Digital advertising trends you need to watch for in 2020

So what’s in, what’s out and what are the predictions on how 2020 will turn out to be for digital advertisers? The following are the leading digital advertising trends, expectations and predictions that you need to consider when developing an advertising strategy for, your business.

1. Growth of mobile advertising

Mobile advertising will continue to rise and shine in 2020. The global mobile ad spend is estimated to cross $225bn in 2020. An increase in mobile ad spending means more advertising networks, better support for devices and more ad types and formats.

One of the mobile advertising trends that will grow significantly in 2020 is related to in-app ads. The mobile app industry is flourishing, and thousands of new apps are added to iOS, Android and Windows stores. These apps need to market their apps and at the same time, they want to monetise their apps. The in-app rewards for watching ads is a perfect example of how in-app and mobile advertising are expanding. We will see more of these.

Advertisers are always looking for new yet innovative ways to reach their audience and this is what makes mobile advertising more important than ever. Ad networks like AdMaven provide advertisers access to apps and let them run in-app ads that work exceptionally well in terms of user engagement. AdMaven provides advertisers with multiple ad formats including push notifications for mobile, in-app ads and mobile popups. The best part: It supports ads in a wide range of formats and types that is something advertisers are always looking for. With rapid changes in browsers and devices, advertisers must focus on responsive ad networks like AdMaven.

2. Focus on personalised ads

Forget ads that appeal to masses. This won’t happen in 2020. It will be a year of personalisation whether it be mobile ads, native ads, display or any other type. Research shows that 71% of consumers get frustrated to see irrelevant ads that are not personalised at all.

Personalised ads that pitch relevant products to consumers is what they want to see. If you are male and you see a women jewellery ad, you won’t like it. In fact, this ad might turn you away from the brand forever. Running personalised ads means you need a lot of data about your audience and this is what we will see in 2020. Smart devices will solve a lot of data-related issues for advertisers.

3. Contextual ads

Data and tracking raise the issue of consumer privacy. Not all consumers are happy to share their personal information. A survey revealed that only 17% of consumers in the USA and Europe are willing to share personal data to see personalised ads.


With third-party cookies getting banned, increased privacy awareness and the latest data breach cases will push advertisers to run contextual ads. A contextual ad is relevant to the content of the page instead of the user. The ad is relevant to the website where it is being displayed. While an increase in personalised ads will rise, businesses will witch to contextual ads as well. There will be a combination of both from advertisers and eventually they will settle with retargeting and contextual ads.

IAB Gold Standard

The IAB Gold Standard is focused on cleaning the digital advertising sector by creating standards for the advertising industry. It has three rules: Reduce ad fraud, improve digital advertising experience and increase brand safety. Big brands like Tesco and McDonald’s have signed up for the Gold Standard in December 2019. This will surely impact digital advertising in 2020.

Several other advertisers, advertising agencies and companies will sign up for the IAB Gold Standard –which will make the advertising industry transparent, clean and fraud-free in the coming years. Since the two giants have already signed up for it, we will see several new sign-ups in 2020.

This change will impact digital ads significantly as the focus is on customer experience. We will see fewer popup ads, auto-play video ads and other ads that ruin customer experience and aren’t appreciated. Together with Google taking strict action against annoying ads, the IAB Gold Standard will have its impact on the digital advertising space in 2020.

5. Rise of social ads

Social advertising isn’t going anywhere. There has been a lot of changes in social networking sites that support advertisers such as chatbots, messenger integration, live streaming and ephemeral content. Besides, Facebook’s increasing global revenue is an indication of how social ads are popular.


Facebook is advertisers favourite social ad network for years and will continue to stay favourite for all the good reasons in 2020 too.


Since LinkedIn is also offering the remarketing feature, other than Facebook, this will push B2B advertisers and companies to use more of LinkedIn’s remarketing feature in 2020. Social advertising will become a norm with a focus on targeted personalised messages.

Final words

These digital marketing trends will top the current year. Other leading trends include programmatic advertising, video ads, an increase in ad spending and IoT powering the advertising industry. There has been a lot going on in the digital advertising industry. The changes are indeed rapid rather instant that it gets impossible to predict the future.

It all comes down to what you do now. How you will plan your digital advertising strategy? What actions you will take to prepare your business for these changes?

Get to work.