Why 2018 will be about embracing advertising for income generation

Is the advertising industry a little like the public sector? Yes. And this year we will see them come together bringing a number of potential benefits.

The public sector and the digital advertising industry may not seem like natural bedfellows, they have, however, more in common that you might think:

• Many are of the opinion that there should be either more or much less of them
• People tend to focus on when they are done badly rather than when done brilliantly
• Since the late noughties, both have been through some of the most challenging changes ever seen – we’re not going anywhere but we are very different from 10 years ago.

When public sector organisations embrace all that advertising tech has to offer, here is what can happen:

• Communications become cheap, free or income-generating
• Budgets start to get signed off as investments
• Public awareness increases, bringing perceived value with it
• Engaging costs less and less

2018 is going to be a very exciting year for advertising in the public sector by…

• Unleashing the power of email (find out how you can be part of an income-generating email advertising programme here)
• Using GDPR as the springboard for freeing consent-driven audience data to engage better and more efficiently
• Investing in comms – as public sector comms become more commercial and platforms tighten the opportunities for free promotion, we have to make the business case for investment in comms, and that of finding the money from somewhere to fund it.

Luckily, the advertising industry has been through fundamental disruption in the last 10 years. This disruption has resulted in the creation of technology that makes communication easier, cheaper, more targeted, more transparent and so, more powerful.

The comms professionals who convince their organisations to embrace this technology will thrive. By embracing income generation from advertising, the job of convincing should become a great deal easier.

If you want to start generating income from email or want to look at how ad funding makes Granicus even easier to invest in, check out this handy summary guide directly.

If you want to talk about how you could run more paid campaigns for free using your own audience data, contact johnpaul.danon@counciladvertising.net at the Council Advertising Network (CAN).

John-Paul Danon is sales director of CAN. They help the public sector generate income, access programmatic advertising and use public sector audience data.