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Digital Media Tech Revenue will Reach $161B in 2017

Enterprise-wide implementations of audience engagement software and services for advertising, marketing, sales and services continue to increase by 5 to 6 percent every six months, reaching nearly 20 percent according to the latest market study by Technology Business Research (TBR).

Over 50 percent of enterprises are either in proof of concept or scaling up their digital technology deployments. According to the TBR assessment, digital technology is mainstream and it's already changing the way that businesses interact with their online stakeholders.

Digital Media Market Development

Traditional media continues the move to digital formats, driving a significant shift in spending. Digital native service providers -- such as Google -- are capturing billions in advertising spend as organizations pivot from traditional print and television formats into more effective online engagement.

Newspapers everywhere have suffered greatly from the shift to the digital economy. Meanwhile, TV networks and cable systems are struggling to compete as marketers invest more in mobile, online video and social advertising platforms to reach their desired business outcomes.

That said, the legacy TV industry is slowly investing in the programmatic advertising technology (ad tech) for data-driven, omni-channel marketing. In addition to infrastructure investments, TV industry stakeholders must explore new business models.

Old-school ad agencies feel the pressure of the market shift, as they lag new entrants who are capturing the huge shift to digital services. The back-end technological and cultural change management opportunities are also going to the progressive full-service digital marketing consulting firms.

Additionally, as services and platforms converge, TBR believes that it's unclear whether legacy ad agencies -- which are now making investments in technology that impact their standing -- are acting as a principal or an agent.

TBR says that along with the potential 'conflict of interest' in this scenario are transparency issues around agency management of media spending on behalf of their clients. Similar to the TV ad industry, the people-intensive ad agency business is facing market disruption as a result of digital technology.

TBR top trend predictions for 2017:

  • Digital advertising and marketing technology and services, excluding media, will grow by 23 percent year-to-year to top $161 billion worldwide in 2017.
  • Large tech vendors and digital service providers will consolidate the advertising and marketing technology landscapes.
  • Outsourcing of the marketing operations function will become an accepted alternative to in-house marketing operations capabilities where the brand retains awareness.

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