How gated content will see increased use

Content has always been important for brands, but it has become even more important over the past few years. There is social content, there are reviews, there is ecommerce content, ad and email content...the list goes on. According to one expert content will become more gated in the coming year. Here's why.

by Kristina Knight

Ad blocking is nothing new, especially in the online space. Consumers have had the ability to block certain ads for some time. Those blocks have frustrated both advertisers and publishers, and gated content is one way marketers and publishers hope will boost their revenue while also not intruding on consumers' experiences.

"There is a growing frustration among ad publishers caused by the market increase in ad blocking. In 2016, ad publishers will address these fears with gated content to illustrate the true value of advertising and marketing. Today, consumers are accustomed to open access to online content (which happens to be funded by selling ad space), so expect they will respond by accepting advertising messages in exchange for having content access at no charge in the end," said Jeff Hirsch, Chief Marketing Officer, SundaySky.

To help with the consumer engagement portion, Hirsch believe there will be a rise in personalized programmatic ad spending - meaning that programmatic won't be a bulk order type of buy, but that programmatic ads will become hyper-targeted to include individual users' purchase histories, preferences and interests.

To boost the amount of data needed to offer this kind of personalization, Hirsch believes we'll see an increase in big data companies acquiring ad tech companies.

"Data-driven marketing, especially, presents opportunities for companies, such as IBM and Oracle, to increase profitability and target new markets. Given that they have the existing data capability already, it will be interesting to watch them build or acquire the technology to delve into this data to enter the programmatic marketing space. Having these data capabilities puts big name data companies at an advantage to emerge as major players in the advertising or marketing technology industries, so expect to see this happening in 2016," said Hirsch.

Image via Shutterstock

Tags: advertising, content, content marketing, content trends, gated content, SundaySky