Recent years have turned out to be a revelation for marketers and adtech pros. While AI opens unmatched opportunities, the market risks being disrupted by its unpredictable twists. Adsterra couldn’t stand aside, and we asked our CMO, Gala, to unbox the most brilliant 2024 highlights. Gala’s here to share our vision for the future of branding that will help you rethink your strategy, whether you’re an enterprise or a smaller organization. Let’s pave the way to promising markets and effective business models!
The future of branding: Offer what machines can’t master
As every part of our lives tends to be augmented, if not automated, we mark a surge of demand for timeless values: reliability, cooperation, empathy, competence, and in-depth knowledge of your industry.
The future of branding is in powering your business with meaning. You need to provide what machines are not able to master. The Citi Global Insights experts have developed a set of “heart skills” that can be called a foundation of a strong brand identity. Among them:
- Emotional intelligence
- Literacy
- Communication
- Problem-solving
- Empathy
- Adaptability
Ensure your SEO strategy includes brand promotion
As an SEO evangelist, I also cannot bypass a strong brand impact on search rankings, which in turn are also AI-powered. Experts note that websites belonging to strong brands are more resilient to Google’s Helpful Content Updates, for instance.
We can assume that AI algorithms evaluate a website’s reliability based on the volume of branded queries, among other things. Lily Ray from Moz.com suggests considering off-site activities like partnerships and brand marketing to create a “strikable” and memorable image of your company. Moving beyond SEO is a reasonable tactic that will serve you for years.
So, how can a brand deliver true values that will keep it away from AI storms and close to customers’ hearts in the next decade? Let’s figure this out!
To Contents ↑Incorporate 360-degree partner care
You know what customer support is, but it’s time to jump further. Make your product users feel they belong to a team of collaborators, friends, or geeks. Partner Care is something that will make them stay because you’re not a service provider but a problem solver and caretaker:
1. Accessibility
Put the importance of being there for our partners first. Both your support teams and managers (if you provide managed services) have to be ready to respond swiftly. Provide the most convenient payment methods making access to your product easier. This commitment to prompt and effective communication fosters a sense of trust and deepens our relationships with those we serve.
2. Problem-solving instead of responding
Train your staff to solve clients’ problems and be advocates for them. Ensure your team can craft customized responses that resonate with specific customers’ needs. Providing relevant solutions and thoughtful recommendations is a key to loyalty.
3. Convenient channels
Connect with our partners through their preferred channels. Enable live support along with call centers & emails (live chat or a messaging app). Use omnichannel support platforms like Intercom to save the whole story of user queries.
4. Continuous training
Invest in your staff’s expertise and encourage them to go the extra mile in learning the market, as Partner Care is about your teammates, too. Prompt mentoring among your employees; it’s a critical differentiator for both large enterprises and startups. Regular workshops or local conferences, where employees share skills and insights, create an environment of cross-team cooperation. Nurture a culture of excellence and dedication.
One of the reasons that makes Adsterra the most preferred ad network is its unique Partner Care program, which manifests providing expert and industry-specific support to every our partner. Any goal is achievable when it becomes a priority to your ad network!
To Contents ↑Celebrate diversity
Diversity comes with the acknowledgment of various talents, points of view, and mentalities. If you give a business such an impetus, you ensure its prosperity in the tech-driven era. Adsterra, with its 51% female C-suite staff, celebrates female contribution to the adtech world by building and supporting the Women in Tech community in Cyprus.
As a proponent of diversity, we have been honored to sponsor the landmark event, the first-ever Women in STEM Forum (Cyprus). Female impact on science and technologies is hard to overestimate. And this event has proved that beautiful minds are tech leaders of the new era.
Respect all ages, don’t hyper-focus on Gen Z or Alpha
Indeed, Gen Alpha is changing the rules of the game right now. These born between 2010 and 2024 form the most tech-savvy and unusual generation of all. The Fortune expects the economic footprint of alphas to hit $5.46 trillion by 2029.
You should at least consider making Gen Alpha your brand’s loyal audience. But my recommendation is not to hyper-focus on specific groups—respect all ages and provide values that will be appreciated by alphas, Gen Z, millennials, and other generations.
1. Robust products
Your product should deliver outstanding digital experiences both when it comes to providing services and customer support. A strong brand serves as a supportive element rather than a cover-up for a weak product. Gone are the times of superficial marketing. Digital experiences are almost as tangible as physical ones, and branding can only enhance and showcase what’s already been rolled out.
2. Authenticity preferred
All generations prioritize brands that communicate genuinely. No more glossy-glamorous-chic lifestyle. Transparency is over everything: you need to speak honestly and provide a unique experience to product users. If you add personalization and gamification to your communications with younger generations, they will spotlight you as they fav.
A not-so-obvious personalization option is a brand’s merchandise. It will not necessarily include full customization but manifest proper values and offer breathtaking design:
Adsterra’s new swag packages include messages that reflect core values—growth, achievements, and self-representation. We added an inspiring WATCH ME GROW slogan that aligns with Gen Z and Alpha’s pursuit of the limelight but also resonates with earlier generations’ aspirations.
To Contents ↑3. Skill perfection along with well-being
Every generation longs for a mindful career choice. They’re not just looking for a job but a profession that will be highly sought after in the future. A strong brand of the future is a conscious employer. Whether you hire millennials or Gen Z employees, ensure they have opportunities for growth as versatile professionals.
In terms of prominent growth, I advise paying the highest attention to each pro skills’ manifestations. We at Adsterra hold seasonal conferences and workshops. Teammates can choose a topic that resonates with their personality or center the speech around professional skills.
