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Data is every marketer's best friend. There was a time, not long ago, when "advertising" simply meant utilizing the creative side of one's brain to come up with interesting spots that would pique audiences' attention. That's certainly no longer the case. Today's advertising is driven by data, analytics, and everything marketing experts can use to truly get to know their consumers.
This is why programmatic advertising has taken the lead with successful companies that know how to get their brands in front of people who will take notice.
Programmatic advertising employs the use of software to determine optimal ways marketers can utilize their digital advertising real estate. Essentially, machines buy ad space because they understand buyer behavior, so they're able to put ads in front of the people who are most likely to pay attention to them.
The machines that drive programmatic advertising understand where your customers came from, how they found you, and which keywords or ads were deemed most relevant. It's all about embracing the power of data science to learn how to better target your campaigns. Sure, humans are pretty good at managing data analytics, but when you put machines in the driver's seat, there's an entire world of digital behavioral data that will allow you to personalize messages in completely new ways.
For starters, programmatic advertising is effective. You don't need humans monitoring your campaigns because the robots do the dirty work for you. Efficient ad buys are more cost-effective, which means you're not only making money — you're simultaneously saving money, too. Machines don't get tired; they don't take vacation days or need time off on the weekends. They're always "on," which means you can enjoy the benefits of real-time ad bidding, no matter when the optimal time occurs.
Programmatic advertising enables you to answer your customers' questions before they even ask them. Thanks to the machines that are constantly scanning your audience's behaviors, you're now able to place ads directly before consumers who are looking for the exact solutions your company offers in real time. In return, you'll receive a virtually limitless set data that helps you home in on various segments of your audience with more personalized messaging.
Real-time behavioral data is a beautiful thing. The more data you have, the more individualized you can make your campaigns. Programmatic advertising enables you to reach a wider audience with more personalized messages.
Let's say a woman was browsing your site for designer shoes. Thanks to programmatic advertising, you'll know the price range she considered reasonable based on the shoes she viewed. You can also derive other essential information, such as:
Now, you have a lot of information that can be used to build a detailed buyer persona. The women who fit this persona are more likely to respond to certain targeted messaging than a retired male who's shopping for shoes to give his daughter for Christmas.
Since programmatic advertising takes into account the entirety of consumers' behaviors, it would be able to distinguish these two subsets of shoppers based on the way they interact with your site (and others).
Despite programmatic advertising's dramatic impact on the marketing world, there remains a major disconnect between media buyers and marketers. Media buyers have built the greatest understanding of this technology, while many marketers don't even know such a tool exists. This disconnect causes certain obvious obstacles, which can be overcome with the right strategies in place.
Twenty-nine percent of organizations claim they're not using programmatic advertising because they don't have a staff in place with the skills to use it properly. Obviously, since only 22 percent of marketers are using programmatic advertising, there's a huge opportunity for education to bridge this gap. Increasing awareness of this option means more people could begin to gain the skills necessary to execute successful campaigns.
Often, it's not that organizations don't have money available to allocate to programmatic advertising. Instead, they don't see the value in this tool when budgets are being created, so they allocate those funds elsewhere. The initial costs can seem intimidating to decision makers. Yet the increased efficiency and improved ROI, resulting from better-targeted campaigns, have early adopters of this technology experiencing strong competitive advantages in their markets.
Media buyers and sellers in the digital space have traditionally maintained human-to-human relationships. Some companies fear the integration of programmatic advertising would harm the existing trust between these two entities. To overcome issues related to transparency, both sides of the buying universe will have to work together.
Centro is where outstanding programmatic advertising begins. If you want to enhance your audience's experience while targeting the people who are most likely to pay attention to your brand, learn more about Programmatic Advertising with Centro.
Advertising has been around since the beginning of time. While it’s evolved as technology has come into the forefront of our lives, its intent has always been the same: to convince people they need something so badly, they can't live without it. As time has passed, though, consumers have caught on to marketing tricks.
Due to increased consumer knowledge, companies have been forced to adjust the ways they approach their audiences. After all, if brands don't listen to buyers' needs, rest-assured - their competitors will.
When the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into play in May 2018, it was a game-changer as far as advertising was concerned. This was the first time a unified set of strict rules was put in place to govern how people's data was used. The regulation also offered ways for consumers to easily opt out of communications if they disagreed with marketers' intentions.
Ad blockers simply weren't enough for online audiences anymore. They called for greater security with less effort and demanded control of the way their personal data was being used. Only a month before GDPR went live, the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal occurred. It was discovered that some 50 million Facebook users' personal information had been facilitating marketers' tactics for years, unbeknownst to the social site's users.
