Advertising is 10x More Difficult Today Than it Was 10 Year Ago

Sorin Patilinet -

Remember 2010? Life was 10x easier for an advertiser.

Facebook had a little more than 500 million users. Snapchat and TikTok didn’t exist, while Instagram was timidly launching in October of that year. In 2010, 4k videos were first available on YouTube, and the platform just crossed the 1bn$ revenue milestone.

Today in 2021, YouTube makes 20bn$, and you can watch 8k videos on your large TV. Instagram and TikTok have more than 1bn users, Snap has 300m users, and Facebook is close to 3bn.

In the same decade, Americans reduced their TV viewing time from 4 hours to 3,4 hours daily.

But more than the changes highlighted above, the life of an advertiser has become 10x more difficult.

Here is why?

10 years ago, a creative agency would create a big ad, and maybe think of adapting it for a sound-off digital newsfeed. That was it; bring on the results!

Today, the same campaign needs an Insta Story, a Newsfeed Carousel, a Lens, a TikTok sound, a Bumper ad, a Skippable version, a vertical, horizontal, and square format, a Reddit thread, and a Metaverse execution. There is simply not enough time and budget to make all this perfect. The fragmentation of media triggered the explosion of content proliferation. And the trend is accelerating instead of calming down.

What can you do about it?

  1. Look at how much media is spent on each piece of content and allocate your development times accordingly. You will be surprised to see that your TV ad still takes the lion's share of the budget.
  2. Accept that most people will not see more than one variant of content. You will get bored faster than them. Calm down.
  3. For the long tail explore new AI-based technologies with care. I first tested AI-based content creation tools 5 years ago in China. I am certain they evolved much more than we would want them to.