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It’s fitting that response is the final pillar in the performance plan series. After all, response is a pivotal benchmark for success and the one thing we really want from our campaigns no matter the brand or product.
The art of sharing messages and gathering replies has been around for hundreds of years. Remember stories about the Pony Express? It took 10 days to carry communications back and forth across the country on horseback. Then there were telegraphs and TV. Some of us even participated in the practice of coupon codes and unique phone extensions. And now, we’re busy chasing clicks, views, shares, and likes – which amazingly occur in split seconds. It’s incredible how so much has changed.
Actually, the vehicles we use to drive response have dramatically evolved over the years but the reason for doing so has not. We’re still just looking for an answer, some sort of action, a reply to our message.
These days, even though technology does the heavy lifting, gaining a response is still hard work. Thankfully it no longer requires serious riding skills, but it does take a whole lot of trust, time, and attention. In order to properly measure response you have to be able to credit marketing tactics with customer actions at every stage in the customer journey. By continuously monitoring response rates, you can tune spend towards what’s working and cut what’s not. This insight will help you strengthen campaign performance and your overall brand story — which is exactly the type of outcome we’re all looking for.
Tune back in tomorrow to grab the Pillar of Performance eBook and get started on a performance plan of your own. You can also review Pillar 1: Audiences, Pillar 2: Channel, Pillar 3: Execution, and Pillar 4: Exposure. Questions on this approach? Give us a shout – we’re ready to support your every digital need.
Fortune Lists Best Companies Nationwide Based on Survey from Consulting Firm Great Place to Work;
Employee Wellness at Centro is a Catalyst for Business Success in Advertising Technology Industry
CHICAGO, IL – Oct. 27, 2015 – Centro (centro.net), a provider of enterprise-class software for digital advertising, today announced it has been named the No. 9 Best Medium Workplace, according to FORTUNE. FORTUNE collaborates with consulting firm Great Place to Work on an annual list of businesses that create positive experiences for employees. Centro has made the top ten on the list for two straight years due to near-perfect, stellar ratings from employees about atmosphere, rewards, leadership and more. With 60 positons open this year and more growth planned for 2016, Centro has many open opportunities for software developers, sales and more.
Common benefits for organizations named on the Great Place to Work list include better financial performance, less employee turnover, higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, more innovative and creative thinking, and higher productivity. This is the fourth accolade Centro has received from the organization in 2015. Centro was named No. 1 among Great Workplaces in Advertising & Marketing; No. 28 among Workplaces for Millennials; and No. 95 among Workplaces for Women. Now with more than 700 employees in North America (with 200 of them added this year), Centro has proven that business growth and employee happiness is the right combination for success.
“If employees believe that a company truly cares about their well-being and happiness, that will manifest in how they care for customers, partners and each other,” said Shawn Riegsecker, CEO of Centro. “Centro prioritizes the happiness of our team not only because it is our natural responsibility, but because it is the true path to lasting success as a company. We’re honored to receive recognition from FORTUNE and Great Place to Work and we will continue building on the workplace values that keeps our employees engaged and excited.”
Centro’s workplace accomplishments directly reflect its vision for the advertising industry, as it continues to build software that improves the lives of people working in the space. Centro’s software platform automates and streamlines every aspect of digital media buying from start to finish across all sites, channels and devices. Its technology is on pace to process $400 million in digital ad spending this year.
Divided into two categories, Small (25-250 employees) and Medium (251-999 employees), FORTUNE’s list has recognized companies with exceptional workplace cultures for the past eleven years. Centro participated in a rigorous selection process, which included an employee survey and an in-depth questionnaire about benefits programs and company practices. In compiling the list, Great Place to Work® has found that employees believe they work for great organizations when they consistently trust the people they work for, have pride in what they do and enjoy the people they work with.
About Centro
Centro (centro.net) provides unified, enterprise-class software to simplify digital media operations. Our media management platform streamlines and scales ad buys across all channels, accessing both guaranteed and biddable inventory, to achieve any campaign objective. Our holistic approach gives marketers a single system of record to fulfill their research, planning, buying, optimization, reporting and reconciliation needs. Since 2001, Centro has successfully planned and executed more than 250,000 campaigns across all digital display platforms and ad format types. Headquartered in Chicago with 32 offices in North America, Centro has received numerous accolades for its commitment to employees and workplace culture, including #1 on Crain’s Best Places to Work in Chicago in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, #1 on Advertising Age’s Best Place to Work in Media & Advertising in 2014, #6 on Crain’s Best Place to Work in New York in 2014, and a 4.6 rating (out of 5) on Glassdoor.com – one of the highest rated in media and tech.
About Great Place to Work
Great Place to Work® is the global authority on high-trust, high-performance workplace cultures. Through proprietary assessment tools, advisory services, and employer branding programs, including Best Companies lists and workplace reviews, Great Place to Work® provides the benchmarks, framework, and expertise needed to create, sustain, and recognize outstanding workplace cultures. In the United States, Great Place to Work® produces the annual Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® list and the Great Place to Work® Best Small & Medium Workplaces list. Follow Great Place to Work® online at www.greatplacetowork.com and on Twitter at @GPTW_US.