This was a turning point for consumers and advertisers alike. Consumers stopped allowing their personal data to be used as marketers began implementing more secure measures of protecting their privacy. Businesses worldwide were forced to respond by formulating new marketing strategies, driven by transparency. Reputable companies own the responsibility of keeping users' data safe and secure.
Advertising is built on emotional responses to certain images, phrases, or actions. It's not inherently bad, but some manipulative tactics are so subliminal, people don't even realize their decisions are being swayed.
When you were little, the candy at the checkout counter elicited an emotional response and made you feel like you needed that sugar right then and there. The same is true for trinkets strategically placed at the register, that are meant to incite impulse buys. This is similar to what happens with digital advertising, but online marketing takes a layer deeper.
Manipulative advertising is intended to take rationale out of the picture. Instead, it relies solely on emotions to justify buying behavior. When you're not prepared to think, decorative words can go a long way in convincing you to do something.
People need to think logically rather than emotionally. Once people recognize the tricks used to elicit feelings instead of thoughtful buying processes, they can break the cycle of bad advertising behaviors.
Consumer expectations in today's world demand more. People want increased personalization in their advertisements, but they mandate better privacy in their interactions with companies with which they consider doing business. As a marketer, your job is to instill confidence in your audience while finding ways to use online data the right way.
Is your brand important to you? We certainly hope so. After all, you've spent countless hours and innumerable amounts of energy developing a brand that tells the story of your business and conveys everything you want the public to know about your company.
It would be a shame if all the efforts you've put into extending your outreach fell into the wrong hands, compromising the integrity of everything you built.
Programmatic advertising is vital to building your audience and creating an extensive outreach that leads to better customer engagement. Yet, how do you balance awesome exposure without incurring the potential problems that could transpire if someone put your brand alongside content that doesn’t fit company values? Fear not, there is a way!
First, decide what level of risk is tolerable for your company. If you're running brand campaigns that are built to generate awareness, you'll need a higher risk tolerance than if you were just running direct-response campaigns.
Once you've settled on the amount of risk that's acceptable, utilize pre-bid screening tools that will enable you to understand how the safety parameters you've put into place measure in the real world. Centro's partner Comscore offers a tool, for example, that allows you to understand the risk and reward tradeoffs for important metrics such as:
Centro also partners with Peer39—another company built around providing brand safety in digital environments. Of course, the more your campaigns are screened, the more likely your efforts won't reach optimal scale. It’s important to set reasonable expectations of permissible risk first.
Block list sites are specifically prevented from serving your ads. To retain brand safety, you'll want to put websites to your block list if they:
Allowed list sites are the opposite—where your ads would only be served to specific sites that you’ve identified as aligning with your values or deem ‘safe.’ Know that using an allowed list, however, may limit your reach and scale. Generally (and not specifically related to block lists or allowed lists), you can find a list of trustworthy ad inventory sources on Pixalate’s Seller Trust Index, which evaluates multiple criteria in how ad marketplaces source ad supply.
Have you ever wondered if YouTube is safe for your brand? It's a valid concern, but there are precautions you can take to make sure your message stays as intended:
Programmatic media buys are extremely beneficial to any business, but brand safety must be at the top of the list before letting the algorithms go to work. By blocking content that doesn't fit your company's values and utilizing the tools that automate the security process, you'll be able to achieve scale in your campaigns, without putting your brand in a publicly compromising position.
Centro has everything you need to ensure brand safety on every digital media buy. We're here to help you realize positive ROI without sacrificing the integrity of your business.
Learn more about Programmatic Advertising with Centro.
Have your cake and eat it too: adopting a brand safety approach that doesn’t cost you scale.
https://centro.net/blog/centro-ensures-brand-safe-ads
In the digital world, technology and trends are constantly in flux—some are so powerful, they become best practices, while others never should have existed in the first place. Read five digital media trends that won't make the cut in 2019.
E-books established themselves as the go-to way for companies to showcase authority in their industries several years ago. Over time, they've become one of the most popular lead-generating elements, as businesses offered them free in exchange for that oh-so-valuable personal contact information.
Due to the number of smartphone users expected to hit, companies have to switch the way they offer information to their audiences because wordy e-books simply don't translate well on the small screens of mobile devices.
What should agencies/brands be offering instead? Scrollable, shareable content, such as:
White papers and e-books still have value, but they'll no longer be the standard way to share information.
Organic reach has been on the decline for several years now. In fact, in 2016, organic reach on Facebook was estimated to be around—a drop from 16 percent just four years prior. Now, with several years’ separation since that near-nothing number was reported, organic reach on Facebook will likely be immeasurably small in 2019.
