What is the future of marketing in 2023?

Paul Getter from The Internet Marketing Nerds helps people quickly accelerate their digital presence and build successful online businesses.

Marketing and commercial advertising are about to be disrupted by the rise of high-bandwidth networks that mediate high-value applications such as augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI).

How fast? Apple and Meta have been making efforts in this direction for years at great cost and effort. Here’s what I see in the pipeline next and how it will change the future of marketing.

augmented reality

Augmented reality glasses have the potential to become a huge attention market. Alphabet, back when it was Google, took a shot at it, but it could be Apple making it cool and stylish enough to be adopted by the market.

End of May, Wired referred to a VR headset “reportedly in development at Apple since 2015”. As smart glasses continue, you can expect new advertising opportunities as new eyeball space emerges – this could be anywhere you look when wearing AR glasses. Imagine looking at your loved one and seeing a reminder above their head to buy flowers for your anniversary.

Expect this ad space to be a bargain, for the same reason Google and Facebook and other digital ad spaces were for so long. Opportunities to place ads will grow, even if complacency, slowness to adapt, reluctance to learn new interfaces, and skepticism prevent others from taking those opportunities.

Metavers

Virtual reality is also a promising market, with Microsoft and PC gaming companies leading the way.

It is known that Facebook was reorganized into Meta last year for an enterprise-wide prioritization of development to enter the virtual reality product market from a social media angle. They have focused hard on the business opportunities of the technology with virtual meeting rooms and virtual shared workspaces.

Other metaverses will continue to grow and develop immersive virtual reality hardware and apps, connected spaces, simulated environments, virtual worlds, and a thriving digital economy.

I see the metaverse’s growth being bolstered by things like powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) and software support for photorealistic resolution, lighting, and physics engines. This will help virtual spaces become wonderfully realistic.

There will undoubtedly be a rich attention market within a lush, immersive and multi-sensory virtual reality interface for any number of applications. Characters, sounds, placements, and all sorts of other marketing opportunities await the marketing industry in the metaverses.

Voice apps

If we continue the trend, our devices will talk to us more as we continue to talk to them, making us more dependent on these automated virtual assistants to listen to music, podcasts and other audio. Advances in smart headphones and improved audio have the potential to pave the way for true disruptive change.

Examples are headphones with outward-facing input microphones and inward-facing audio monitors that could make the augmented reality headset of the future fully audiovisual.

Audio enhancements can include turning up the volume of someone you’re trying to listen to, turning down the volume of music or background noise, and adjusting the equalizer of voices or sounds to make your listening experience more enjoyable or comfortable.

You can also match the sounds with an aesthetic flair for fun, translate foreign languages ​​in real time, and receive ambient and contextually reactive and immersive audio ads.

Internet of things

In the coming years, more and more new devices will be innovated with smartphones and laptops with different sensors, network connections and capabilities.

A few of them could reach sales approaching the growth levels of the mass market adoption curve. These can help us by automating time-consuming and time-consuming tasks, freeing up more time for things like doing business or playing in the metaverses.

With IoT, your fridge can automatically send an order for more milk when it runs out, based on the best deals in town or favorite ads. Commercial applications such as remote asset monitoring and automation of supply chain processes are likely to become huge global markets.

Blockchain

Blockchain has the ability to contribute in many ways to support and drive innovation and interactivity on the internet.

This is so bad that the proponents on the developer and investor side are calling it Web3. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) may become essential for establishing, validating and verifying digital identity and private ownership of digital assets. In this way, I think NFTs will become standard in the marketing toolset.

The big problem with all of our worlds colliding over the internet is one of organization. How can you verify and validate your identity and digital property to use online?

How can you manage interoperability so you can take your identity and assets across platforms? An increasing number of features that solve these problems will work seamlessly with blockchain powering them quietly in the background.

Automation

My final prediction is that anything for which there is a total profit to automate that exceeds the cost (including the expenditure of computational cycles, to obtain the relevant data and to learn) will eventually be automated.

That means many of our technologies will become self-sustaining and self-operating as we move forward with Moore’s law and increasing sophistication and increasing number of network connections.

While there’s no such thing as a button you can press that automatically tells you what you want, automation is changing the industry.

With the increasing number, quality, and interoperability of ecommerce digital tools, it’s easier than ever to combine different services into largely autonomous ecommerce businesses that convert ad traffic from Facebook and Instagram into sales on Shopify and Amazon.

Closing thoughts

Augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence are wonderfully strange yet familiar. The business leaders making the most difference as these technologies change the landscape will be the ones who don’t lose their heads for the fundamentals of good business practice.

The technology is shiny and exciting, but those who benefit from it will be the ones who use it in the same way that companies have always succeeded: inventing, building and marketing excellent products while taking good care of the customer.

---

businessroundups.org Business Council is the premier growth and networking organization for entrepreneurs and leaders. Am I eligible?

---