The previous year was rich in new stuff: new ad formats, enhanced targeting methods, and improved ways of measuring the campaign performance.

Out of $185 billion digital ad spend in the US, mobile accounted for a whopping 58%. Will this year be more successful and what will be the trends determining the mobile ad landscape? Let’s take a look into the future with Tapjoy.

Brands have been always paying for ad campaigns based on impressions metric. 2018 is expected to be the year when they will reconsider the outdated approach to digital ad inventory buying and start to rely on engagement- and conversion-based metrics. The technologies of measurement and verification have advanced greatly over the last year, raising awareness about frauds in impressions calculations and paving the way for such metrics as cost per completed view or viewable impressions, which allow to make the buying more quality focused.

Advertisers will turn to machine learning and technologies to bring targeting to a whole new level. Instead of going after the maximum number of users and having the “reach” in mind as their goal, they will try to single out those users who will engage with ads in the way brands want them to - install an app, watch a video, sign up for service, etc. How? They will use the goal-based bidding to improve targeting for ad campaigns and reach out to users who are most likely to take those actions in the first place. This will allow advertisers to focus more on their actual business goals instead of thinking about the maximum reach.

Targeting won’t be the only area of mobile advertising that undergoes major changes powered by state-of-art technologies. The ad creative is expected to become a whole lot smarter and effective with the introduction of artificial intelligence. Such tools as Creative Management Platforms and Dynamic Creative Optimization will help to create and adjust ad creatives on the fly making them suitable for certain audiences. The times when one and the same ad is brought to all users will be gone soon, as AI will provide the necessary toolset to deliver flexible, personalized and varied ad creatives.

 

Last year proved that programmatic advertising isn’t picture-perfect with all the problems related to fraud and viewability. However, it has a great many strengths, which are most powerful when in-app inventory comes into picture. With in-app the programmatic becomes free from all the mentioned issues, especially with a rewarded ad inventory. It’s fraud-proof because users opt-in to engage with ads and guarantee that ads are served to interested and real human beings. Its viewability is proven as the pricing model is performance-based, so you won’t pay for incompletely viewed ads or wasted impressions. There’s also been a transparency issue in question, but most programmatic ad vendors support full transparency at all stages. In the view of all this, the programmatic ad market is expected to shift to in-app in 2018.