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When you’re online looking for crowdsourced recommendations from passionate people, where and how do you look? With so much product recommendation content out there these days, we can’t be the only ones adding “Reddit” at the end of our searches (à la “best vacuum cleaner reddit”) in search of honest recommendations and reviews.
In fact, this is likely one of the most common ways Reddit shows up in the lives of people who don’t participate regularly in one of the social media network’s 100,000+ interest-based communities. Add it all up, and Reddit is the third-most visited website in the US and the seventh-most visited site in the world.
Amongst advertisers, the platform isn’t as widely leveraged as YouTube or TikTok. But with a variety of factors bringing new challenges to historically dominant social media networks—not to mention the strides Reddit has made in recent years to up its advertising value—some advertisers are newly considering whether the platform makes sense for their brands.
If you want to learn more about what Reddit is, what it offers advertisers, and how to make the most of its advertising opportunity, you’ve come to the right place. Read on for everything you need to know about advertising on this one-of-a-kind social platform.
Unfamiliar with Reddit? You’re not the only one! Before we get into how and when advertisers might want to use the platform, let’s get clear on how it works.
Reddit is home to thousands of interest-based communities, or subreddits, where users connect and converse with each other. The site has over 51 million active monthly users across the US and more than 430 million around the globe.
One of the main ways Redditors engage is via posts, which can be marked as public to the entire internet or as viewable only to other Redditors in a certain subreddit. Users engage with posts by commenting and either upvoting (clicking a button to indicate that they found the post valuable or relevant) or downvoting (clicking a button to indicate that they did not find the post valuable or relevant) the post. The more upvotes a post gets, the more visibly it is displayed on Reddit. Check out the front page of Reddit to see the most popular (i.e., the most upvoted) posts of today—they range from breaking news, to funny videos, to celebrity gossip, to interviews with interesting people.
It’s a great question, as Redditors are a unique bunch!
One of the most unique benefits of the Reddit audience is that it’s a highly engaged one: As Reddit itself says, “Redditors don’t doom-scroll—they engage with intent.” Reddit is also a great way to reach millennials, as they represent about 40% of the platform’s users. At the same time, Redditors trust the content on the platform: 85% of them agree that their peers post things that are “honest and truthful”, which explains why so many turn to the site when searching for reviews and recommendations.
That being said, the fact that Redditors are so highly engaged and passionate about the topics they engage in comes with some caveats for marketers. Redditors are protective about their communities—a quality which has led to the perception that there’s an anti-advertising sentiment on the platform. According to Reddit, however, Redditors don’t dislike ads in and of themselves—they dislike “sneaky” ads.
Despite the platform’s large, engaged user base and its clear staying power, there’s a sentiment in the advertising community that Reddit has often been the platform playing catch-up when it comes to developing innovative features for users and advertisers alike.
Still, despite its relatively simple interface (to put it kindly…), Reddit has made some serious strides in just the past year to make itself more attractive to marketers—and, in particular, performance marketers. In 2023 alone, the platform announced Reddit Brand Lift and Reddit Conversion Lift for enhanced measurement, as well as Product Ads and Contextual Keyword Targeting. The platform has also invested heavily in delivering a personalized and localized user experience to international audiences. Its untapped search advertising potential (which it will no doubt try to harness amidst hints that an IPO could be around the corner) makes Reddit a worthy channel for advertisers to, at the very least, keep an eye on.
Overall, while Reddit has thus far struggled to establish itself as a cornerstone in the social advertising landscape, the platform is in an exciting place to capture more of marketers’ social ad spend—if it plays its cards right.
While Reddit can work for brands in most industries, marketers working in sectors that have particularly active audiences on the platforms, such as consumer, gaming, and tech, are especially well-situated to tap in. However, Reddit’s big marketing appeal—its ability to direct ad spending towards very specific target audiences in a privacy-friendly way—is relevant for businesses of all kinds.
Because Reddit is home to so many niche communities—from birders, to board gamers, skincare addicts, sound system afficionados, and everyone in between—there’s a big opportunity to serve ads specifically to people who are already engaging in an interest relevant to your product or service. Marketers using Reddit can target by community (to serve ads to a specific subreddit), interest (to reach a larger audience across multiple subreddits), location (to target Redditors in specific geographies), and custom audiences (to re-engage with consumers who have already engaged with their business in some way).
Even more, as the advertising world prepares for the loss of third-party cookies in Chrome and adjusts to the uptick in privacy-focused digital advertising regulation—not to mention the clear consumer demand for privacy-first marketing—contextual targeting will become a critical piece of any brand’s marketing investment. That makes Reddit’s community- and interest-based targeting options all the more valuable. These contextual capabilities will be a big differentiator for Reddit and may drive more marketing dollars towards the platform as social ad spend continues to fragment and marketers prioritize privacy-friendly targeting opportunities.
The golden question! Let’s dig into what you should consider when investing in Reddit to ensure your dollars are used strategically.
First and foremost, make sure to read up on Reddit’s Advertising Policy and ensure that all your campaigns comply.
Next, when it comes to crafting creative for Reddit, here are some key tips:
Once you’ve crafted your creative, make sure to set a clear objective or KPI to analyze the performance of your campaign against. This will help you keep track of what’s working and what isn’t once the campaign is up and running.
From there, make sure to set a long enough flight for your test to ensure that the platform can optimize based on initial learnings. Your test should last for at least four weeks, and preferably for eight weeks. As part of the testing process, incorporate A/B tests—of ad formats, ad creatives, headlines, post text, and CTAs—into your campaign to see what resonates the most with your target audiences.
Next, while Reddit can be a standalone platform for advertising efforts, it works best as part of a full funnel, omnichannel approach. While the platform has come a long way in improving its performance marketing offerings, it has a lot of value as an upper-funnel channel, as many users visit the site to research and discover new ideas and products. As such, it can work well for building brand awareness with highly engaged target audiences. To move prospect audiences further down the funnel, marketers can pair Reddit campaigns with channels like Meta and Google Search to round out their omnichannel efforts.
Despite its effectiveness, adding a new channel to any digital campaign can be daunting for marketers, if only due to the sheer number of different platforms they must navigate. To ease this burden, some teams may seek out platforms that automatically pull in campaign performance data from multiple platforms—including social platforms such as Reddit, Snapchat, and TikTok—and centralizing them within a single interface. This provides advertisers with a single source of truth, allowing them to view their campaigns holistically, while saving time and reducing manual labor by eliminating the need to toggle back and forth between platforms.
Phew! That was a lot. Let’s wrap it up with a brief summary of what was discussed—or, as Redditors like to tag summaries under particularly long posts, TL;DR (too long; didn’t read).
Overall, Reddit is chasing some of the more established social media marketing channels. That said, the platform is in a particularly interesting position as social ad spend fragments and the industry quickens its pace towards a privacy-friendly norm. For advertisers who want to tap into engaged, niche communities, Reddit presents a great opportunity to test, learn, and grow.
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Social fragmentation and privacy-friendly marketing are just two of the trends shaping the marketing landscape today. Want a better understanding of all the trends that will impact advertisers in 2024? Check out our 2024 Trends Report.
In an industry marked by high penetration—nearly all US adults have bank accounts—and consequently fierce competition, enticing new clientele while retaining existing customers is critical for financial services advertisers. While 84% of US customers say they’re “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their primary bank, a smaller but influential 34% say they’d be willing to switch over to a new financial institution—demonstrating that efforts curated towards both retention and acquisition are equally important.