‘Hey I just met you
And this is crazy
But here's my number
So call me maybe….’
Sorry in advance, as you’ll most likely sing this later today and want to send me hate mail but the point of this cruel exercise is that we all know this song. Adults, teens, even toddlers spent the summer of 2012 singing along with Carly Rae. Don’t lie – you know you did, too.
But the ‘stickiness’ of these lyrics is not exclusive to music. What about the Geico gecko or Jake from State Farm? Love ‘em or hate ‘em (“She sounds hideous!”) everyone knows who these characters -- and brands -- are.
From a Pillars of Performance perspective: mission accomplished.
Certainly, there are several reasons why this so, but undoubtedly, exposure and repetition are two of them. Constant exposure to these songs, ads, products, and brands leaves indelible marks on our minds and ensures we remember who to turn to when the time is right.
Despite seeming fairly simple (just hit replay hundreds of thousands of times, right?), exposure requires a thoughtful approach and includes several methods of measurement. Over-exposure is overkill and under-exposure leads to under performance. Like all of our pillars, knowing what your audience wants and needs, when, is critical. In order to maximize the value of exposure, it’s important to interpret marketing signals and apply it to your advertising strategy. This means integrating more analytics into buying decisions.
To learn more about exposure, including the six metrics you need to know in order to execute this pillar properly and increase performance, download the one-sheet here.
Tune back in over the next few days to learn in detail about pillar five and find out what you can do to get started on a performance plan of your own. You can also review Pillar 1: Audiences, Pillar 2: Channel, and Pillar 3: Execution. Questions on this approach? Give us a shout – we’re ready to support your every digital need.
If you’re anything like me, you probably need to hear about or see an idea a couple of times to fully grasp what it could mean to me. Repetition helps a lot. It probably took me a couple of times to remember the message of the Geico commercial with Europe playing its hit song ‘The Final Countdown.’ The first time I see it, I’m humming along because it’s a familiar tune from the past. The second time I see it, it becomes clear it’s for Geico. Third time, I get it.
Quality exposure in any media helps brands generate a rational or emotive response. In digital media, there are so many user factors we can measure, where marketers know intricate details about how they’ve reached individuals. Learning from this, it’s critical for marketers to understand what kind of delivery is most effective for different customers. Furthermore, once a marketer identifies a right situation where they have a great value proposition to offer to the right customer, they’d better hope that they have something creative and compelling to show. comScore proved that creative quality deserves four times the credit for driving conversions than the media plan itself.
Putting these multiple considerations together, a marketer can define quality exposure by:
What’s challenging is orchestrating exposure and precisely coordinating it with the sales/buying cycles. It’s pointless to re-target a user if they already purchased the item. Having a response message while the consumer is still on the top of the funnel is a wasted opportunity. An ad shown to someone just starting their automobile research should be different from an ad for someone way down the purchase funnel (where a weekend discount offer served with high frequency on every site the user goes on might be enough to affect a purchase).
Brands and agencies need to find effective ways to interpret marketing signals and apply it to their ad executions to maximize the value of their exposure to the user. In reality, this means integrating more analytics into ad buying decisions. More and more hours of digital media consumption is generated every day so there’s plenty of opportunity to reach a user. But that doesn’t mean it should be a free-for-all in ad exposures. First of all, it could get costly very quickly. Secondly, over-exposure could damage your brand’s reputation. Smart marketers evaluate when a conversion with a user is imminent, and when enough is enough.
Every brand should understand the optimal way they are building their reputation with customers. By timing exposures based on individual customer journeys, ensuring that ads can be seen, tailoring those messages, and choosing the most effective creative/executions, agencies and brands can maximize the possibilities of digital media to gain market share and build long-lasting customer bases.
The old saying goes, "If you do something you love, you'll never work a day in your life." In no one else is that more clear than this Centron, in our latest chapter of #CentronShorts. In these brief accounts, we’ll give you a new look into the lives of the Centrons, in ways never before seen. And just so we are clear: no selfie sticks. Please enjoy!
On July 1st, 1941, the Brooklyn Dodgers played the Philadelphia Phillies at Ebbets Field. The game was broadcast on WNBT-TV. At 2:29pm, just seconds before the game aired, history was made. A grey outline of the United States appeared in viewers’ TVs, overlain by a Bulova clock face, with the voiceover “America Runs on Bulova Time.” The ten second spot was the world’s first TV advertisement.
Many decades later, TV ad spots capture the largest share of media spend thanks to its potential reach and scale. As a channel, video has the unique ability to share a brand’s story with their consumers through sight, sound, and motion. And although video viewing on digital devices continues to rise, TV still commands most of consumers’ time. The medium does, however, have limitations when it comes to inventory insight, targeting, and efficiency. Today, media planners and buyers are working toward designing omnichannel plans, creating the opportunity to modernize traditional TV buying in order to keep pace.
