ADMARP’s Hits and Misses: A review of 2022 predictions
By Zion Rufus
To set the stage for the year 2023, the Association of Digital Marketing Professionals (ADMARP) launched a review of the major hits and misses of predictions rolled out in 2022 at its recently concluded Digital Media and Marketing Predictions Webinar, a yearly conversation where internal and external experts converge to identify and interpret significant trends that will shape the outlook for the new year.
Commenting on the Review tagged ‘2022 Predictions: Hits and misses’ while delivering his opening remark at the webinar, ADMARP President, Stanislaus Martins said: “Every year we try to take a clairvoyant predictive look into the future, to try to see where the trends and opportunities might lie for brands and marketers. Last year we did something similar and to kick off we will take a look back at last year and see how spot on we were with our predictions.”
Anchored by former ADMARP President, Oti Ukubeyinje, ‘2022 Predictions: Hits and misses’ was a thorough scrutiny of Digital Media and Marketing Predictions submitted by marketing experts in 2022. These experts include Ized Uanikhehi, Founder Zedi Africa; Temitayo Ige, Global Brand Communications Lead, Beiersdorf; Oke Umurhohwo, Marketing Manager, West Africa, Itel Mobile; Stanislaus Martins, President ADMARP; Israel Ogunseye, Head Of Marketing, Kobobid; and Pelumi Oyetimeyin, Marketing And Growth, Umba.
Hits
“A lot more incorporation of AI and personalization technologies; better ad target and data driven marketing” Ized Uanikhehi, CEO, Zedi Africa
Here’s why, largely, ChatGPT sort of put a stamp on this particular prediction because we all saw how it changed the entire game towards the end of last year. But even before GPT, a lot of AI and machine learning had already started to happen on the advertising platform; so you would have heard Facebook and Google talking to you about fluidity, stop tampering with the systems, just put your objective creatives and budgets, and the system would use machine learning and intelligence to optimize the campaigns for you to give you best results. So yea, last year saw increased investment in AI and ML, and we are sure that will continue into the new year.
“Big brands will demand more performance marketing, leading to a rise in demand for performance marketers” Temitayo Ige
The finance industry was forced into that zone with the rise of fintech, we had a lot of banks also trying to stay competitive and move budget into their apps, online signups, and that drove performance spending in finance.
“Growth of online communities and access to exclusive content,” Temitayo Ige
It was pretty much the year of people forming interesting communities, and not just people, big techs reacted; Meta, through Whatsapp rolled out communities, groups also became a thing. If you go inside most platforms right now, in the inbox of social platforms, you can now start to have a lot of group chats because they start to see the essence of collective discussions and collective ideologies. So communities indeed exploded in 2022.
“Offline marketing events including brand activation, student campus events, roadshows etc will regain dominance as the government relaxes COVID-19 rules,” Oke, Ladi Ogunseye
The general feedback was that because of the relaxation of COVID restrictions, brands heavily moved back into physical activations.
“Heavy influx of new skitmakers and creators, and a huge spike in influencer marketing spend,” Oke, Stanislaus
This was a major hit because we are seeing an army of new content creators within the space. Now, pranks and interesting videos have become the order of the day and we are still waiting to see how brands are going to use those types of content.
Misses
“Privacy will be major concern for internet users” Ized, Stanislaus
This prediction is neither a hit nor a miss. Globally, privacy was indeed a massive concern. Some of the measurement tools we used was to see what will be the global opt-in rate for ATT on Apple devices, what would be the Google situation as far as cookieless browsers are coming to play, and what will be the situation with the adoption of products like facebook Capi. Now here is what happened, Google literally told everyone to their face ‘we own this space, and we will be ready when we are ready’ and they moved the goal post to the end of 2023. Meta had expected heavier adoption of Capi in 2022, but that did not happen. Although, what happened in Nigeria was that the National Data Protection Bureau did finally release the final data protection bill for 2022, it was promised for December, it was released in October early one, which was an update for the 2019 NDPR that we all know about. But here is the thing that only sets the bedrock for privacy concerns to come to bear in 2023 going forward. Why? Because you need to have such legislation in place before people can start to act out their privacy concerns. So when we checked through legal archives, not a single case was found about lawsuits around data protection, privacy and all of that within the Nigerian space.
“Brands will replace discounts with digital offerings” Temitayo Ige
A lot of brands did the usual. It was typically consumer promotions in rewards and cash. Airtime and data were the closest to digital currencies or digital rewards as well as products and physical goods. We did not see that heavy adoption of digital tokens or other digital content offerings as a way of brands offering rewards or promotional benefits to their customers.
“Smartphone penetration will grow rapidly in 2022,” Oke
All data points to the fact that global shipment of smartphones dropped by 8% in 2022. All the big brands in Nigeria recorded also recorded a drop in market share in 2022. Now here is the primary cause for that, the world is facing a massive recession. Disposable incomes in Nigeria are significantly shrinking. On the average, a 4G smartphone will cost anywhere from N35,000 and above on the average. The average minimum wage in Nigeria is N30,000. Now, noone will spend their entire minimum wage on a phone, it will take about a year to save up to buy one of those smartphones
“Radio will dominate TV and digital spend, catering to T2-T5 communities,” Oke
Radio did not consume the other channels.We could also see that clearly even if the stats are not fully out.
“The Metaverse will take off in 2022,” Stanislaus
It didn’t really happen, although we see it gradually picking up. So even though the metaverse wasn’t the biggest thing that happened to digital, what happened was that platforms like Facebook were very deliberate to keep the momentum up through a heavy campaign that ran throughout Q4 or the better part of last year, ensuring we all keep up with the Metaverse.”
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