To navigate this landscape successfully, advertisers must understand consumer behavior and address their goals and concerns through creative served on the most impactful media channels. So, what exactly are those goals and concerns, and how can advertisers meet consumers with the right messages, in the right places and the right times? Let’s start with an exploration of today’s banking consumer:
Consumer trust in traditional banks and credit unions is high relative to other financial services providers such as tech companies and neobanks, and they’re generally satisfied with their primary bank, to the point where six in 10 customers have held their primary accounts for more than six years.
In light of that trust, satisfaction, and entrenchment, what motivates banking customers to shop around and ultimately switch? The top reasons include increases in fees, poor customer service, and better rates elsewhere. Generally, customers’ biggest industry concerns aren’t that different: increased fees, high interest rates, the possibility of data theft, and overall bank stability affecting the safety of their money score highest in impacting their financial services decisions.
Once consumers are on the hunt for a financial institution, their top drivers are online banking capabilities, brand reputation, online customer service, and the ability to help customers achieve their financial goals. What goals, you ask? Topping the list are saving for the short-term and the long-term, improving credit scores, and paying off credit card debt.
These factors show the importance of meeting consumers’ expectations around both banking features—especially online—and staff expertise. By addressing their needs and issues directly, financial industry marketing teams can increase customer trust and satisfaction, leading to improved retention of existing customers and acquisition of bank switchers.
Touting benefits and addressing concerns without a strategic plan to distribute those messages along the customer journey is as good as shouting into a bank vault—and then shutting and locking the door. Industry marketing teams can uncover paid media opportunities when they understand where and how consumer banking customers perform their research.
As customers seek information about their finances and explore products and services that can help them save money and tackle debt, they’re turning to a variety of sources: friends, family, and financial advisers, of course, along with bank websites, social media, and TV and online advertising. Similarly, they become aware of financial products and services through bank websites, apps, and branches; word of mouth; and communication tools like social media, direct mail, and search.
Demographics do play a role in media preferences: Consumer banking personas aged 55 years and over tend to layer newspapers and magazines onto their search, social, and convergent TV consumption, while those younger than 55 are nearly exclusively digital media consumers, with social, streaming audio, and CTV comprising their favorites.
Realizing the personal nature of finances and many of the sources customers trust, consumer banking marketing teams can find success with similarly personal channels like social media, and by using recommendation-based messaging such as reviews and testimonials. Beyond that, knowing the array of resources used by such a wide swath of people during their research, an omnichannel advertising approach grounded in thorough, customer-centric research can help teams craft a holistic experience with efficient reach and outcome-driven loyalty and acquisition results.
The financial services industry continues to go digital, from all points of view: customers and their online banking expectations, financial institutions and their digital innovations, and industry marketers and their digital media spend. Consumer banking marketing teams who follow this digital trajectory can both reach customers and keep up with—if not find ways to innovate and surpass—their competition.
The number of digital banking users in the US—about 82% of the population and rising—is making online banking the new normal, with mobile banking making up the lion’s share of online banking activity. But there’s increased competition outside of traditional banking: Consumers, especially younger ones, are showing interest in doing business with nonbanks, saying they’d open a financial account with the likes of PayPal, Amazon, Walmart, and Apple, and use of nonbank peer-to-peer payment platforms like PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle continues to grow. That sort of industry disruption could cost financial institutions market share at a highly competitive moment in time.
As customers rely on digital media for financial information and digital platforms for banking, financial services marketers are realizing the value of digital advertising to reach varied audiences with varied needs. The majority of the total industry’s $5 billion ad spend is digital, as monitored by Vivvix, yet consumer banking’s $1 billion budget leans slightly in favor of traditional advertising.
Marketing teams looking to reach digital-minded audiences and intercept people who are eyeing disruptive competitors can capitalize on the not-fully-realized potential of online advertising to meet consumers where they are—and, for critical customer acquisition, where some competition is not.
Consumer banking institutions have an opportunity to grow their market share despite near customer saturation. While most existing customers are generally satisfied with their primary banks and feel a high level of trust in them, a significant portion say they’d be willing to switch primary banks for specific reasons.
Financial services marketers who combine consumer media preferences, including digital media, with creative that speaks to their financial goals, online banking expectations, and general industry concerns can all but bank on retaining their firmly rooted customers while cashing in on new customer acquisition.
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Want to make your campaigns work smarter? Connect with us to discuss how our automated advertising technology and media strategy and activation services can increase efficiency, reduce complexity, and solve your biggest advertising problems.
Political advertising is a unique beast. It’s a months-long marathon full of building awareness, appealing for donations, fighting primary battles, and educating audiences on who you are and what you believe in. Then, after a long year (or more, given the United States’ ever-lengthening campaign seasons) the race wraps up with an all-out sprint toward Election Day as candidates and causes of all kinds pitch themselves to busy, skeptical, and undecided voters while rallying supporters to head to the polls. Just thinking about it makes us out of breath.
Every election battle is fierce, but 2024 is shaping up to be one of the most hotly contested cycles in recent memory—and the most expensive in history. The combination of high-profile races, major cultural and economic questions, motivated cause-based outside groups, and emotionally invested voters is likely to fuel high turnout and even higher ad budgets. Led by a presidential race at the top of the ticket, the election is forecast to generate a record $12 billion in political ad spend, including $9 billion on down-ballot races. And with so many political (and non-political) advertisers looking to grab their share of voice and motivate their audiences to action, having the latest and greatest tips, tactics, insights, and strategies will be essential to ensuring a successful campaign.
Fortunately, you’ve come to the right place: This is the ultimate guide to political advertising in the 2024 US elections. We’ll be updating this page regularly in the months leading up to Election Day on November 5, 2024, so be sure to bookmark it for future reference.
Ready? Let’s dive in.
With each succeeding election, the campaign season seems to be starting earlier and earlier, and by fall 2023, an array of presidential and senatorial candidates were already well into their fundraising and vote appeal cycles (while congressional candidates are seemingly always fundraising without pause). With most campaigns now underway, political marketers are eagerly diving into awareness, fundraising, and list building.
In the early days of a campaign, when small dollar fundraising and email list building is key, there’s no channel quite like social. Between its effectiveness and its efficiency, nothing else can even compete.
Most political social spend is taking place on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, which advertisers of all stripes have long loved for their significant reach and precise targeting capabilities. Snapchat is another platform that accepts political advertising, which can be particularly useful for candidates and cause-based marketers looking to reach millennial and Gen Z voters. Technically, X (aka “The Social Network Formerly Known As Twitter”) has also started accepting political ads again, but given spending and user trends, it’s unlikely to capture a large slice of the political pie. And to answer your next question: No, TikTok still does not allow political advertising, whether in the form of brand ads or paid branded content.
Beyond social, other key tactics for raising awareness (and raising dollars via small donors) include trusted standbys like video, display, and search/SEM. All four of those play key roles throughout any campaign, with video in particular being largely considered a political advertiser’s best friend. Speaking of which...
If 2022 was CTV’s political advertising breakout performance, then 2024 is set to be its star turn. The fast-growing channel accounted for 12% of all political ad dollars spent during the midterms, and that spend is expected to rise to $1.3 billion in the coming election cycle.