4. Responsible brands
Responsibility is admitting you can impact how the world changes for the better. Brands whose corporate social responsibility includes eco-activities or the empowerment of diversity become customers’ best friends.
The future of branding will also be tightly connected with a commitment to customers’ data privacy and security. Advertising networks like Adsterra equip their platforms with security protocols and algorithms that prevent their users from malicious activities, such as bot traffic, malvertising, account hijacking, etc.
A responsible brand will also pay attention to identifying its customers and the nature of their activities, which is now packaged in the KYC (Know Your Customer) requirements.
Provide in-depth market expertise
Expert guides and tips come as an integral part of every SMB or large brand activity. But most of them aim to push direct sales: product tutorials, setup checklists, or advanced marketing hacks. What will make you stand out is pushing these boundaries.
Create content that will make your customers more knowledgeable about the market in which they operate. Your advice should go beyond your product or niche and embrace the overall situation: competition, taxes, regulations, etc. Though it’s a no-brainer, it becomes a direct way to build trust.
- Stay clear and straightforward like our expert was in this guide to iGaming legal compliance.
- Pay attention to newbies in the industry, paving them a path to a painless start with your product like this definitive guide to earning on the Internet.
- Keep your copy sharp and practical, responding to the most painful questions, as our expert did in this article about boosting traffic for CPA campaigns.
- Make your content helpful for customers from various markets like this guide to advertising in Brazil.
- And don’t forget to include calls to action and engaging blocks of content to prompt lead generation 😉
Build connections instead of bruteforce selling
Digitalization has played a trick on all of us: we have found an endless traffic source. But thinking of users and customers as traffic is a big no-no. Communication face-to-face is key to tighter bonds with your audience.
A successful brand in 2025–2030 is not only visible but tangible. So, make sure you go offline. You may choose to attend signature affiliate marketing conferences or other significant market events, such as meetups, hackathons, and workshops.
You can include non in-market offline activities that are important to your customers like sports marathons and charity auctions. Or, foster partnerships with educational institutions to support students and aspiring beginners in your industry.
In 2024, Adsterra sponsored Youth Tech FEST, a gathering for future data scientists, analysts, and programmers. We included wide publicity of this venture in social media, so anyone related to adtech could mark Adsterra as a brand empowering the young generation.
Adopt technologies but prioritize humans
Though the point about technologies permeates the entire narrative, let’s accentuate its core meaning. Your business should think of AI as an instrument to enhance human skills, not as a replacement for them.
My strong stand on AI is that it must align with a brand’s tone of voice and branding, whether we speak about copywriting or graphic design. Humans come first, remember? So, the starting point is a tailored strategy based on what you know about the market and audiences. AI comes to the rescue when you need to make your strategy spark!
If we hand mundane tasks to machines, our minds will fully immerse in strategic thinking and problem-solving—the heart skills of the future. Adsterra’s Head of Brand Marketing, Sofia Popovidou, shared some insider info about how we included AI in SEO copywriting and design at Affiliate Expo.
To Contents ↑So, what’s the future of a strong brand?
All that we’ve discussed today fits into the concept of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). I believe the IMC concept is the future of branding because it aligns your company representation across channels, boosting relevant brand mentions in a way that you can monitor and measure.
Integrated Marketing Communications allow for building a clear and consistent message, by design and by nature.
- You first invest in brand presence in various channels like organic search, PPC, SMM, events, and others. This stage is about being everywhere where your audience is and saturating the feed with diverse content. Using brand mention tools and analytics is also a must-have at this stage.
- Next, you check how your audience reacts, which content resonates with its values, and which questions they ask.
- You rebuild your unified messaging and branding according to what you’ve learnt at stage 2.
- Finally, you create agile guidelines for brand communications across channels.
The whole IMC idea is nothing but teamwork, where every team member is aware of brand guidelines and its tone of voice, becoming their company ambassador and advocate.
As we developed Adsterra’s brand messages—growth, progress, and reliability—we incorporated them into every aspect of our communications, including visuals. Here’s an example I took from our Brand Guidelines, which we continue improving even now.
How to measure your brand power
The future of branding is interlinked with how many people will recognize your brand and prefer it over others, how they will find you in search engines and outside, and how your messages will make them stay with you. Below is the answer to these questions. We carry out them based on regular brand awareness surveys.
My teammate Sofia who’s in charge of branding often points out that “a brand is a two-way communication.” It’s crucial to listen to your audience and understand how they perceive you and what they need.
Regular surveys and feedback help you identify where you’re on track and where adjustments are needed. This allows you to stay connected with your audience and continuously improve your strategy. At Adsterra, we periodically conduct surveys, and this serves as a compass, guiding our decisions and helping us refine our approach.
Sofia Popovidou, Head of Brand Marketing at Adsterra
Brand mentions will be one of the key markers of success. Your mission here is to monitor all IMC channels and look for extraordinary peaks or drops. We use Brand24 to keep a check on our brand strength compared to competitors.
Paving a way to customers’ hearts starts when they get interested in what you do and look for various aspects of your activity: %brandname% payments, %brandname% careers, %brandname% traffic, %brandname% research, etc. Your blog should not fulfill this interest alone. You need to resort to market influencers, forums, and communities and connect with opinion leaders, as well.
Conclusion
The future of branding is in its growing importance for building tough bonds with the audience. You will still need to set OKR and fetch results in real figures. But above this, you need to have the big idea of your brand that will align with what your target audiences appreciate the most.
Start providing a unified brand experience when users can:
- rely on your expertise,
- get quick solutions to their issues,
- feel their values resonate with yours.
Manifest values across all channels. Stick to your word. Increase your offline presence. Invest in your industry development. And, finally, grow your “heart skills.”
