What Agencies Say Won’t Happen in 2013

Darren Herman, chief digital media officer, The Media Kitchen
I do not believe that we’ll see considerable dollars in “native advertising” even though it’s all the rage today. I say this because it generally does not scale, and that’s the beauty of native advertising in that it’s platform specific and generally at least a bit custom. What I specifically like here, however, is that publishers recognize that units and programs fit into the user experience of their publishing platforms perform much better than commoditized standard ad units, and the agency world will start adopting tools and frameworks to measure the performance of these campaigns. It’s important to note that agencies have been buying site-direct programs for almost two decades, so technically “native advertising” isn’t really anything new. Also, I do not believe that Facebook will ultimately find its dominant advertising strategy in 2013. The reason for this is, I believe, the headwinds in government will not allow it to fully embrace its targeting platform to the extent it could. I believe that the government and privacy advocacy groups will be Facebook’s worst enemy and Google will draft behind all of this.

Andrew Bailey, chairman, Proximity North America
There’s a lot of chatter about mobile, and every year for 10 years has been the year of mobile, but you can’t argue with the breakneck speed of consumer penetration. That is happening, and there’s no doubt mobile will play an increasingly important role, but what not to expect is a huge influx of advertising dollars into the channel because the real estate is just not there. We as an industry simply haven’t figured it out yet, and as much as we’ll continue to see tremendous consumer traction, I think we won’t see the dollars there next year. It’s almost as if the industry has been caught off guard by mobile.

David Berkowitz, vp, emerging media, 360i
Storytelling will stop being used as a way to cover for ideas with no substance: Storytelling was one of the big buzzwords of 2012. Agency folks love it, as what could make us feel more creative than telling stories? But we can’t forget that we have jobs to do. One of those jobs is to tell the stories the brands already created and make those stories relevant for new consumers. Another is to achieve clients’ mutually agreed-upon objectives, and a story is only great if it makes progress toward those objectives. We will keep telling stories, as great stories spread, but we can’t get so gaga over storytelling that we forget about the work we need to do each day.