Why, exactly, do political advertisers love CTV and streaming video? It boils down to a lot of the same factors that have fueled the decades-long love affair between political advertisers and linear TV. Campaigns are often trying to both educate voters and, simultaneously, develop an emotional connection that will get them to the polls—and video is uniquely suited to accomplishing both. With CTV, advertisers can access that familiar TV-like experience (and TV-like benefits), but with the added bonus of digital targeting capabilities and access to audiences that have either supplemented or replaced their linear viewing hours with digital media.
From an overall ad spend perspective, broadcast is still king in the land of political advertising. But if you’re sticking to advertising on linear TV alone, your spots are likely not reaching an increasingly large swath of voters who’ve either cut the cord or never had cable to begin with. Add on the atypical year of linear TV programming that’s underway due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, plus the heaps of new inventory, and CTV is about as critical a channel as you’ll find in 2024.
There are many different ways to buy CTV inventory—from programmatic on the open exchange, to programmatic guaranteed, to private marketplace (PMP) deals, and more. But while there’s a decent amount of overlap amongst the inventory available across those different buying methods (save for highly-valuable exclusive CTV inventory that’s only accessible through select partners), advertisers looking to take full advantage of the channel should use a healthy mix of each—especially when demand spikes and availability tightens starting in early October during the run up to Election Day. Otherwise, you run the risk of blowing through your budget (or, worse yet, getting shut out entirely) as programmatic CPMs soar down the homestretch.
(Want to make the most of the political CTV advertising opportunity? Be sure to check out our guide.)
Video and display dominate political ad spending—commanding 68% and 24%, respectively, of all digital political spend during the midterms—and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. But where are there underutilized opportunities for campaigns that want to get the most bang for their budgetary buck and maximize their reach with target voter audiences?
One under-adopted format: native, which advertisers can use to insert their creative into the feeds of news and other websites. Native advertising made up just 3% of political ad spend in 2022—perhaps because, to many marketers, native feels a bit more complicated (or even intimidating) than familiar, tried-and-true ad types such as video or display banner ads. But leveraging native can be as simple as taking your Facebook creative, loading it into your DSP (or your agency partner’s DSP), and then testing and experimenting with different headlines to see what performs best across different sites. It’s a great way to get your message in front of voters right alongside other content they’re consuming on sites that they know and trust.
Audio is another underutilized channel amongst political advertisers. While spend on the medium did rise from 2020 to 2022, it still accounted for just 1% of digital spend in the midterms (compared to 6.4% of overall digital ad spend in 2023), indicating there’s plenty of ripe opportunity that’s currently going untapped.
Audio delivers plenty of addressable audiences that political advertisers are keen on reaching—with over 225 million US listeners who tune in for an average of 2 hours and 43 minutes per day— while offering many of the same emotional and educational benefits that come with video. Best of all, the inventory is now widely available programmatically (even for broadcast radio ads), making it easier than ever to buy while providing the same types of targeting tactics available elsewhere in the programmatic ecosystem. Add it all together, and audio is poised to be a breakout channel for political in 2024.
Lastly, in many districts, digital out-of-home can be a savvy and effective way to raise awareness and get your candidate or cause in front of voters as they navigate through the world. Like audio, more and more DOOH inventory is now available programmatically, so for many political advertisers, it’s increasingly becoming a channel to know.
While much of the digital advertising world is focused on signal loss and the impending impact of Google’s promised deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome in 2024, the approach among many in the political advertising world has resembled something closer to, “Let’s just not think about it, and hopefully we won’t have to deal until 2026.” Of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t ongoing challenges around audience targeting for political marketers—or that a Q3 Google announcement about Chrome going cookieless couldn’t deliver an October surprise to campaigns nationwide.
Granted, the political world is used to frequent (and sometimes last-minute) changes to their digital targeting and reach capabilities. Since 2018, a range of US states including California, Virginia, and many others have introduced new levels of nuance in their regulation of digital political advertising. That same year, Facebook (now Meta) began its now-standard political ad buyer verification process, before adding new disclaimer requirements in 2019, and then eliminating targeting by race, ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation from its platforms starting in 2022. Spotify barred political and advocacy advertising in late 2019, only to re-introduce them in 2022. In 2020, Google removed the ability to audience target for election ads, limiting advertisers to reaching voters with age, gender, geographic and contextual targeting. The tech giant will also require political advertisers to disclose any use of AI in their ads. Add it all together, and it’s clear that political advertisers are already seasoned pros when it comes to working around increased targeting restrictions.
Looking ahead to 2024, political advertisers should ensure they are working with partners who have contingencies such as privacy-friendly identifiers and data-based solutions in place to ensure proper targeting and reach in the run up to Election Day. And many channels—including broadcast TV, CTV, and Facebook/Instagram—will go mostly (if not entirely) unaffected by such a change, outside of a potential spike in CPMs should more advertisers start running to those safe havens in the wake of any major signal loss.
Lastly, political marketers are likely to increasingly leverage geopolitical targeting tactics across their programmatic ad buys. According to Basis’ 2022 US election digital ad spend data, almost 20% of political programmatic ads used geopolitical targeting to reach voters in specific districts. Of those, 51% leveraged congressional district targeting, while 32% used state senate district targeting. These types of geo-based targeting tactics are expected to grow even more prominent if Google does indeed deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome over the course of the election cycle.
Sadly, connecting with voters in 2024 will mean more than just running ads in their markets. Misinformation and disinformation appear likely to play an outsized role in the coming elections, and political marketers will need to prepare accordingly.
Not helping matters: trust and safety teams have been dramatically downsized at many tech companies, including Google and YouTube parent company Alphabet, Facebook and Instagram’s Meta, Amazon, and X. When you combine that with the emergence of generative AI, an electorate that is increasingly partisan, and bad actors both domestic and foreign that aim to sew misinformation and disinformation into the political discourse, political marketers will face unique challenges when attempting to build a foundation of trust and connection with voters.
To their credit, Google, Meta, TikTok and others have expressed confidence in their ability to leverage both AI and human monitoring to combat any inevitable waves of misinformation on their channels. Meta has also taken the unprecedented step of no longer recommending political content (defined exceedingly loosely as content "potentially related to things like laws, elections, or social topics") on Instagram and Threads, though political ads are still very much allowed in the Meta universe.
But in the meantime, the best thing political advertisers can do to break through the noise is to get as strategic as possible about leveraging tactics that put their messaging in front of voters—particularly undecided voters and/or “persuadables” in the political center—while leaning on compelling creative that fosters an emotional connection with a public that’s often increasingly skeptical of fact-based appeals.
There’s no perfect way to stop misinformation from impacting an election, but with decisiveness and deliberateness around targeting and messaging—and by leveraging brand safety tools from partners like NOBL, Comscore, Grapeshot, and Peer39—campaigns can make sure their official voice is a loud and clear part of the conversation.
While there are plenty of reasons for political marketers to run a steady stream of ads throughout the entirety of the campaign process, spend tends to spike at two key times: the weeks leading up to a state’s primary day, and the four-plus weeks leading up to Election Day in November.
A Basis study found that 50% of digital ad budgets for the 2022 midterms were spent in the last 30 days before Election Day, with half of that spend allocated during the 10 days running up to the election as campaigns work to get out the vote. While presidential elections tend to have higher turnouts (and higher energy) than the midterms, down-ballot candidates could face unique challenges in 2024.
According to numerous polls, the two presumptive presidential nominees whose names will appear at the top of the ticket are widely unpopular, meaning it could fall to those down-ballot candidates to rally supporters to the polls—and, potentially, to win over voters who may not feel particularly excited about checking the box for either party’s presidential contenders. That means tapping fundraising and awareness channels early and often, and earmarking significant budget for the homestretch in October and November.
