Especially online, sales are increasing, and the buying power of consumers is trending high, making an impressive digital presence the more crucial for any e-commerce companies.

The convergence of social and demographic trends, consumer behavior and new technologies like the blockchain, mobility and various facets of “the cloud” are continually re-shaping mission-critical business areas across industries, and the supply chain is no exception.

Xaxis, GroupM’s programmatic media arm, surveyed around 5,000 digital media marketers across 16 markets to find out how satisfied marketers around the world were with their existing methods of measuring the success of digital display campaigns - especially in terms of how they deliver against their strategic business and marketing goals.

The way large online platforms, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon (GAFAs), restrict advertisers from using their data on the platforms is called “walled gardens”. In lieu thereof, around two-thirds of marketing executives complain that walled gardens do not provide enough information to measure campaigns effectively.

Looking at the Swiss full-service digital agency Namics’ predictions, we feel that we are on the right track with many of the trends we forecasted to gain momentum in 2019, including the following:

2018 was a significant year filled with events that marked a sign of changing times, Google unveils with its annual ‘Year in Search’ 2018 report. Through the exploration of the over one trillion search queries the company receives each year, the top trending topics could be identified, including people, events and places that captured the attention of users worldwide who turned to Google Search for answers.

2018 was a huge year for social media, with many changes to navigate including privacy scandals, a new algorithm at Facebook, the impact of influencer marketing, and the rise of Instagram. Social media marketers found themselves having to aim for targets that were not only moving but morphing into new entities altogether. For brands that need to reach more consumers and raise brand awareness on social media, here are the biggest trends from 2018.

A recent study by elaboratum, a German expert consultancy firm for digital business and cross-channel strategies, shows that optimizing your website for emotional and intuitive decision-making factors can significantly improve your conversion rate.

The Coalition for Better Ads announced that it will expand the Better Ads Standards for desktop and mobile web to all countries and regions worldwide to improve the online ad experience for consumers.

Mobile channels have become more compelling to the perpetrators of ad fraud, since mobile accounts for an increasing proportion of digital ad spend. But, while there are many strategies and solutions available to mitigate the impacts of ad fraud, separating the capabilities from the spin can be difficult, which is why TrafficGuard provides some thoughts and predictions on ad fraud prevention:

The immense reach, the widely propagated ease of ad booking, and the ability to accurately define target audiences are just a few of the factors that persuade many advertisers to bet their marketing budgets on social media.

The problem with this is that big names, such as Facebook and Google, are quickly entrusted with the dissemination of ads without much reflection and thus with the integrity of brand safety. They benefit from the fact that the online advertising ecosystem is becoming increasingly complex and advertisers use the strong fragmentation and confusion as an excuse to snatch simpler social media advertising or playing out Google AdSense.

Cryptomining malware, also called cryptocurrency mining malware or simply cryptojacking, is a relatively new term that refers to software programs and malware components developed to take over a computer's resources and use them for cryptocurrency mining without a user's explicit permission. Unauthorized cryptomining is seeing exponential growth, since it actually doesn’t require significant technical skills and cyber criminals have increasingly turned to cryptomining malware as a way to harness the processing power of large numbers of computers, smartphones and other electronic devices to help them generate revenue from cryptocurrency mining. Ad blocking firm AdGuard, for instance, estimates that more than 500 million users are mining cryptocurrencies on their devices without realizing it. These users either get infected by a cryptomining malware program or visit websites that stealthily run cryptomining software in the background without the user's consent.

A new competitive factor has emerged in today's widely ramified brand landscape, which has in fact become one of the decisive factors for consumers when choosing an offer - the user experience. The choices between different providers with similar services are simply countless. Consequently, customers feel less and less likely connected and loyal to a brand. It is simply no longer the quality of a product that determines success or failure in business, but emotions, which explains, for instance, why Nike does not advertise its sporting goods, but the feeling that everyone can deploy their full potential, or Airbnb does not provide housing, but worldwide connectivity and the feeling of being at home anywhere in the world.

Today’s challenge is no longer the availability of information but its abundance, bringing us the marketing issues we are dealing with now for decades. In all this noise, it is not only harder than ever to be found by customers, making things worse is the fact that the average attention span of today's media users has slipped below that of a goldfish.