The introduction of programmatic TV is timely, and quickly gaining interest among buyers. Ad technology has matured to allow for a more data-driven targeting approach and more immediate access to inventory and audience data – specifically with the use of programmatic. Buying TV spots is not an inherently streamlined process, but syncing the inventory management and ad insertion systems with programmatic technology offers a more automated purchase process for buyers. Enhanced targeting techniques through programmatic allow buyers to more efficiently assess the spots they are buying. And, instead of reaching out to each individual network for avails, buyers can gather inventory forecasts closer to real time.
Data layers are also changing the way buyers look at inventory, revealing new audience insights and placements that may not have been previously considered. Including audience data gives buyers a chance to plan across both high and low value TV spots, baking efficiency into their plans. This insight spells good news for media buyers, especially those looking to make a little budget go a long way. Even large brands don’t always have the media dollars for prime time spots on large networks. These additional layers of data also help refine targets based on what they’re watching, including more affordable ad spots; a real win for any campaign.
At Centro, we’ve been investigating programmatic TV opportunities with our clients, and checking out the advancements in this space. Interested in joining us? Reach out to [email protected], or speak to your local account lead to get the full picture of how Centro can help you get started in programmatic TV.
As marketers, we’ve got a lot to think about: goals to hit, brands to promote, alternative fuel vehicles to launch. At least, that was the case with Centro’s recent client – a leading vehicle brand preparing for the release of a new hybrid electric car. Understandably, during this time, the client’s team was short on bandwidth and lacked the expertise necessary to carefully plan the digital splash its product launch required. Our client had bigger things to focus on and needed a partner that had the resources necessary to design a high-performing, expertly tuned digital campaign.
Fortunately, the client was able to connect with the Centro team in order to execute its vision. The client primarily wanted to raise awareness of the vehicle launch and educate consumers about the benefits of its hybrid electric model. The vehicle brand dubbed the target audience the “Everyday Eco-Modernist.” It was up to Centro to find this audience and deliver the brand’s message.
Centro leveraged strategic intelligence, audience insight data, and planning resources to locate this consumer group across all digital devices and inventory types. This ensured a cross-channel presence that allowed the brand to stay in front of its consumer audience during all moments of their digital day. Centro built high-impact media and branding opportunities across nearly 20 partners to align the client’s message with reputable technology and science content. All in all, the bundled recommendation filled out a full media portfolio that targeted the “Everyday Eco-Modernist” audience for the client. But, the Centro partnership didn’t end there. Upon launch, a dedicated analyst team monitored the campaign, provided bi-weekly reporting, and recommended optimizations to continuously improve performance.
The final campaign was a big win – both for Centro and the client. The “Everyday Eco-Modernist” media portfolio successfully reached the audience it was created for, while simultaneously achieving scale. The Centro team’s dedication to monitoring pacing and performance resulted in full delivery of the purchased impressions with additional impressions delivered as added value for the campaign. Satisfied with Centro’s thorough strategic approach to the media plan and the careful execution of the campaign, the client renewed its buy for an additional campaign flight.
At Centro, we offer a modern approach to digital media. With over 13 years and 100,000 campaigns to our name, we leverage advanced technology, proven tactics, and industry expertise to build campaigns around the channels and platforms that drive the greatest results for our client’s specific business needs. People and technology are at the heart of Centro, and are the essential parts in every #CentroInAction story.
There’s an age-old debate around the merits of marketing versus brand advertising.
Marketers claim: “Creative is not valuable unless it closes business and makes money.”
Brand advertisers argue: “Good creative isn’t about numbers, it’s about inspiring people.”
Wait. Isn’t it about both?
Whether you agree or not, the convergence of creative and performance is happening right before our very eyes – literally. It occurs in your feeds, shows up as recommendations in searches, appears in the right-hand rail, it even materializes now and again in banner placements (#digitaldinosaur).
Nowadays, customers are smart, challenging, and fast-paced. As a result creative has to be, too. Unless you hit the viral campaign lottery or have a mega-brand budget, without a sound performance plan in place that includes such data as targeting layers, various format metrics, channel insights, etc., being agile (while making smart decisions) is nearly impossible. And in today’s digital landscape, that means your brand will end up in ruins.
The reality is, creative can’t show performance without data and metrics – and high performing media isn’t possible without creative thinking applied every step of the way. Looks like it’s time for marketers and advertisers to hug it out.
Reaching consumers is both an art and a science – something we explore in detail in our Pillars of Performance strategy. The release of our third pillar: execution, focuses exclusively on messaging and format and how to build high performing creative that’s able to stand against the toughest competitors, including time.
Tune back in over the course of the next few days to learn in detail about pillars four and five and find out what you can do to get started on a performance plan of your own. You can also review Pillar 1: Audiences, and Pillar 2: Channel here. Questions on this approach? Give us a shout – we’re ready to support your every digital need.
