With Facebook, YouTube, mobile, and OTT prevailing in the expanding video space—and people spending more and more time in front of small screens—advertisers are increasingly prioritizing video.  In fact, they rank it among their most effective advertising channels.

However, they continue to spend the bulk of their budgets on paid search, with paid social taking the next biggest chunk according to the 2019 “State of Digital Advertising” released by Marin Software. Based on a survey 460 digital marketers, the report details the main priorities digital advertisers are focusing on this year, as well as the biggest challenges and trends.

Marketers cited increasing brand awareness as their top priority (25%). Other priorities include:

• Enhancing the customer experience – 22%
• Embracing omnichannels – 20%
• Delivering personalization – 20%
• Campaign management – 19%

Advertising trends

Data privacy, video advertising, and visual search were the three largest trends advertisers believe to be impacting their business in 2019. A total of 22% of digital advertisers indicated that both video advertising and information security in the form of data privacy, tracking restrictions, brand safety, and ad blocking will have the largest impact on their businesses this year.  Within social specifically, marketers surveyed cited attribution/cross-device measurement (28%), generating quality creative (26%) and brand safety (26%) as their top concerns.

“Advertisers are very sensitive to these privacy and tracking issues and need to strike a balance between brand safety/sound privacy policies and ad performance tied to audience targeting,” according to Wes MacLaggan, senior vice president of marketing at Marin Software. So, while marketers continue to prioritize search and social channels for digital advertising, their priorities and concerns provide and opportunity for other marketing channels to address these issues and help them reach their objectives.