Back when it was acceptable to simply have words on a webpage to rank well with search engines—keyword stuffing and blogs that didn't offer any value were fine. If you're still doing this in 2019, you will be killing your chances of ranking well on SERPs (search engine results pages). You will also probably be irritating your audience to the point of no return.
To remedy this, don't focus on the quantity of content you're putting out to the world, but rather, the quality. Every post you create should mean something to your audience—otherwise, it shouldn’t take up valuable real estate on the internet. One post every week or two weeks that's filled with a substantial amount of relevant, useful, information is worth far more than a bunch of meaningless words every few days.
Words are important, but they're not the only things that make you rank well in the land of search engine optimization. You have to reduce bounce rates, decrease load times and increase backlinks to reputable sites. If you’re only focused on words, your SEO will surely fall in the rankings.
Let’s face it, fake reviews are just bad for business. Consumers can sniff them out a mile away, and big brands like Amazon are doing their due diligence to ensure they don't infiltrate the true meaning of honest reviews.
If you’re considering employing a fake-review strategy, we implore you to put your energies elsewhere.
Sticking with outdated digital media trends can be incredibly detrimental to the reputation of your business or brand. Refine your reach with a comprehensive digital media platform and request a demo from our Centro team. We can't wait to show you how we're changing the world of digital media!
Technology has done amazing things in recent years. Nearly every industry has now adopted improved processes, thanks to innovative solutions that technology has allowed. While some of these trends are obvious to outside observers, others only make sense to the people who are driving the designs. Marketing technology resides on both sides of the fence, offering marketers and their target audiences better experiences that bolster brand awareness.
As 2018 comes to a close, we wanted to look back at some of the digital marketing technology trends that dominated this year (and will continue to do so as we embark upon the next calendar year).
Consumers' expectations are higher today than ever before. Companies that truly want to create engaging campaigns must find ways to deliver authentic experiences to each of their audience members. With today's ever-connected world of mobile devices and non-stop Internet accessibility, consumers expect to be engaged and delighted across multiple channels and platforms, posing major challenges for marketers that weren't prepared for the technological takeover.
According to Adobe, "60% of marketers struggle to personalize content in real-time, yet 77% believe real-time personalization is crucial." That's a huge gap that can only be filled when organizations understand the importance of hiring an outside firm that can automate, update, and optimize their outreach and advertising efforts.
Although desktop usage is still quite common among people with traditional working hours, mobile and tablet technologies have taken over as consumers' preferred search methodologies. What marketers really need to understand is when mobile usage will provide ideal results. Depending on a company's intended demographic, the time of day in which it chooses to display ads could make or break a campaign.
As mentioned above, real-time personalization is the key to revealing a higher ROI. When mobile marketing technology is used correctly, companies can hyper-target their messages based on users' habits, locations, and the time of day in which they're most likely to give the brand the attention it wants.
Artificial intelligence (AI) began popping up in the gaming world a few years ago, but it's only recently reared its head in the marketing industry, turning once-bland ads into must-see experiences. It goes without saying that any trend grabbing people's attention exponentially in just a couple of short years will find its way into marketing campaigns.
AI ups the advertising ante, enabling companies to give consumers that real-life, personalized engagement that's truly meant for the person who's seeing the ads. It will continue to be used to aid in content creation, proper PPC purchasing, website design, and everything else users interact with on the Internet. Machine-learning algorithms enable companies to learn about their consumers and adjust to their needs and desires unlike anything before.
Once upon a time, departments were siloed, unable (or unwilling) to know what the others were doing. Today, that's not possible. Finance, marketing, accounting, and sales are all intertwined by the power of an organization's data. Each department drives the success of another, ideally finding its way to positive customer experiences. Without the necessary technological infrastructure to capture, manage, and analyze everyday data, however, companies are missing out on major opportunities to fulfill their customers' needs.
Data's all about bringing components together and identifying trends, successes, and opportunities that will propel a business into its next stages of success.
Centro is the place where better performance meets more efficient planning, execution, and management of paid digital marketing campaigns. If you're ready to learn what a performance-driven approach can do for your marketing initiatives—learn more about our services and meet our team. Get ahead of the game and be part of the trends that bring big solutions.
The digital industry is constantly evolving, which can make keeping up with the latest trends and advances very challenging. Fear not! Centro is here for you. What are the emerging trends? What's still working? Where are we going next? In our latest infographic, we answer pertinent questions regarding digital platform investments, mobile, and the video landscape as they continue to move forward.