Of course, if all political advertisers are saving their budgets for the end of the campaign, there’s not going to be a whole lot of opportunity to capitalize on lower pricing anywhere near Election Day. If you’re looking for an edge, your best bet is to try to lock in favorable pricing by negotiating in advance via PMP deals, programmatic guaranteed, or even direct buys with preferred vendors.
Political advertisers face an especially complex and competitive 2024 election season. But by putting these insights and recommendations to work, marketing teams will be better positioned to find a competitive edge that helps lift their candidates and causes to victory. We hope these tips help you as you march on toward Election Day, and best of luck with the rest of the campaign!
Automation is a game-changer for advertisers. As Co-Founder, President, and Chief Product Officer of Fluency, Eric Mayhew has made it his mission to build automation technologies that improve how people buy digital media.
In this episode, Eric joins host Noor Naseer to share how automation and AI can reduce low-value manual labor, minimize friction in workflows, and help organizations gain a competitive edge.
Noor Naseer: Automation: It's an oft-mentioned word in the advertising world that can mean a lot of different things. Understanding its potential is something more ad pros are determined to figure out especially in the last year since the popularization of AI. Eric Mayhew is the Co-Founder, President and Chief Product Officer of Fluency, an organization focused on automation solutions for digital media. He joins us to share wisdom from his 20-year plus career in digital marketing, ad tech and software engineering to highlight how automation can reduce low value manual labor, minimize friction and workflows and just help us in organizations not get bogged down by some of the needlessly laborious aspects of media buying. Let's get into this episode on automation and AI with Eric right now.
Eric, I just want to thank you for the time you've made so we can talk about another iteration of artificial intelligence and where it intersects with automation and these are things that you have a lot of passion around. So, I'm looking forward to this conversation.
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Eric Mayhew: Absolutely. Thank you for having me today.
NN: So, I'm going to take us a year plus back. Whenever the new renaissance of artificial intelligence really started, maybe you could say it was the end of 2022, early ‘23. I want to get everybody on the same page. How did we really start embracing artificial intelligence? If you can take us back there so we can kick off this conversation on where it intersects with automation.
EM: It is absolutely amazing that it's only been about a year where this has been this pervasive. I think open AI came out in November 2022 where it was at Chat GPT3 and pretty exciting to see what's happened since then. That natural language the fact that you can interact with it in such a natural way is really profound. So, I think that's why we're really here today to talk about AI in its use case especially in advertising where we're a vehicle and a voice piece to communicate between our clients and their clients. So we're trying to talk on a human level between the two. But I don't think that's when it really got started.
AI's kind of been around for a while I've been in some panels where even I was exposed to things that I didn't realize how much longer it's been in in our society. It's just been kind of guarded from the general population and practical use cases. But as it's become more prevalent and pervasive, because of those new innovations there's a scramble to find the great use case and get the efficacy from that that we think that and the promise that's there.
So, if we take a year ago - I spent a lot of time in the Meta environment, spent a lot of time in Google and Microsoft and in the programmatic space. Take those first couple that I talked about with Google and and Meta and they've been in the space of trying to do AI type of content management and prediction capability for quite a while.
Google went to Smart Bidding a couple years ago. So Smart Bidding was kind of Google's first space into prediction of all these attributes about users and their proclivity to take an action. One of the bidding strategies that they have is maximize conversions or maximize conversion value. Those two things are all in the propensity for someone to actually submit a lead and it doesn't really tie as close as it once did to keywords.
Now if we even rewind farther back, Google's broad match just as a concept, that is an AI type function. Here's a phrase somebody typed in, that phrase isn't exactly what you're bidding on as a keyword. But that keyword is for the same intention. So there's always been this interpretation. There's been this growing path through the ecosystem to get us to the spot where we can say that AI takes a simple concept a simple implementation and expands it out into something very tailored and curated and ready for the general public.
So, I think we've seen this journey over the last year. And in the last year with Chat GPT we've seen that we can actually automate something that's been elusive for a long time. And that elusivity has been around the creative side, talking to customers in a natural language in the way that they'd want to be spoken to. When you're going to generate creativity and you want it to resonate with a person it cannot look robotic. And the new LLMs and the new Large Language Models make that feel supernatural.
NN: You jumped into also very specifically the advertising applications and considerations that have taken place across this last year so going further into that and just very much asking that question thinking more broadly about programmatic advertising and how we've seen AI show up in those spaces. Do you have any additional commentary on what that connectivity has looked like and how people who are media buyers or planners have already had a lot of just general exposure?
EM: You're right – it has had a much larger societal impact than just in the advertising space. Over the last bunch of years, we'll say even rewind seven or eight years ago in programmatic buying, real-time bidders have always been in the machine learning space trying to predict proclivity to interact. So, if you want to try to maximize your click-through rates (programmatic buying) that's usually done through some sort of machine learning algorithm that has been accumulating signals from users over time. Pretty amazing space.
We've had conversations around Google Smart Bidding. We're seeing it now in Google's responsive search ads and their responsive display ads where they go ahead and restitch assets together in compelling ways, and then measure the response for different user segments. That's all been done through large models through machine learning and through what they're doing with their algorithms.
Meta is in this space all the time. Lookalikes as an example are definitely in that space. So lookalike audiences which have been around for a while that concept is pretty pervasive in Meta and they're doing a lot of that work over there.
What I think happened in the last year however is that this is all in kind of the last mile buying that we've seen. It's bid management, it's proclivity to buy like these low-level signal type things. What we're seeing over the last year is that you can put it more in your workflow and the workflow can be very labor intensive. We collectively as an advertising community definitely find that as digital marketing gets more and more sophisticated, the levers to pull become more and more complex. They're more sophisticated. They interact together a lot. I'm going to guess a thousand different settings in any given campaign. And if that's the case if there are all those thousand different settings, there's a reason that there are ways you can set it in position A versus B (just as a concept why people have set those up that way). And it's not always obvious what the combination of settings are to reach your goal in the most productive way.
So, people in digital agencies, digital advertising tend to spend an awful lot of time figuring out what those pure combinations are. How do we link these audience settings together with my bid strategy? How do I get my creativity optimized properly for the space? And configuring those settings has been complex and labor intense. And I think AI is coming into play here in a great spot. It's helping people make those decisions.
Even with all that there's still a lot of labor in just the creative content and content generation to communicate a special. You've got a four-bedroom apartment and there's a move in special and all those pieces to make that sound natural and bring that to a user that's been challenging over time as well. And, again, very labor intense when you look at the wide landscape of the number of accounts that agencies typically manage that takes a lot of time and energy to just manage all that creative generation. AI has done an amazing job here simplifying that entire process, helping you understand the settings that make the most sense and helping you effectively communicate with your client base with compelling assets, compelling content and creativity.
NN: I think probably most people picked up on that when you're saying, by settings you mean different parameters or tactics that you can leverage, different data integrations that you can make selections around. To what extent do you think that there has been a shift in since the birth of (and I'm calling it the birth of generative AI) but I mean the accessible form that you were talking about at the top of this podcast has there been any notable shift? Because so much of the focus has been on generative AI. Have we seen any differences or distinctions whether it's AI specific or automation specific that you've perceived in the last 12 months?
EM: You're talking about out in the space. Am I seeing any signals that are coming back that say that the way we operate is different?
