5 Advertising Predictions for 2023 That B2B Marketers Should Know

Discover a few predictions about digital advertising for 2023 by Gareth Noonan to stay prepared.

December 2, 2022

The digital advertising landscape continues to change, and B2B marketers must constantly adapt to these changes. But how can they prepare for a future where change is a constant thing? Gareth Noonan, GM, Demandbase, shares a few predictions for advertising for the coming year so marketers can be prepared.

You and I both know that the world and the digital world have a way of surprising us. Whether it is a global event that impacts the economy and our budgets or a disruptive technological advancement that challenges the status quo, marketers must constantly adapt to external forces.

Knowing this, is there any way to prepare for the future when change is the only constant? Kind of. The best we can do is make educated predictions about what comes next and how we can make the most of it. With this in mind, here is what I expect to happen in advertising in 2023 so you can prepare. 

The “R Word” & Its Impact on Advertising Budgets

Experts have been whispering about a potential recessionOpens a new window taking place next year for a while now. So, with growth trajectories significantly flattened and the possibility of declines in U.S. digital ad spend for 2022, doing more with less will continue to be a theme of 2023. If advertising is a big part of your marketing strategy, how should you cope? 

Well, as marketing budgets are cut, the sequence tends to be tech and tools first, then programs, then people. Showing the value of your advertising spend in generating business outcomes is more important than ever, which means creating clear and credible ROI visualizations and storytelling. Empower your champion’s conversations with their CMO and that CMO’s ability to defend budgets with their CFO. In the B2B world, much of that starts with only spending the budget on the accounts and people within those accounts who are current or future prospects for what you are selling.

See More: Looking For Laughs: 5 Tips for Marketers To Deliver Happiness

Widespread Signal Loss

As privacy continues to remain a key priority to consumers, advertisers will continue to feel the impact. Google is still planning to phase out cookies from Chrome (although this has been delayed again to 2024), Apple released its App Tracking Transparency framework, and there have been changes made to GA4Opens a new window

The takeaway from all this is that the days of individual targeting and measurement are numbered and the future is about cohorts — identifying and understanding users grouped by similar intent and buying behavior. B2B should actually be in better shape here by design, especially marketers who have an account-based view of the world. After all, what is an account if not a cohort of individuals grouped by a common association?

As third-party cookie and cross-app targeting signals become obscured, access to robust, consented first-party data and successfully modeling anonymized audience behavior from those sets will be key differentiators. Tech vendors who can successfully help their customers do this programmatically will be popular with everyone in the C-suite.

Apple Advertising Is Expected To Grow

Finally, the elephant in the advertising room. While many of us have been focused on what happens when third-party cookies are blocked in Chrome, Apple was essentially doing the same thing on iOS but with much less fanfare. Since the launch of iOS 14 and App-tracking Transparency, data from a Bloomberg reportOpens a new window suggests 75% of users have blocked the ability of advertisers and publishers to measure cross-app advertising performance.

In recent months, we have seen Apple step boldly into this signal wasteland with its own advertising offering. Of course, all targeting and measurement are first-party for them as the owners of the App Store and operating system. Some estimates suggest in-app advertising will be a $30 billionOpens a new window business for Apple by 2026, up from $3.7 billion in 2021. 

The Need To Get a (Clean) Room

As first-party data become the biggest show in town, matching a buyer’s audience to that of the seller — in this case, an advertiser with the audience provider — will be key. This is where the relatively recent category of “clean rooms” comes in. 

These are privacy-safe tools that allow advertisers to reach their targets in the aggregated audiences of publishers and measure comparative reach and duplication across publishers and platforms. The actual specifics of the matching never leave the clean room, so while advertisers know what their match and reach were for the uploaded audience, they will not be able to reverse engineer exactly which users saw and interacted with their ads.

An emerging challenge in the early days of clean room tech is how to scale. If an advertiser has to work with different vendors for each agency, publisher and walled garden (Google, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.), it is going to get pretty crowded in the room.

See More: Can Telcos Fill the Marketing Void With the Demise of Third-party Cookies?

Machines (Might) Get Creative

We are in the early stages of finding out whether machines have the capacity for true creativity. Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) has continued to evolve from a basic product, pricing, and company information personalization to AI-driven tools like Marpipe and Pattern89 that let us measure and predict the impacts of the most incremental creative tweaks at a massive scale. 

Combine these capabilities with systems like DALL.E that can generate images based on natural language descriptions, and the permutations seem almost literally endless.

As you plan for 2023, keep these predictions in mind. I am sure there will be other surprises in store for us all, but this gives a good overview of how advertising is likely to keep evolving and what we can do to maximize it. 

What are some of your predictions for digital advertising for the coming year? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .

MORE ON ADVERTISING

Gareth Noonan
Proven GM-level leader managing cross-functional international teams and owning profitable P&Ls for business units generating $100M+ revenue. Programmatic Strategy, Operations, Business Development & Product for mobile app and desktop video, OTT, native and display across all screens.
Take me to Community
Do you still have questions? Head over to the Spiceworks Community to find answers.