The fast evolution of the digital ecosystem was a direct result of the epidemic, which pushed communities and companies online. exchange4media identifies the year’s leading digital landscape trends. In the quickly expanding world of digital trends, consumers and advertisers discover something new and fascinating each year. Many of these topics captivated our interest, from the promise of Metaverse to the coming release of Web 3.0. The year also saw the collapse of cryptocurrencies and the introduction of connected television as a marketing and media planning channel.

The top ten digital global trends

Digital ad expenditure

India’s internet advertising income remained a topic of conversation throughout the year.
In 2021-22, Google India and Meta India earned more than Rs 41,000 crore from internet advertisements. E-commerce companies Amazon India and Flipkart earned almost Rs 7,000 crore in advertising income, bringing the total Indian earnings of Meta, Google, Amazon, and Flipkart to Rs 48,000 crore.

Experts expect that digital ad spending will reach an all-time high this year, maybe even exceeding TV ad spending, due to the expansion of small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). This is far greater than what the central agencies predicted early this year. “The growth rate has slowed, but digital ad spending has continued to increase in 2022 as India’s economic outlook looks to be better than other markets,” says Antique Kazi, President – of Data, Performance, and Digital Products at GroupM India.

GroupM’s end-of-year study, ‘This Year Next Year,’ projects that digital advertising revenue in India will account for the most significant percentage (48.8%) in 2022 and will continue to increase beyond pre-pandemic levels. The retail media market in India is anticipated to reach $551 million in 2022.

Data privacy legislation

There are close to 760 million internet users in India. Data privacy disputes shook the nation during the year, mainly due to increased data breach cases and strict rules in the European Union and other industrialized countries. The Indian government has finally released a revised Data Protection Bill, which intends to enable firms to send specific user data overseas while granting the federal government the authority to exclude state agencies for national security. In addition, the bill seeks fines of up to $30 million for violating the law’s requirements.

The proposal of harsh limitations on cross-border data transfers scared businesses. In August of this year, India withdrew a 2019 privacy law, prompting the revision of the measure. The proposed bill would be the most recent regulation that potentially influences how internet titans like Facebook and Google manage and move data in India’s rapidly expanding digital economy.

Connected television advertising

According to a FICCI-EY estimate for 2022, the number of connected TVs in India surpassed 10 million this year. With the increasing expansion of CTV and its youthful audience, it has become an important touchpoint for marketers and media strategists to contact their target consumers efficiently.

Although linked TV advertising in India is in its infancy and lacks appropriate measuring tools, marketers have begun advertising on the podium this year. It is quickly becoming the best platform for marketers to target their clients directly. With linked television, firms can advertise on an enormous screen while reaping the advantages of digital advertising, such as targeting, measurement, and interaction.

Prabhvir Sahmey, Senior Director-India, and South East Asia, Samsung Ads, affirms, “As we move to the next generation of audience measurement, massive first-party data sets from Smart TVs will undoubtedly play a crucial role in measuring, planning, and optimisation.”

Brief videos

As a result of the Indian government’s ban on TikTok in 2020, the Indian short-form video industry will see rapid development through 2022. This year, short-form video platforms with an active user base of 300 million have observed an increase in content consumption. “The hole was swiftly filled by worldwide giants YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, as well as homegrown platforms like as Moj, Josh, MX TakTaka, and Chingari, among others,” according to Sajal Gupta, Digital Marketing Specialist and Chief Executive Officer of Kiaos Marketing.

In terms of content consumption, RedSeer forecasted in 2021 that short-video platforms would surpass over-the-top (OTT) video streaming services in 2022. According to an analysis by Redseer, there would be a monetization potential of $19 billion for Indian short-video applications by 2030.

Metaverse

In 2022, it was almost impossible to move without encountering the phrase “metaverse,” particularly after Facebook’s rebranding into Meta at the end of 2021. Metaverse allowed many new convergence options between the digital and physical worlds. Leading marketers such as Maruti Suzuki, Mahindra & Mahindra, Tanishq, Mondelez, and MakeMyTrip set the tone by using the virtual area to establish their own Shoppes in the Metaverse.

🇮🇳 India’s commitment to #Web3 is getting stronger day by day 💪🏽@Flipkart, India’s leading e-commerce giant has teamed up with #Polygon to create a Blockchain-eCommerce Centre of Excellence (CoE) that will strengthen Web3 development & metaverse commerce use cases in India 🌍 pic.twitter.com/boAdgP0nWl

— Polygon – MATIC 💜 (@0xPolygon) December 2, 2022

The frenzy that began during the Omicron wave at the beginning of the year seems to have waned slightly later. Rubeena Singh, the departing national manager for Josh, said, “Metaverse has enormous promise, and the sector has yet to be completely explored.” It is expected to contribute $5 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and 2023 will likely be a pivotal year in determining its future course.

Social Business

Brands and retailers devised a social commerce strategy, which included creating content to showcase items in an amusing and aesthetically attractive manner so that it is widely shared on social media. Integrations with Shopify and other payment systems facilitated the establishment of social media stores by companies and influencers. In addition, influencers were used in performance marketing. Their followers made online purchases with promo codes, while influencers counted their earnings.

Microscopic and Nano-influencers

In influencer marketing, content providers with lesser followings than film stars and celebrities emerged as the strategic play in 2022. According to the most recent INCA-e4m Influencer Marketing Report 2022, the sector in India has reached Rs 1,275 crore and is projected to expand at a CAGR of 25% over the next five years.

The paper emphasizes the meteoric rise in popularity of influencers, particularly nano- and micro-influencers, to the point that consumers trust them more than celebrities and are more inclined to test a product based on influencer advice than a celebrity endorsement.

Crypto downfall

In 2022, the cryptocurrency market saw daily declines. It all began with the Luna-Terra debacle at the beginning of this year, followed by Bitcoin and many others. Following the April implementation of the Indian government’s April budget declaration that it will levy a 30% tax on gains from crypto trading, crypto prices fell further.

Investors watched horror as FTX, the multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange, crumbled in November 2022. Soon after, other prominent crypto organizations were flooded with demands from clients attempting to retrieve their funds – the equivalent of a bank run in the crypto world. Several companies have been compelled to halt withdrawals while they address liquidity issues.

Web 3.0

While several tech messiahs, such as Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, have voiced misgivings about Web 3.0 to the metaverse, prominent marketers see it as the future of the internet and the democratization of media and information ownership as the way organizations, customers, and content, interact. Many began designing Web 3.0 systems, extolling its customer advantages and ability to facilitate direct brand connection.

Web 3.0 is built on blockchain technology, with a possible decentralized ecosystem that would enable users to break free from the grip of tech giants like Alphabet, Meta, and the rest of “big tech,” bringing down the “walled gardens” of restricted internet platforms. Web 3.0 enables the creation of intelligent interfaces that are more user-friendly, more customized, progressively adaptive, and readily shared, as well as more secure and private.

First-party information

Third-party cookies have aided advertisers that spend extensively on digital in understanding their customers’ identities, interests, and locations to target them precisely. By 2023, Google plans to erase third-party cookies from its Chrome browser. This year, many advertisers began investing in first-party data because Google Chrome has India’s highest browsing market share.

It would be challenging for B2B organizations to obtain first-party data. Sajal Gupta states, “Collecting first-party data requires substantial expenditures.” Then there are the recurrent expenses connected with the data, which increase as customers age and their tastes and needs change appropriately.