NN: The way that we operate with advertising or programmatic advertising in mind.
EM: I think the answer is absolutely that there are very simple ways to do these things. You can actually have fully AI generated campaigns through settings through messaging and that can exist now. I think there's some challenges with that but it does exist. Which means if we are trying to compare agency A to agency B. The labor savings that you can gain from AI and automation is astounding if you can really lean into it now. The first thing I want to say is I'm very cautious with how we do that. That wasn't a statement to say widen your margins immediately adopt AI and I think automation is solid and we'll talk about why automation is very cool in a little bit I'm sure. But AI can do so many things but it's a little bit non-deterministic. If you can tolerate a little bit of error - if you can tolerate a tone of voice that may or may not match with your client. I would never use it for a large brand that has an established voice. But if you don't have that case and you're using a lot of just data to power your information and trying to get a message out there, you can do an awful lot with it. That just changes the way we execute. So that we can offer more complete solutions at a lower labor point which means that margins can stay where they are. Businesses have to run. At the same time the end-advertiser gets a better experience, more long-tail on the advertising side and it's not paying for it on the other side, so it's prohibitive on the cost side.
I think there's a lot that's gone on in there. You can definitely feel that the entire shift inside the Google Meta space Microsoft is leaning in extremely hard with OpenAI in that Google has an AdWords version that's fully AI driven. It gives you recommendations and walks you through the entire process. That's very difficult to use if you are trying to put together a bespoke campaign with deterministic outcomes. You're still going to get involved and you're going to make those choices but it's definitely coming and it's definitely getting better all the time.
NN: There's been a lot of excitement around the potential of AI across this last year and we've established that. And I think that the automation component is something that I know you have a lot of energy around the words automation for whatever reason in the advertising world don't always resonate with everyone. It's not everyone's first priority. They have manpower. They have bandwidth. They have systems that are already in place. How do you think the word automation is being received today in a way differently than it was in the last couple of years?
EM: Well, I think we're in a spot where it's almost a necessity there are agencies that are doing it and doing extremely well and those agencies are able to offer a deeper service at a lower price at maybe the same or lower price point than where we've been before. So those services are now very feature complete. I think when you think about automation. First, we'll kind of define a little bit of the difference between AI and automation. AI is a natural thinker it will come up with something for you. It will feel creative whether it is or isn't it will feel creative it may feel new and it's a little non-deterministic (you don't know exactly what you're going to get out of it when you start).
Automation is effectively a rule system that is very deterministic. You should know based on whatever you put in the outcomes will be deterministic you will know what you'll get. So, for example you can do a lot of things if you had a data set of specials taking those specials and converting them into ad content it's pretty straightforward. We know what we would do as people. We can model it and if we model it we can automate it and I think that's a really important piece. So, if you are an agency and you can think about the decision trees that you go through as a person and your best practices because you're you're probably going to tell your clients exactly what your best practices are. “We do XYZ in this scenario and that's what makes us an amazing agency”. We do these things and if you can say those types of words why you make choices when you see certain data sets, then you can automate it. You can say, “When the weather changes and I'm representing an HVAC client I prioritize heating systems. When the weather gets cold.” I've actually heard people go the other direction because heating systems sell themselves when weather gets cold. So, you might want to say that our secret sauce is to reduce bids because you don't have to be as aggressive.
So if you can articulate who you are and what your strategy is in scenarios then from that point forward you can go ahead and just set up your rule systems and let them run. I think it's had a negative connotation because we have two hemispheres really in advertising today and it's new. With digital advertising whenever anybody thinks advertising we think creative we think creative minds creative writers we think Mad Men a little bit. We think you know just splashing ideas on a wall and there is a place for that. But the digital advertiser today has a very technical job and that's new. So now you've got this one person that is expected to be both creative and technical.
So, what I see us doing with automation over the next several years is really taking that technical piece and simplifying it by putting it through the rule systems. Allowing creativity to flourish, that side of the house actually continues as is. But reduce the requirement of low-level settings knowledge on the digital advertiser, allowing them to be more on the creative side how they communicate with clients. I think AI has a great narrative on that side of the house specifically because that can be very time consuming also and as inspiration and creativity, super cool spot. For AI, I can go and ask it a question. I can get an idea, it could be my finished product, it could be just an idea spark and I love that about that side on the creative side of the house. But when it comes to the execution side that's a great spot for automation. The execution is going to take and process all that data, look at the scenarios out in the marketplace right now, bring in signals like the interest prime rate and the weather and the products that are in inventory that your account has and make decisions like you would make as a person and just stop requiring you to go and configure all these things over and over again.
We just had a conversation. It's actually really timely. Just before we got on we were talking to a friendly partner that talked about how they do Facebook. And the cycle over month over month with campaign renews in Facebook is a many person multiple day job. And it's not a creative job. It's a workflow job and those are the places where automation just a no-brainer in my opinion. Why would you put your people through that? Even if you had the manpower it's such a tedious and painful existence it's not fun. It's a burnout machine. It's prone to error. And not because people are significantly prone to error but because it's tedious, it's mindless, it's repetitive and I would love to use a computer personally anytime that that scenario comes up.
NN: You've given so many examples that clarify that the industry has progressed to a place where a larger slice of advertising responsibility falls into some of those that, they're not low value but sometimes the feeling is that they're mindless activities or they're less creative or they naturally shouldn't be sucking up so much manpower time. Are you finding that most agencies clients that fall into doing this type of work are making the shift and embracing automation to the extent that it's available?
EM: It is a mental shift. The partners that I've gotten a chance to work with, when I get to work closely with them you can bring them through that process and it is a process. It's going to sound like a simple thing but if you're a software developer a “for” loop or an “if then” else statement is pretty natural it's common language. Automation works on similar concepts. I've got to loop through every one of these products. And if this scenario happens then I wanted to do this other thing and in natural speech that works but to set up automation can be daunting if you don't think like that.
Once you have the idea of how looping works and iteration and logical blocks like that you can do a ton with it. I don't think it's as foreign as it seems. When you first hear it and if you don't communicate it in a proper way it looks really technical. It doesn't have to stay that way though.
Expressing the concept once you get there, the savings are so wildly important. Businesses transform once they get there. If you can show them the win early. Like if you can give them a small small morsel of success, they can literally cross off labor intensive things like that thing we just talked about the Facebook campaign refresh. If you can show the value of that early in the process then the sky is the limit.
NN: The analysis of achieving efficiencies and cost savings is a conversation that's had with a certain buyer. And it may not be just somebody who strictly and exclusively does media buying. Of course the role of what it means to be a media buyer is going to vary depending upon the organization and what their responsibilities are. But I take it back to my own experiences working in a holding company being a media buyer. I got exposed to basically publishers and publishers that were doing outreach to us and I talked to them. They had some suite of sites or portfolio of sites that I could buy from or they're representing a single solution. I wasn't the one who was responsible for understanding the economic upside. So who are you talking to about this? Because some people may fall outside of their wheelhouse who's really going to be bought into or do you need to talk to who cares about this when you're reaching out to an agency?
