What is the future of advertising?

Digital advertising will level off. Digital advertising is widely inefficient. It is borderline useless for a lot of businesses. Between 50% of ads simply not loading and an astronomically low confidence level, consumers are unlikely to click on digital ads.

People are 500 times more likely to act on a billboard ad than a digital ad.

Older formats (while dwarfed by digital in revenue) are much more effective. I'm not saying digital advertising is over. I'm merely saying that advertisers will realize it is not as effective as they thought.

---

While digital advertising will level off if not begin to sink, the tools that it gave us will be applied to other forms of advertising.

AI facial analysis is being used to judge creditworthiness[1] Stanford researchers can use AI to predict whether someone is gay/lesbian.[2] (just by looking at their face). Soon, AI will be able to “guess”/know your political orientation by a picture of your face[3].

Colloquially called face-reading, this could be heavily integrated into traditional forms of advertising.

High-tech cameras can be implemented into billboard ads to track trends and show ads at relevant times. For example, it would show democratic ads at 2PM when there is an influx of democrats driving down a ride and show a republican ad at 5PM where there is an influx of republicans driving down the road.

These trends are powerful and can be used to even retarget people and target demographics. It will provide advertisers with data that they love. This will help the demise of digital advertising.

---

In the future, digital advertising will be powerful but won't be the record-breaking medium it is right now. Other mediums will catch up technologically giving advertisers more data through technology like face-reading significantly altering how we advertise to people on busses and through OOH.