David Bell on Expected Changes to Digital Marketing in the Next Decade

David Bell is a former Professor of Wharton School of Business and a recognized expert in consumer investing, eCommerce, Branding, Digital Marketing, and Entrepreneurship. Today, he operates as a professional consumer investor in New York City. David Bell has earned a glowing reputation for his thought leadership in multi-channel marketing, digital retail, and the future of digital branding. We sat down with Dr. Bell to hear his thoughts on the future of digital marketing. Here’s what we learned.

David Bell, former Professor of Wharton School of Business, on Trends & Strategies for the Next Decade

Trends come and go with few exceptions. Some also repeat in the future and it is often the case that today’s successful strategies become tomorrow’s prevailing wisdom. David Bell makes a point of distinguishing between the two.

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Trends for the Next Decade

Interactive and user generated content will continue to grow strong well into the end of the next decade, David Bell explains. As users become accustomed to having more control over their content, the podcast becomes more like the Livestream, while movies become more like video games, with layers of interactivity.

Video content marketing can be expected to steal the limelight. This, according to David Bell, is due to people becoming increasingly short on time and more focused on bite-sized entertainment. Sophisticated demographic targeting will continue to curve upwards; specifically, marketing efforts based on age, education level, and political affiliation..

Social media influencers can be expected to come from non-Hollywood and non-legacy-media sources as the demand for authenticity continues to spike.

Finally, voice search is expected to change the way SEO strategies work as people perform voice searches differently than they do typed searches.

Strategies for the Next Decade

Artificial intelligence will be used more and more heavily. The bulk of its use will be in bringing forth meaning from digital warehouses of user-generated data. Toward the end of the decade, look for the trends and strategies of the 2030s to be generated – or at least anticipated – by AI itself.

Voice searches, David Bell explains, are changing the way people conjugate search terms. As personal assistants grow in utilization, they too will affect the way people perform their searches. People speak search terms differently than they type them, and they also use different grammatical structures when speaking to an automated assistant. SEO professionals will be tasked with keeping their fingers firmly on this trend.

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Influencer marketing systems will become more important. As professional media people and marketing people gradually accept the rise of the grassroots influencer, they will increasingly look for talent to groom for that very purpose. This will re-balkanize social media e-celebrity culture, which can be expected to undergo similar shifts along shorter and shorter timelines.

Personality marketing experts will have to learn to acclimate to the rise-and-rebellion cycle that is emerging. By the time they do, television advertising as we know it will be a dusty relic of a bygone era.