EM: I mean, ultimately it's going to take executive sponsorship for us to take that leap with somebody. But I think before you even get to that point you've got to win the hearts and minds of the executor and the ad strategist. Long-term like overall we will have to also sell the economics. All software automation processes their process change, process change has cost, software has cost. Like all those things do end up having cost so you will have to get to the executive sponsor side. But we always start first in showing the person that does the job how their day will get easier. And once their day gets easier then the convince-up is a lot easier. It's basically saying you know they don't have to do that campaign refresh anymore. You can put them on more high value things. Have them talk with your clients more. Have them express your value. Let's have them grow budgets. Have them grow penetration and make your solution stickier. Let's mitigate some churn. They can be put on more high value business tasks which are really thinkers’ tasks anyhow. And get away from the tedium.
So, if we can show the value of the platform with people that do execution then talking to the executive sponsor that's going to actually fund this thing becomes really straightforward. Your team knows that they will not have to do this tedium anymore. The five person three-day job at the beginning of the month, every month has just gone away. When it comes to the economic side definitely we're talking more with the executive sponsor inside an organization.
NN: Are there markers of an organization that is going to be more open to embracing the future of automation compared to an organization that seems less prepared and therefore less inclined to actually receiving what automation can do for them?
EM: We definitely see that there are a lot of clients that if they are confident in what they offer as a service, if they can articulate why they are different than somebody else. You've got agencies always buying for the same clients and the same business and it's a competitive space. If you can articulate your value prop that means you have a set of values and rules systems that you operate by. That is different than somebody else. That's the first foundation that I always look for, someone that knows their business really well.
The next side is that they have an appetite for growth. If you're already doing it and you don't have an appetite for growth, probably going to be settled in where you're at. But if you have an appetite for growth and you don't want it to linearly scale headcount with growth that's another really good candidate for that because you can get buried in this. Just even finding talent even if the economics started work finding the talent can be very challenging when you have large growth goals.
And then finally progressive companies that want to get into the longer tale. I'll tell you a story from my background. I worked on an ad platform and then I left that company or I was about to leave that company and I was entertaining other places and I went to an audience company. I was going to sign with them and when I got to the end of that interview my little anxiety kicked in. I was having a hard time putting pen to paper and what was clicking with me was all this audience stuff is amazing. I believe in it. I was just at a place that was doing digital advertising and if they had brought those audiences to me to our organization I would have believed in them just as much there. And they still would never have seen the light a day just because we were underwater with the amount of labor it took to manage specials and to make ad copy updates, and to manage negative, keyword lists and keyword bids and etc. just all those settings that were just taking up all this time. Meanwhile running a very lean business that wasn't a gigantic margin business. Adding more on top of that advertiser's plate was very difficult.
I want to help agencies do more for their clients while not burying them. That is definitely my goal. And what I would see is bringing them something like more audiences, more complexity. And I just want to make sure that we can make that as simple as possible and help them through this journey. I think when we do that their end advertisers (like the end advertiser that's outside the agency or brand) will feel the benefit of more compelling and more complete advertising and yet not feel the pain of the expense.
NN: If I hear everything that you've said and it sounds like we try to automate some things but we're clearly not doing it with the sophistication that we need so we can stay competitive. What would I need to do at this moment from a prerequisite perspective to best embrace the type of automation that you're describing?
EM: Well automation is definitely a walk I don't think there's an all-in-one. You just made a statement that you know we're doing some things. I think anybody that's doing anything is off to a great start. You understand the benefit, you look for opportunities not to be repetitive and redundant. And now all we have to do is just more of those things as we go. Understand your business. Say you have a team of 35 strategists, understand where they spend their time. Where are those time syncs that pull them away? And evaluate each one of those things to say, “Is it value added?” Humans don't add a great multiplier effect to copy and paste. We have to do it because there isn't another thing that copies and pastes for us unless you get into automation.
So, if you're really taking settings from one account and moving it to another doing a small trial on a singular account and then want the worst thing that happens is it's successful. And then you have a thousand other accounts to go apply that setting to. We want to make sure that that's a very easy thing and no longer a deterrent to going and doing the right thing.
My last venture before this I was writing on a software and in the digital strategist pod and I like to work late. Every 7 o'clock on Friday I would look over and there were two people sitting at their desk with just a desk light on. And they were upset and frustrated and you could just see. And I'd find out what it is and someone had just asked them for a very complicated problem late in the day that needed to be done for Monday's solution. It's miserable. And I really wanted to make sure that that wasn't a requirement of the job. And I think as employers we are looking to help our digital strategist look for places that you can improve their life. I think when you improve their life it will reduce in some ways meaningful and tedious labor. So help them there and then it's great for the bottom line as well.
NN: I want to ask you a question about talent, in particular. You mentioned talent earlier on, what type of talent are we looking for, so we can best embrace automation in our agencies and advertising organizations?
EM: Well this is going to be one of the bigger challenges in the space like I said there's that two hemispheres of an advertiser today. There's the creative hemisphere and the technical hemisphere and that person is rarer than I wish they were. So we have to talk about where we can level people up and help them make them superhuman with systems. I think there's a way that you can help someone that's not like I'm not strong in creative writing. I'm strong on the technical side and not so strong on the creative side. What I see is the AI generative side really can help augment that type of person. So if you can find someone that's biased to the digital world and weaker on the creative side, AI is a really good inspiration tool. Now they still have to be careful to look for tone of voice and compliance and things like that but they at least will get some ideas from the AI side.
If you've got someone on the creative side but they’re a little bit weaker on the execution and the technical side, I personally feel like automation isn't a great enhancement for that user. They can put something into the machine in the beginning with very simple inputs. And then let it do all of the marshaling and all the construction of the complicated campaigns and A/B groups and A/B sets and audience management and all those other settings that are more on the technical side.
A technical marketer that has a creative flair is the ideal state and I think where you'll find is that everybody's got some bias. I am extremely biased on the technical side and not so much on the creative writing side. And then there are counterparts that I've met that are completely the other direction. And I believe that we are in a spot right now where you can level up either of those two sides appropriately and find your complete person with some augmentation.
NN: If I am thinking about the opportunities that AI can afford my organization, maybe I'm a media buyer, maybe even some of what you just described in the last answer doesn't represent me strictly. Me being whoever is responsible for media buying but maybe a larger team. Maybe there's three, four or five people that cover the work that you're describing both technical and creative and what do you have. Who would I want to go to inside of my organization to get buy-in for some of these things? And that almost feels like a repetitive question because you said earlier on I guess if I'm the hands-on keyboard person then I would naturally want to go to somebody at the executive level or somebody who's responsible for bigger buying decisions. But I'm just curious what types of questions or information do I want to put forth or ask about so that there is a greater potential that we can be doing smarter media buying in our organization's future?
EM: I've seen a few of these different cases and I'll kind of talk about what we've seen so far. As people want to be able to self-service more, you just described a scenario where there are four or five people involved in a singular process. And you know at each of those handoffs there's some overhead in the communication. I put together my part and then I had to write a document about it to send it off to the next person who had to read that document to do their next part etc. There's overhead in those transition spots. And if you were someone that really wanted to start to take singular ownership over more of the process. We've seen that as one of the use cases for trying to get into this transformative state. I'd like to do this on my own with these clients. I'd like to be able to go from end to end and I think we can save money because we'll have a shorter cycle.
If you can set your processes and automation up right, it can work for each of them. And now you've got the capacity instead of for one account. And I know we just use simple numbers there instead of five supporting ones. Now you have five supporting five and they're all whole. And the nice thing is the learnings can get shared at that point. So, if strategist A finds that a certain bidding strategy or placement position or audience works extremely well and they know why, they can say in these scenarios this works better that can get distributed and that can become best practices across all five of those users because it's an automation system. And they'll just immediately reap the benefit of that knowledge. That knowledge share becomes not just conversational not just in a document but actually in a living breathing piece of software that will help you propagate that through your entire business. It is a very cool spot to be there.
