What does 2017 hold for the Digital Media, Marketing, Technology and Creative Sectors?
Working within the recruitment industry means we are privileged enough to partner with some of the most influential people and companies in the industry on a daily basis. And the insight that we gather gives us a unique opportunity to identify some of the trends towards new technology and declining and growing parts of our industry.
What does 2017 hold for the Digital Media, Marketing, Technology and Creative Sectors?
2016 was an interesting year! The media, data-driven advertising and the way that we consume content had a seismic involvement in major global events. In ad tech we saw a year of consolidation, with a number of exciting acquisitions and IPO’s. Although a challenging year in many respects digital media, marketing, creative and technology people and businesses grew and evolved.
On the “job front” they remain great sectors to work in with a high demand for talent in both new and established skill sets.
The advertising landscape continues to evolve. As well as the rise of data-driven advertising and data-led technology we are seeing a stronger demand for creativity and for creativity to play a leading role in data-led advertising. The best people and the best businesses are bridging the various “silo’s” within digital advertising. Harnessing data, content, creativity and experiential touch points to create meaningful campaigns.
Here are projections for 2017 and the digital advertising landscape:
- Display advertising
Programmatic will continue to grow and take a larger percentage of the display advertising budget. Yet there will be a stronger demand for creativity and personalisation. Whether this is targeting an audience “cross device” or using technology that can create greater personalisation and more creatively focused content, be this on a desktop, mobile or tablet. Video will continue to play a leading role in this as will header bidding.
There will be a strong demand for talent in sales (SaaS based tech people) trading, account management and analytics.
- Content led marketing and biddable media:
Content marketing and big data will continue to be the top rated digital marketing techniques of 2017. A Focus on content marketing (including areas like “influencer” marketing and social) and paid social will be key elements to most leading brands digital marketing activity.
There will be an ever increasing demand for “biddable media” experience in both brands and agencies. We see “biddable media” and “programmatic” experience playing a much greater part of people’s roles at a senior level within media agencies. These skills, and an understanding of these channels, have an ever increasing importance.
- Insight and Analytics:
With IBM reporting that the volume of marketing data has doubled in the last eighteen months what we do with data and how brands, publishers, agencies and tech vendors use data is more important than ever.
The agencies are making a shift toward “data planning”. How can brands use data to create more emotionally engaging campaigns? Significant investments are being made by agency networks in people and tech to help their customers achieve this.
People who have a great grasp of data and who can articulate this to clients in a simple and meaningful way will remain in high demand.
- Creative:
Pioneering brands want hyper-personalised digital experiences, achieved by creating messages tailored to an individuals’ wants and needs. Enabling niche user experiences for more personalised groups is increasingly significant. Mobile-first design will continue to force brands to focus on only the necessary content, design plays a large part in the delivery of this message and needs to be consistent across all devises.
We see that the scripting languages that we dominate in 2017 are Angular3, ReactJS , PHP 7, Python, PHP, JavaScript, Visual Basic .NET, Ruby on Rails, Swift, C# and Scala.
- Technologists:
The ad tech market continues to move away from an IO based sale into more of a self-service based model. Marketing tech and customer management tools are enabling marketers to close the loop between technology and behaviours or actions. Advertising is already data heavy and tech driven, so the convergence of ad tech and mar tech is inevitable as they complement each other as major ad tech and mar tech vendors fight to build better and more comprehensive tech stacks.
There will continue to be a great demand for talent in sales, account management, optimisation, “product” and “tech” led roles across the ad tech and mar tech space.
- A word on Jobs
In spite of some doomy post Brexit projections the job market in the digital media, marketing, creative and technology sectors in London has remained buoyant and robust. Although more cautious the clear majority of businesses who we speak to are increasingly optimistic about 2017 an expect and plan to grow their revenue and market share.
The very best of luck for a purposeful, meaningful and productive 2017.
Content by The Drum Network member:
Sphere Digital Recruitment
We recruit for digital jobs in digital media, creative, marketing and content. Our clients are ad technology providers, brands and agencies
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