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Historians say the act of setting New Year’s resolutions dates back some 4,000 years to the ancient Babylonians. Since those early years, the evolution of New Year’s resolutions has maintained one commonality: future improvement.
Our resolutions capture our aspirations for the futures we want to live. We aim to stop bad habits, start healthy ones, or make big changes that stretch us out of our comfort zones—setting goals to reach, creating strategies to achieve them, and identifying ways to track our progress.
Of course, advertising industry professionals are no strangers to goal setting, strategy development, and performance measurement. We need those skills to fuel 2024’s forecasted ad spend growth, which follows 2023’s rocky start but generally stable finish. So, in the spirit of the New Year and of helping marketers improve their campaign efforts in 2024 (and beyond), we asked three Basis media experts—Page Kelley, Jared Rosenbloom, and Dan Wilson, our Group Vice Presidents of Integrated Marketing Solutions—to provide some suggestions for New Year’s resolution that advertisers can embrace to improve campaign outcomes in the coming year.
Page Kelley: Now that Google has started phasing out third-party cookies from users’ internet browsers, marketers should start to test and understand new cookie-proof ad targeting tactics to gain an understanding of their performance. There are many solutions and approaches to addressing a cookieless future, and marketers will remain a step ahead if they have data-driven learnings to minimize the impact.
Take the opportunity to test the effectiveness of activating your customers’ first-party data, using data modeling to create look-a-like audiences, and enhancing ad relevance with contextual targeting. You may find you’re able to make more out of your opted-in customer data and even increase your data pool, and you might learn more about certain audience segments, ad placements, or creative approaches that help you purge underperformers and focus on winners. The unknown can be frightening and intimidating, but using your own findings to create an action plan can ease the dramatic impact to your bottom line.
Jared Rosenbloom: Consider test-and-learn budgets with new and fast-growing channels. Digital out-of-home (DOOH) and dynamic podcast advertising are two channels that are growing leaps and bounds post-pandemic. In the past, marketers were nervous to advertise on novel channels due to a bit of a “Wild West” ad supply stigma. The reality is that DOOH and dynamic podcast advertising have consolidated their ad supply, making the inventory seamlessly available. Measurement of these channels is also far more interesting today, with options to track impression delivery by audience/geography and to use visit lift studies for brands with brick-and-mortar locations. A test-and-learn approach means not putting all your eggs in one unknown basket, and it means measuring effectiveness and investing more in what works while not overspending on what doesn’t.
Dan Wilson: Watch out for getting stuck using an overly simplified view of defining and achieving marketing objectives. If you’ve spent any time recently in industry forums or professional social networks, you will quickly find that the industry is abuzz debating which types of marketing strategies lead to the greatest revenue impact: brand-focused or performance-focused. Though these are certainly thought-provoking and relevant discussions, don’t let them lead you to a “one or the other” mindset. It is important to ensure your approach is mindful of the multiple touchpoints of the consumer journey and the objectives you can reach throughout, that it stays nimble, and that it’s rooted in a test/learn/optimize philosophy. With the availability of new and innovative channels and a constantly evolving measurement landscape, there is no need to pick only one approach.
JR: Use automatic content recognition (ACR) technology to strategically determine broadcast spend versus convergent TV spend for 2024 and beyond. ACR is a technology that is built into smart TVs to recognize content, including ads, being played on your television. And, from an advertising standpoint, that helps to target ad placements and measure ad performance. Studies using ACR data provide advertisers with an impressive analysis tool to recommend what level of broadcast-to-digital spend makes the most sense for your brand and/or your competition. These studies are done with reputable companies like TVAdSync and Samba, who work directly with TV manufacturers like Vizio, Samsung, and others. Marketers should not fear the sticker shock of these ACR studies, because they can provide long-term benefits for reach, frequency, relevance, and overall performance.
From the ancient Babylonians to modern-day marketers, people have long embraced the tradition of using New Year’s resolutions to kickstart self-improvement. They’re often the things we commit to stop doing, start doing, or sometimes drastically change in our efforts to better ourselves.
Similarly, marketing and advertising professionals constantly seek out ways to improve their ad campaigns—from planning to performance to measurement. By resolving to start to test cookie-proof targeting tactics and emerging channels, to stop using an “either/or” dichotomy of brand vs. performance, and to leap into innovative data use like CTV’s automatic content recognition, advertisers will start the New Year off on a path toward success, both in 2024 and beyond.
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Want to learn more about how to make the most of your New Year? Download our 2024 digital advertising trends report to learn more about how capturing attention, navigating the upcoming election, and riding out hype cycles can influence your plans and strategies in the months ahead.