So, I've definitely seen people who want to expand the scope and have fewer interfaces with handoffs from team to team that work extremely.
NN: What we're going to see moving into the future and I'm sure many organizations have already seen this trending, is that smaller organizations will see people who have hands on keyboards building more of these use cases and rationale for why change and embracing a combination of AI and automation is important to do now. I think there's a lot of exciting things to come in the year ahead. So with that Eric thanks for the time and having this conversation with me.
EM: I had a great time today. And the last thought I kind of want to leave with is that it levels the field for a lot of people. When you just mentioned the smaller agency. I think the smaller agencies can get overshadowed by large agencies that cast a big shadow. Take the same concept with large brands casting a big shadow over small brands. If you can do excellent work with the same pedigree of work that you could dedicate to a large brand but you can now dedicate it to even smaller brands, what an amazing spot to be. It kind of levels the playing field. The product stands on its own and you can tear up your narrative there. I think it's a great leveling system here with automation and AI.
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NN: Thanks to Eric Mayhew for his wisdom on automation and AI, there's so much change we're struggling with right now in the ad tech space. Most notably the deprecation of third party cookies, reconciling MFA sites, managing brand safety, CTV measurement and more. On top of all that, organizations need to level up on any existing traditional systems that remain to ensure that they're inching out the competition. Now is the right time for agencies and brands to do that deeper analysis of their existing text deck to see what automation can do for them. That's all for now. This is Adtech Unfiltered with Noor Naseer. Another episode coming out real soon.
Meta's new political content policy could create new complexity—and new opportunities—for advertisers.
Earlier this month, Meta announced it will no longer “proactively recommend content about politics” on Instagram and Threads. The company says the change is intended to improve the user experience and give audiences control over how and when they encounter content that they deem “political,” but ambiguity around what exactly “political content” is has left both audiences and advertisers with more questions than answers—particularly with the 2024 US election cycle already underway.
In 2008, back when Facebook was still a relatively new platform and social media still in its infancy, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama recognized its potential as a way to speak directly with voters, engage in grassroots fundraising, and get out the vote.
In the 16 years since, social media has exploded, becoming a virtually ubiquitous part of audiences’ digital lives. Facebook—now a part of Meta alongside platforms including Messenger, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and others—has long since transformed from “innovative startup” to “media giant.” The platforms make up one of the largest walled gardens in the digital advertising ecosystem, drawing a projected $62.7 billion in US ad spend in 2024—accounting for 75.6% of US social ad spend and 20.4% of all US digital ad spend.
Amidst this extraordinary growth, it’s no surprise that political ad spending on social networks has increased rapidly alongside it, having grown by 194% from the 2016 to 2020 election cycle and projected to rise by nearly 350% from 2020 to 2024. But social media’s role in political campaigns extends beyond paid advertising. The platforms allow for public discourse and grassroots mobilization, providing a place for voters to express their opinions and engage in the political process.
Yet social media can also foster polarization, allow hate speech to run rampant, and lead to the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation. And with tools like generative AI making it all too easy to create and circulate false and misleading content—from robocalls purporting to be President Biden to AI-generated images of Donald Trump being arrested—social media is poised to again be a complex space throughout the 2024 election cycle, with Meta’s recent announcement only further complicating matters.
The degree to which Meta’s policy change will impact both marketing and political discourse on social media is still unclear, particularly given the many unknowns surrounding the announcement. Meta has yet to clarify what qualifies as “political content,” and there has been no mention of any new limits to political advertising on these platforms. What the company does make clear is that users will only see organic political content from accounts they choose to follow, and that if users want political posts recommended to them, they will have more control over how and when they see them.
When it comes to political advertising, Meta’s history is both storied and spotty.
“Historically, Meta entities have been a consistent and successful environment for political campaigns—from fundraising, to storytelling, to get out the vote efforts,” says Jaime Vasil, Group Vice President of Candidates & Causes at Basis Technologies. The 2008 election was, after all, dubbed the Facebook Election by some observers. With many rival social media platforms (including TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest) prohibiting political ads entirely, Meta’s platforms have long been a reliable go-to for political campaigns.
However, the company’s past is also checkered with scandal and fallout: from the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal in the 2010s, to Facebook’s role in spreading false narratives leading up to the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Meta has also made significant cuts to its teams tasked with online safety—including content moderators—as well as team members with positions related to trust, integrity, and responsibility.
Given this legacy, Meta’s recent announcement could well be a move to get ahead of the potential spread of mis- and disinformation that has already begun to characterize the 2024 election cycle.
That motive also aligns with what they’ve said publicly about wanting “Instagram and Threads to be a great experience for everyone.” Like that text you get from your aunt right before Thanksgiving reminding you to check your politics at the door, Meta likely wants to keep these platforms fun, escapist, and bright—a place where users can get lost in an endless doom-scroll of light and entertaining content.
This change is likely to shape how marketers and advertisers of all kinds (both political and nonpolitical) approach the platform. If Meta's suppositions prove to be correct, a relative lack of political content could make Instagram a more enticing destination for users and more brand safe for advertisers—creating new incentive and opportunity for increased spend on the channel. Yet it also brings new complexity around brands' organic content and creative on Instagram and Threads: When there is so much ambiguity around what exactly constitutes "political content," marketers may find themselves steering clear of anything that could be interpreted as political subject matter, thereby narrowing the focus of their organic marketing efforts—and curbing its potential.
For political marketers, meanwhile, this could have a significant impact on how they approach both their campaigns and messaging on Instagram and Threads—particularly if they were counting on organic social content to drive awareness and action for their campaigns. Meta’s shift could push political advertisers to put a greater emphasis on gaining followers, since only audiences that follow them will see the political messages posted to their accounts. It could also mean that user-generated content will play an even bigger role, as candidates strive to connect with younger and diverse audiences without any help from the algorithm.
One notable absence from Meta’s announcement: any implications for their political advertising policies. Since 2018, advertisers have spent more than $4.2 billion on ads about social issues, elections, and/or politics across the tech company’s several social media platforms, and Meta’s policy of accepting political ads (and the accompanying ad spending) shows no signs of changing.
With this new content policy, the only way for political advertisers to reach new audiences on Instagram will be through paid ads (Threads, meanwhile, remains ad-free…for now…) And though this shift could cause challenges for marketers when it comes to organic content, it could also create new advertising opportunities, such as partnering with influencers to reach the sizable audiences and followings they have already amassed.
“In general, it is getting tougher for political campaigns to reach voters. But I think this move by Meta may actually create an environment that is less cluttered for paid ads, potentially leading to more engagement,” says Vasil. Perhaps in a space where users are less inundated with organic political content, teams’ paid ads will have a more significant impact.
Whether it’s an attempt to make their platforms better for users, to ensure the only way to get a political message across is through paid ads, or something else entirely, Meta’s recent announcement will no doubt impact political advertisers in the 2024 election cycle and for years to come.
Though many questions remain unanswered, political campaigns that rely heavily on social media for both paid and organic content will benefit from reconsidering their approach within Meta’s updated guidelines and shifting their campaign and messaging strategies to meet the demands of this new landscape.
