Many changes in marketing have transpired since my first
class on the subject matter in fall of 2001. At the time, we were focused on page
rank, banner ads; sizes, formats, and load speeds. Facebook was invite-only,
and you had to have a .edu email to join and myspace was the only real social
media player at the time.

Looking down the road, here are some of the changes I foresee
over the next 5 years:

In the way of digital advertising technologies, I see AI
chatbots that can answer any of your questions about any product, recalls, or concerns
about any product a company has right on their website, or even integrated into
social media. Custom chatbots can be programmed to match the lingo, culture,
and speak of any business to the point where they are almost indistinguishable
from a live self-help worker. In some ways, they can even offer up a better solution to current outsourced live help to other countries, or even local
companies due to the bot being able to act as both the level I technician, and
the supervisor.

Up until now, artificial intelligence has only been available to tech giants and startups, and they have left the rest of the world far behind. That’s going to change. According to Gartner, the democratization of AI will be a dominating trend in 2021. That means that more organizations will put more effort into making AI tools accessible. (Zabjo, 2021)

The battle between ad blockers, and intelligent forms of
servicing ads will rage on. As a marketer, I do root for the individual right
to prevent ads, yet still I notice that given a large enough market, ads will eventually
find their way into it. There’s just too much opportunity for money to be made. As of now, companies are creating AI identify not just ad trackers, but to see what type of information they’re tracking and using this data to better block other ads. (Barrett, 2021)

Strategies will change. Ads will become more segmented,
intimate, personable, and more one to one marketing will take a larger market share.
Ads that claim that there are 50 singles in your area, will be replaced with hi
Your_Actual_name, my name is Stacy, would you like to meet at _Some_local_place_near_your_house.

Trends, Word of mouth and earned media will cause marketers to
see how groups interact and will single out who the influencers are in each
group and then make this segment a subset sold as super influenced marketing.
For example, there may arise a software that sees how a baseball fans interact
with their friends, then it will see who the most interacted with people are
out of each group, and market to them to re-market to their social groups.  In today’s hyper-connected world, a single recommendation can have far greater impact – leading to word of mouth marketing (WOMM) or word of mouth advertising strategies to capitalize on the opportunity. (Glover, 2021)

I foresee, new legislation put in place for 2020 style
marketing to draw some fair lines of privacy, ethics, and boundaries for age. If
not something in place, at least people calling for it so that it will put in
place a few years later down the road.

Citations: 

 Zaboj, D. (2021). The top artificial Intelligence trends to watch in 2021. Retrieved February 19, 2021, from https://www.chatbot.com/blog/ai-trends/

Glover, M. (2021, January 26). Word of mouth marketing IN 2021: Effective Strategies + examples. Retrieved February 19, 2021, from https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/word-of-mouth-marketing/#what-is-word-of-mouth-marketing