10 ways digital marketing will evolve in 2017

Digital marketing has become the largest media channel by spend for the first time, a development that will challenge marketers, platforms and agencies to step up with truly engaging experiences tailored for customers and different delivery mechanisms or risk frittering away their investment. Following a year fraught with scandals and broken trust, marketers will buckle down in 2017 and do the hard work required to improve metrics and business relationships while focusing on creating engagements that are not intrusive, but rather personalized, contextual and enriching. Without these steps, consumers are likely to increasingly turn to ad blockers and premium ad-free services. "In 2017, digital will become the single largest media investment channel, passing television for the first time," Scott Symonds, managing director of media at AKQA, told Marketing Dive. "This will be a symbolic turning point for a trend that has been building for years and will make it that much more obvious to all marketers that digital is no longer just a test or an innovation budget. It needs to be expected to work as hard or harder vs. every other investment channel."