Impact of 5G on Marketing and Advertising

5G is gearing up to launch later this year. The coming of next-gen 5G wireless transmission will be a big deal for marketers. Verizon has launched a 5G-enabled home broadband service, AT&T has started 5G service in a dozen cities and 5G networks are expected to be available by mid-2019. With data rates from 1 to 10 gigabits/second – up to 100 times faster than 4G LTE and a major decrease in latency, 5G could alter a lot of the existing digital landscape.

End of Cable - Cable connections & set-top boxes could become irrelevant. If you get a new, large TV, for instance, it might pick up all the HD and 4K programming you want from the air wirelessly. This would totally disrupt the cable and Internet Service Provider industry because the fixed wire infrastructure would no longer be necessary to deliver fast Internet and hundreds of TV channels, and it would similarly disrupt the ad-buying and -serving infrastructure built around it. But it also means something more profound for marketers: any surface with a 5G wireless transceiver can become a high-resolution screen, and an outlet for the most intelligent computing service available.

A 5G-enhanced media environment, offers more ad inventory opportunities as super-fast wireless connectivity means high-end screens can be located anywhere. It also could dramatically change the kind of messaging marketers and advertisers do. The biggest marketing impact of 5G will be that consumers will have actual voice conversations with mobile devices, not just issue a few voice commands and interact at other times via thumb-typing or screen-touching. Mobile marketing could become entirely oriented toward voice conversations.

But it’s not just data repositories that may have to be redesigned to handle massive demand. Advertising infrastructures will also have to be re-invented. Present-day programmatic technologies aren’t built for the demands of a system that delivers ads up to a hundred times faster. The industry needs to prepare for 5G in other ways as well, such as updating creative specs on ad formats and file sizes.