Click to read our take on the digital trends and predictions for 2019.
Consumers are constantly inundated with video ads from a multitude of brands both large and small. Whether they're on a PC, tablet, or laptop, they're exposed to one ad after another—which makes it easy for them to ignore what doesn't connect or stand-out. This creates a unique challenge for brands/agencies alike, and poses the question: How do companies capture the short attention span of consumers in an entirely saturated market?
Here are five proven advertising techniques to help your brand break away from the pack.
In-your-face branding is a turn-off for today's consumers. They've become desensitized over the years, making consumer advertising with heavy-handed branding largely ineffective. Instead, consider a technique called brand pulsing. This technique strategically knits branding through an advertisement in an understated way. It ensures that your brand is seen, but in an effective, understated way.
Ad placement can impact the effectiveness of messaging and affect how consumers think about the brand. Ads must be relevant not only to the audience, but also the space in which they’re located. For example, if you own a company that manufactures dog toys and your ad appears on a website dedicated to maintaining saltwater fish tanks—it’s probably going to miss the mark. Utilize a demand-side platform to help discover ad space that is most relevant to your brand and vice versa.
Establishing a personal connection is crucial to effective advertising in a saturated market. One of the most valuable advertising tips for companies in any industry is to find a way to empathize with their target audience. This is less difficult than it seems. Think about it—most companies are created because they offer a product or service that solves a problem or satisfies a need. Show that you understand their challenges and frustrations and that your product or service is the solution.
Create highly shareable video content that’s appropriate for a wide range of audiences. Avoid segregating some markets to appeal to others. For example, the use of crude humor for shock value may increase your number of views but is likely to isolate certain segments of your audience.
Today's consumers value rich, interactive experiences on and offline. Avoid talking at them—instead, provide your audience with educational and actionable content. Deliver a full experience. Do that, and they will remember your brand. Content that’s extravagant for the sake of being extravagant is easily forgotten, while content that cultivates a positive learning experience is usually the most effective.
Maximize Brand Exposure
There is a myriad of advertising techniques and tactics that can be utilized to increase brand exposure, however, many of them fail to take into account that online channels are now very saturated with ads. What worked a few years ago, may not work now. Stay on top of the latest advertising tips to maximize exposure and make your ad dollars work harder for you.
Centro offers a performance-driven, demand-side platform designed to help you streamline media campaigns across a multitude of online channels. For more information about how programmatic can transform your consumer advertising, contact us today.
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Sources
https://www.acuityads.com/blog/2017/11/06/seizing-short-attention-spans-saturated-online-channels/
https://centro.net/
https://centro.net/services
https://centro.net/products/dsp-programmatic-advertising
https://centro.net/products/reinventing-digital-media-planning
‘Tis the season… to be advertising!
HO HO HO! Thanksgiving is practically here, Black Friday is right around the corner, and the holidays are soon-to-follow. At this point, consumers have already started their shopping, and every brand/retailer is on the hunt for the best way to increase their share of wallet. Proper targeting, segmentation, and engagement are now more important than ever in order to stand-out.
Are you trying to determine the most effective way to deploy the remainder of your annual marketing budget? Do you know the right strategies and tactics to heighten your message’s engagement? We’ve made a list (and checked it twice) of all the latest stats and key trends, that are sure to put your holiday campaigns on the “nice” list!
Review our Holiday Advertising Trends Infographic below!
How do you activate and improve media performance? Well, by the thoughtful integration of digital buying, of course! Is converging your direct and programmatic buying into a unified platform really that simple? The short answer is—not always. That’s why we’re here to clear the air and share a practical guide of tested methods to get you there!
According to Forrester Research*, 75% of agencies are headed towards convergence, while only 17% have fully achieved this state. More importantly, most agencies know that failing to evolve media buying practices means potentially jeopardizing their future. However, there is a bright side—and a solution! The convergence of direct and programmatic buying, along with a holistic system for internal collaboration, allow agencies to focus on the innovation and advancement of their media buying solutions. Can technology help achieve this?
What agencies prioritize in tech buying to create a more holistic system for internal collaboration:
We believe that the thoughtful integration of media buying can be achieved if and when it’s powered by a unified media platform. Read more about how to get there with our guide, Converge Direct + Programmatic. TheBlueprint -- and get started on your convergence today!
*Methodology: In this study, Forrester conducted an online survey of 104 advertising and/or marketing agency professionals at the manager level or above with responsibility for or influence over media buying strategy to evaluate digital media buying.
*Source: A study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Centro, June 2018
*Base: 104 media buying strategy decision makers at US advertising and/or marketing agencies