first-party data.
Interested in learning how you can succeed in advertising in a post-cookie world? Check out our Guide to Navigating the Post-Cookie World.
Trend 6: Market Consolidation
The media industry continues to experience an intense phase of consolidation, marked by notable mergers such as Disney’s acquisition of Twentieth Century Fox and the CBS-Viacom merger, reshaping the landscape. This consolidation trend is centralizing control, forming larger media conglomerates with enhanced bargaining power and strategic capabilities in advertising. A recent World Federation of Advertisers survey found that 79% of brands planned an agency transformation process while 53% sought to centralize agency.
With this consolidation, the big players are delivering robust capabilities and strategies accessible at all levels, not just in creative aspects but also in workflow and predictive clearing. They’re streamlining the supply path, reducing intermediaries, and improving market clarity while creating more value.
With that said, as independent media outlets decrease, competition for ad spaces within these conglomerates intensifies. This can lead to higher prices and decreased negotiability in ad placements. Additionally, the concentration of media ownership may result in fewer, albeit more expansive, advertising platforms, influencing the strategy and execution of media buys.
Advertisers need to prioritize building strong relationships with conglomerates that control multiple media properties to navigate this consolidated landscape. Leveraging integrated advertising solutions these conglomerates offer can grant access to a wider audience through a single negotiation point. Advertisers should also examine advanced targeting and personalization options enabled by the consolidated data capabilities of these large entities to enhance campaign effectiveness.
Delivering Meaningful Outcomes
In today’s fiercely competitive digital landscape, aligning emerging trends with specific marketing objectives is crucial for brands and agencies aiming to stay relevant and succeed. Ensuring they’re aligned with your business goals is important to leverage these trends effectively. Whether your focus is on increasing brand awareness, boosting website traffic, enhancing customer loyalty, or improving conversion rates, this alignment forms the foundation of an effective strategy.
Media Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA)
Media Mix Modeling (MMM) is a foundational method for evaluating how well different media channels contribute to achieving business goals. This method involves looking at past data to see how channels like CTV, audio, and digital-out-of-home (DOOH) advertising impact sales and other important metrics. By measuring each channel’s impact on overall marketing success, MMM gives marketers a thorough understanding of their media strategy.
Unlike Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), which focuses on individual interactions, MMM provides a broad view of marketing effectiveness across all channels. Using advanced statistical techniques, MMM identifies connections between media spending and business results. With these insights, marketers can adjust their media mix to get the most out of their investment and effectively meet strategic goals.
In the end, Media Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) help marketers make smart decisions about allocating resources by showing which media channels drive the best results.
At Choozle, we leverage cutting-edge AI-powered tools such as Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) and Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) to empower our advertisers with invaluable insights that elevate their marketing strategies and drive tangible outcomes. These sophisticated tools not only unveil inefficiencies but also streamline resource allocation, enabling brands to achieve superior results by minimizing wastage. While MTA focuses on pinpointing the effectiveness of individual touchpoints, MMM broadens the scope by delving into wider marketing dynamics, encompassing external variables. By synergizing MTA’s granular insights with MMM’s comprehensive analysis, advertisers are equipped to make well-informed, data-backed decisions, optimize campaign performance, and ultimately maximize efficiency.
The Bottom Line
As we’ve explored the evolving landscape of paid media in 2024, it’s evident that the path to success lies in identifying key trends and harnessing them to deliver meaningful outcomes.
By aligning emerging trends with specific business objectives, brands and agencies can unlock new opportunities for growth and engagement. Whether leveraging location targeting to reach audiences with pinpoint accuracy or embracing AI and machine learning to optimize ad performance, strategically integrating these trends is essential for driving results.
Methodologies like Media Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) offer invaluable insights into the effectiveness of marketing efforts, empowering marketers to make data-driven decisions and optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.
Navigating the dynamic landscape of paid media requires innovation and adaptability. By embracing change and experimenting with new strategies, marketers can keep pace with the evolving digital ecosystem and define the future of advertising itself.
Adam Woods
Adam Woods is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and held two other roles at Choozle — Chief Client Officer and Chief Technology Officer. Throughout his tenure at Choozle, he has been improving the way that advertisers buy media through the Choozle platform. He has led initiatives to ensure that Choozle leads the space in terms of being a consultative partner that helps ensure the effective deployment of media through a combination of omni-channel planning, targeting best practices, upfront goal setting, and effective measurement.
