Ad Age’s Digital Predictions 2016

From the Demise of Texting to the Next Phase of Facebook Messenger

Facebook’s Messenger Opens for Business
Facebook’s chat app is poised to become the social network’s next big revenue stream. Originally an instant-messaging service, Messenger was spun off into its own app in 2014. And after a series of announcements, now it’s ready to start up its own business. Last year Messenger began testing ways for businesses to use the service as a customer support line and for people to use it as an artificially intelligent assistant that can do things like order an Uber car. As more people use Messenger to communicate with businesses, expect Facebook to find a way to charge companies for the privilege, as it’s done with its own social network. –Tim Peterson

The Death of Texting
Emojis ruled in 2015. But GIFs, those quick looping videos or animations, are the next messaging app trend. In Asia, GIFs have been huge on apps like WeChat and Line. The appeal is obvious: Why use a standard yellow smiley face when you could send someone a three-second cat video? The fancier, funnier cousins of emojis are familiar from sites like Tumblr, but they’re about to get much more mainstream in Western markets, since Facebook finally embraced them. Facebook Messenger integrated a GIF-finder, and some brands have been using them on Facebook too. Between emojis and GIFs, who really needs text anymore? –Angela Doland

Headhunters Look to China
Given the explosion of online shopping in China and how crucial that market is, more multinationals will tap executives with experience there to oversee their worldwide e-commerce strategy. Case in point: Mars recently promoted its China general manager, Clarence Mak, to chief customer officer and global e-commerce leader. Mondelez International’s Cindy Chen, global head of e-commerce, also has worked in China. –Angela Doland

Refined Virtual Reality
This year will deliver more sophisticated virtual reality experiences, refined storytelling and increased layers of interactivity, given the consumer arrival of the Oculus headset and a variety of big deals in the space. Oculus partnered with premier VR storytellers Felix & Paul Studios to develop long-form, narrative content. Disneymade a $65 million investment in Jaunt VR. And 20th Century Fox is diving in as well, unveiling “The Martian Experience,” based on the blockbuster movie, at its Fox Innovation Lab during the Consumer Electronics Show.–Ann-Christine Diaz

2016 Won’t Be 360-Degree Video’s Breakout Year
There are plenty of reasons to believe 2016 will be the year that 360-degree videos hit the mainstream. Two of the biggest digital video services, Google‘s YouTube and Facebook, already support the format that lets people swivel their viewpoint all the way around a scene. And Facebook’s Oculus VR has finally begun selling the long-awaited consumer version of its virtual-reality headset that, like Samsung‘s Gear VR and Google Cardboard that are already in the market, is more tailored to 360-degree video viewing than a smartphone.

But while the ways to watch 360-degree videos have grown, there’s still the question of what people will watch. The New York Times, Vice and Disney are among the content companies already producing 360-degree videos, but too many of the 360-degree videos currently available offer beautiful documentary-style landscape shots yet lack a clear story or characters that can entice mainstream audiences and offset the format’s learning curve. If people are to tune in to 360-degree videos consistently, those videos must survive the novelty of the form; their content needs to rival, if not surpass, what people could watch normally. And for that to happen, filmmakers need to experiment with the form. That will likely require more time than 2016 holds. –Tim Peterson

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2015 Predictions for CMOs and Digital Marketing

Gil Press Contributor

In 2015, digital marketing budgets will increase by 8%, according to a recent Gartner’s CMO Spend Report, a survey of 315 marketing decision makers representing organizations with more than $500 million in annual revenue.

Customer experience is the top innovation project for 2015, continuing its role as the top priority for marketing investment in 2014. The survey also found that

• In 79% of companies, marketing has a budget for capital expenditures — primarily, for infrastructure and software
• Marketers are managing a P&L and generating revenue from digital advertising, digital commerce and sale of data
• 68% of organizations have a separate digital marketing budget — it averages a quarter of the total marketing budget
• Two-thirds of companies are funding digital marketing via reinvestment of existing marketing budgets

Earlier this year, IBM found in its worldwide survey of CMOs that CEOs increasingly call on them for strategic input. Furthermore, the CMO now comes second only to the CFO in terms of the influence he or she exerts on the CEO. The survey also found, however, that very few CMOs have made much progress in building a robust digital marketing capability: Only 20%, for example, have set up social networks for the purpose of engaging with customers, and the percentage of CMOs who have integrated their company’s interactions with customers across different channels, installed analytical programs to mine customer data and created digitally enabled supply chains to respond rapidly to changes in customer demand is even smaller. Almost all CMOs, 82% of survey respondents, felt underprepared to deal with the explosion of data.

With this as a background, here’s a summary of what digital marketing and the CMO will look like in 2015, based on observations by Scott Brinker, a leading commentator on marketing technology, Forrester, TopRank online marketing blog, Wheelhouse Advisors, and Brian Solis.

CMOs will take charge of focusing their companies on the customer

CMOs and their marketing teams will become the primary driver behind customer-centric company growth. Leveraging their knowledge of the customer and the competitive landscape, CMOs will advise and council CEOs on how to win, serve, and retain customers to grow the business. They will also lead organizational changes and new collaboration initiatives aimed at unifying all customer engagement activities across the enterprise.

CMOs will poach IT staff to help them manage a rapidly expanding digital marketing landscape

The number of digital marketing tools will grow in 2015 with new startups and large, established tech companies confusing even more that CMO with their numerous offerings. To help manage this embarrassment of riches and move their companies further on their digital marketing journey, CMOs will be poaching IT staff looking for new challenges and better salaries.

CMOs should expect heavy rains from proliferating digital marketing clouds

Digital marketing tools will be increasingly offered as a cloud-based solution (“marketing-as-a-service”) rather than licensed software. Cloud-based solutions will continue to expand their ecosystems, with many small software developers adding apps to existing cloud-based digital marketing platforms.

CMOs will invest in new digital marketing hot areas

Content marketing and predictive analytics will continue to be hot areas of interest and investment for CMOs, but they will be joined in 2015 by sales enablement, post-sale customer marketing, marketing finance, marketing talent management, and new tools based on the Internet of Things, allowing for the integration of offline and online experiences.

CMOs will become brand publishers

CMOs in 2015 will act as heads of a publishing house, overseeing the entire spectrum of brand engagement, increasing the quality of their output, and improving the perceived value of digital interactions with customers and prospects.

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