The Landscape of Media and Entertainment Industry

The media and entertainment industries will see several changes where users have larger concerns about how their data is utilised, and privacy is an emerging challenge.

FREMONT, CA: Digital advertising’s future lies in firms adapting skill sets from the past as they look to the future. One of the most significant is the meteoric rise in digital ad spending focused on algorithmic platforms. Many advertising chips are still seen prominently with the transition from Web 2.0 to a future Web 3.0. There are significant shifts in ad spending with the evolution of the internet. During the Web 1.0 era, newspaper and television advertising accounted for 40% and 30% of total ad spending, respectively. Over the past few years, newspaper advertising has dropped to two per cent and television only 20 per cent of total ad spending.

The current trends suggest that future advertising will continue to be characterised as digital. Due to changes in the internet domain and a renewed focus on privacy, the digital advertising of Web 3.0 may not resemble the digital advertising of Web 2.0. The shortcomings of centralisation drive the primary reason for Web 3.0's growth. Repeated instances of power abuse by social media platforms and centralised authorities have encouraged users to adopt decentralisation.

Several social media companies depend on an algorithmic feed coupled with dynamic data collection to monetise their services. For example, a company made substantial changes to its privacy controls, limiting the tracking capabilities of digital advertisers and allowing their users to opt for data sharing, creating a pervasive effect. Despite this development leading the charge to control data back in the users’ hands, consumers continue to have concerns about how their data is utilised. A recent survey showed smartphone users worry about how companies use their data and how the government tracks their online data. Only a small percentage feel in control of their data online.

On the policy front, companies estimate a 60 per cent chance that in the near future, the federal trade commission (FTC) will try to use its rulemaking power to minimise the ad-data business by defining certain practices as unfair or deceptive. With data privacy as the pivot, data tracking under fire, and the pull toward decentralisation, middle-market digital advertisers require the borrowing of customer segmentation tactics and ad placement strategies from the pre-digital marketing era.

Digital marketers’ future success will depend on their ability to quickly become acquainted with Web 3.0, in which an ecosystem identifying target market traffic inside a digital metaverse instance could more closely resemble the bus stop ad placement than the algorithmic approach of more than a decade.