What Will Digital-Video Advertising Look Like in 5 Years?

In the past few years, video has been perhaps the most powerful driving force behind the global digital advertising industry. And while the niche future undoubtedly remains optimistic, five years from now online video advertising trends will definitely be at least somewhat different from what we are currently tracking in 2021.

Let’s take a quick look at what digital video advertising could look like in 2026.

5G-powered reign of immersive advertising

While 5G adoption has faced numerous hurdles in 2020 and 2021 (owe it to the pandemic-induced economic slowdowns or the waterfall of disinformation that is spreading online and fueling general fear among people), the next five years will be longer than be enough to get them to get things going. And as the variety of 5G devices will obviously dominate the market in 2026, so will AR and VR powered immersive video displays. Not only will these provide an extraordinary experience in the e-commerce and travel industries, but they will also become an essential part of gaming ads, opening the brand new era of Metaverse for customers.

One of the most promising video ad formats in the VR and AR gaming universes will remain the familiar premium video ads, and these will definitely offer viewers an interactive, tiered journey and, accordingly, a granular reward system.

More importantly, the latter, game-related trend is also likely to cover the parent-controlled niche of advertising, offering a unique mix of educational and entertainment promotional content for kids with access to VR sets in their homes. In light of this, the digitized Barbie universes seem like the least imaginative example of many.

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Revitalizing 360-degree video ads on mobile devices

Even if Facebook may not be at the top in 2026, the mobile communications industry will definitely dominate by then. And this is where the online advertising money will flow. Even in spite of the Setting third-party cookies and the ever stricter regulations on the use of customer data, the volume of mobile advertising will only grow in the next few years.

However, given the lack of precise targeting, brands and agencies need to be more careful about curating ad content in order to make it interactive and engaging enough to attract and retain customers within a large cohort.

One of the possible solutions that we expect to make a comeback is the mobile-specific 360-degree video ads, which have gained less prominence in recent years than originally expected. Namely, these are likely to be displayed flexibly in both vertical and horizontal device modes to ensure a smooth experience with different screen configurations and sizes (including the foldable smartphones).

Survival vs. Revitalization of Influencer Curated Video Ad Content

First and foremost, our predictions are that the online influencer community as we know it will die by 2026. And yet it will continue to develop and grow far beyond the limits we can imagine today. This paradox is self-explanatory. The competition among YouTube bloggers has already pushed many of them below the targeted monetization thresholds, and the TikTok boom is devouring the influencer market, making everyone a star, so that hardly anyone can actually monetize short-term fame through direct brand advertising.

What can emerge from such an overwhelmed influencer market is its constrained, more sophisticated iteration, with brands investing more money in promoting their long-time ambassadors in the influencer community, but pushing them further in terms of the quality and format of curated videos -Ad content.

The collaboration between GoPro and RedBull is perhaps a simple but very comprehensive example to start with, but using the immersive displays is a must as well.

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Splitting and emergence of several programmatic video advertising markets

So far, the direct partnership between publishers and brands has formed the premium niche for digital video advertising, while programmatic video advertising has largely remained a wild west market, albeit with a much larger volume.

Well, five years from now, we expect the programmatic video ads segment to split itself into a number of sub-niches (from premium and high-tier niches to the less regulated gray area types). And while the premium segments (and almost premium segments) rely primarily on first-party opt-in audience data and complex tools for context targeting along with AI-powered predictive advertising technology for segmenting user cohorts, the rest of the programmatically use a completely different business model.

This business model will include a selection of less precise targeting options and more vague brand suitability benchmarks, but at a much cheaper price. Predictably, this can be a potentially acceptable solution for smaller brands with less demanding audiences or companies that operate in the gray market areas themselves.

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