During turbulent times, the most successful companies increase their investment in display advertising. A joint iPROM and Valicon study shows that the majority of Slovenian advertisers will maintain or increase their investments in digital advertising in the future. In total, they will spend almost EUR 100 million on digital advertising in 2021, with display advertising receiving the largest slice of the pie. With the advent of advanced advertising technologies, display advertising has emerged as one of the most effective forms of advertising and gives online advertisers the most bang for their advertising buck.

The importance of digital advertising for brands in all industries cannot be overstated

Advertisers are increasingly aware of the importance of investing in digital media, which is where most consumers can be found today. In Slovenia, we have seen an 8% to 10% year-over-year growth of investment in digital advertising and a 14% to 20% growth in total funds for buying advertising space.

While investments vary from industry to industry depending on their specific requirements and business constraints, they will already average around half a million euros per advertiser in 2021.

Display advertising maximizes the effectiveness of advertising budgets

This year, advertisers will spend the most (27%) on display advertising in digital media, recognising its effectiveness compared to other forms of digital advertising. When they partner with the right Ad-Tech partners, it allows them to use advanced ad formats and precise targeting and ensure the highest standards of brand protection and the highest standards of online privacy protection.

Slovenian companies will spend a slightly smaller share of their advertising budget on e-mail marketing (21%) and social media advertising (16%). Based on practical experience and market trend research, iPROM predicts that the share of resources dedicated to online media buying will remain similar in the future. Advertisers are realising that they simply cannot ignore digital advertising and “digital first” strategies if they hope to reach the hyperconnected consumer successfully and efficiently across generations.

The winning combination: display advertising, owned content and own data

Online, the length of a purchase journey varies from a few days to several months. At a time, when online users suffer from information saturation and sensory overload, it is almost an art to capture the consumer’s attention at the right moment, at the right stage in the purchase journey and using the right message.

Businesses that rely on their proprietary consumer data are much more adept and agile at this. Their own data provides them with a better insight into consumer purchasing behaviour, allows them to monitor their target audience along the purchase journey and enables them to plan their communications in a more informed way. Using their owned media content, over which they have full control, they can generate data and then turn to the right technology partner to store and enrich it in carefully secured data silos, such as the iPROM DMP.

Prominently placed display ads in premium, trusted media properties with contextually relevant content at the right time and in the right place, combined with their own data, always put them one step ahead of the competition.

Global advertising platforms are just one way to reach consumers and are not necessarily the most effective. Successful and powerful brands have already taken full control of their digital presence.

Turkish Airlines sets new air ticket sales records with data-driven display advertising and iPROM Cloud technology

We recently partnered with Turkish Airlines to create a data-driven advertising campaign to promote flights to Istanbul. We used iPROM DMP to analyse the behavioural patterns of digital media users and to identify the target group of potential travellers who were relevant to the destination during the planned campaign period.

We used machine learning to supplement the behavioural analysis with data from past advertising campaigns, which Turkish Airlines is using to build its own data silo in the iPROM DMP data management platform. We used iPROM Cloud to leverage the aggregated data for advanced targeting of digital media users. Turkish Airlines targeted user profiles based on their interactions with their marketing content in the past as well as new profiles that represented potential travellers to the target destination at the time of the campaign.

Our data-driven display advertising campaign reached our target audience on mobile and desktop devices (multi-channel targeting), resulting in excellent sales results: Turkish Airlines’ digital advertising campaign brought ticket sales to near pre-epidemic levels, when travel was booming, and sold out all seats on its planes.

Numerous examples of successful regional practices of companies that are already harnessing the power of display advertising and applying “digital first” principles are also described in our case studies.