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Interested in taking a deeper dive into the political advertising environment in 2024? In our Ultimate Guide to Political Advertising in 2024, we unpack the latest trends, stats, insights, and strategies for political advertisers to craft winning campaigns in the year ahead.
As advertisers continue to grapple with signal loss, the pressure is on for organizations to up their first-party data game.
Factors like Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, privacy-minded digital advertising regulation, and Google’s plan to fully deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome by the end of 2024 have led to new interest in first-party data, with advertisers eager to substitute their reliance on third-party cookies with privacy-first forms of targeting and attribution. And first-party data is perhaps the heaviest hitter on that list.
Because first-party data is provided directly by consumers, it allows advertisers to learn about their audience, craft personalized messages, and understand what tactics are most impactful in their path to purchase—all with a high degree of precision. Unfortunately, because of the advertising industry’s historic reliance on third-party cookies, many businesses haven’t prioritized first-party data to the extent they’ll need to in a privacy-first world.
Looking for some guidance on where to begin this process? You’ve come to the right place. Read on to learn everything advertisers need to know about collecting and storing first-party data for cookieless targeting and attribution.
To maximize their first-party data, advertisers must collect, store, and leverage it in ways that honor consumer privacy and comply with digital advertising regulations.
To do this effectively means not just compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA/CPRA, but also prioritizing the larger demand behand these regulations: Namely, that consumers want more control over whether or not businesses have access to their data, and more transparency into how their data is used and stored.
Studies have found that 68% of global consumers feel either somewhat or very concerned about their online data privacy, and nearly half of consumers say that websites and apps don’t provide enough information about how their data is used. However, 78% of consumers say they are more likely to share their data with a company they trust, indicating that companies can bolster their first-party data collection efforts by demonstrating they are committed to handling that data with integrity and care.
To do this, marketers should start by conducting a holistic analysis to account for the business goals that consumer data empowers, getting specific about what data is needed to reach those goals. Tapping legal counsel will help ensure data processing practices are airtight from the start—a close collaboration between legal and marketing teams will ensure that businesses are able to collect the most impactful first-party data available to them while honoring consumer privacy and adhering to regulations.
Additionally, marketers should seek out technology partners that share their commitment to honoring consumer privacy—for example, those that have achieved SOC 2 compliance. Failing to vet partners’ data protection practices can open companies up to both legal consequences and consumer backlash.
Once a business has set up the appropriate systems to ensure privacy compliance, they’ll want to maximize their collection of first-party data. There are a variety of ways to go about this, including:
These approaches will vary by industry, as different sectors present different opportunities for data collection. For example, a B2B software company might prioritize collecting first-party data by offering whitepapers relevant to their target audience and requiring them to fill out a form to access them. A financial services brand could take a similar approach with gated site-based tools, such as loan calculators, that provide value to their target audiences. A retail business, on the other hand, is well-positioned to collect data through its point-of-sale system or a loyalty program.
With any approach to asking consumers for their data, marketers should be clear about what they’re offering in return—whether it’s a resource their target audience will find valuable, an exclusive coupon, or simply personalized marketing designed to meet their needs. This ensures that consumers are informed about how their data is being used, and serves to build brand trust as well.
Beyond collecting first-party data and using it for targeting and attribution, it’s important to store this data in an organized, privacy-compliant, and easily accessible way. Currently, many organizations store first-party data across a variety of third-party vendors who collect and activate that data for a variety of functions. This means marketers only have access to very fragmented views of their consumers and their paths to purchase and, as a result, can’t leverage that data’s full potential. These data silos also make it difficult to track when and how consumers gave consent for the collection and use of their data.
To more effectively store and activate this information, business typically turn to two main technologies: customer relationship management systems (CRMs) and customer data platforms (CDPs).
CRMs were originally created to help salespeople track their interactions with current and prospective customers and optimize how they approach forming and maintaining those relationships. These tools have since grown to support marketing teams as well, pulling in data through integrations with touchpoints like a brand’s website, landing pages, and social media accounts and subsequently allowing marketers to create and segment audiences using that data. Some CRMs can also assist with other functions, such as workflow automation and consent management.
CDPs cover many of the same functions as CRMs, but they offer the added benefit of being built specifically for the collection, storage, and activation of first-party data. They can gather data from even more sources than CRMs can, process and standardize that data, and segment it in real-time, allowing advertisers to activate it more quickly. The depth of first-party data CDPs can capture gives advertisers a more holistic view of the customer journey across many touchpoints and a single source of truth when it comes to consumer data. Lastly, some CDPs can assist with data compliance by setting data governance standards.
While CRMs are widely adopted among digital advertisers, CDPs are a newer offering. For brands that really want to prioritize first-party data for privacy-first marketing amidst signal loss, CDPs can offer enhanced functionality for that specific purpose.
CRMs and CDPs can organize large amounts of first-party data, which advertisers can use to create consumer personas and targetable audiences. Some advertising platforms allow marketers to create these targetable audiences via the direct upload of their CRM data, while others require the use of external partners to first process that data. CDPs, on the other hand, can automate the segmentation of audiences in real-time for use in targeting and measurement.
With the right platforms and partners, advertisers can also extend their first-party data via strategies such as lookalike modeling and layering first-party data with contextual targeting.
Once a campaign is live, there are a variety of ways advertisers can use first-party data for measurement and attribution. For example, they can integrate their first-party data sources with a single-touch attribution tool like Google Analytics. Some advertising platforms provide analytics dashboards that measure the impact of campaigns on users identified via uploaded CRM data. CDPs, meanwhile, can be used in the same way, and by offering a holistic view of the customer journey, they help advertisers understand how different interactions and touchpoints contribute to conversions.
By baking in privacy compliance from the outset, optimizing their methods for first-party data collection, and storing that data in a way that allows them to get the most out of it, advertisers will be well positioned to use first-party data for targeting and attribution in their campaigns. As the industry pivots towards practices that honor consumer privacy, organizations that invest in and refine their first-party data systems early will have a competitive advantage over teams that drag their feet on adopting privacy-first solutions.
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Curious as to how your peers are approaching privacy-first advertising? Basis surveyed over 200 marketing and advertising professionals across agencies, brands, non-profits, and publishers to find out how they are grappling with signal loss. Check out the findings in our report, Identity vs. Privacy: Digital Advertising in a Cookieless World.
From raw materials to professional services, from healthcare supplies to technology, and everything in between, the business-to-business (B2B) industry boasts a truly vast spectrum of categories. And while B2B buyers are also varied, they’re all ultimately looking for the same thing: a product or service that provides a solution to their problem.
But the characteristics of those B2B buyers are changing, as is their path to purchase. Perhaps the most noticeable changes stem from their evolving demographics, which has contributed to the shift towards digital across all aspects of the B2B buying journey. As a result, the best ways B2B advertisers can reach their ideal customers are also evolving.
Looking to understand what the B2B buyer of today and their path to purchase looks like? Read on for the insights B2B marketers need to foster deeper connections in this relationship-based industry.
In order for industry marketers to be visible and influential throughout a B2B consumer’s path to purchase, they’ve got to understand the shopping habits and purchase motivations of the more than 15 million buyers that make up the consumer base. And these consumers look a lot different than they used to.
To start, the baton of B2B buying is being passed from boomers and Generation X to more digitally fluent generations. Millennials, totaling 60% of all buyers, now hold the greatest purchase influence. As a result, 59% of US buyers—and 77% of global buyers with the highest buying budgets—start their buying processes online. When the buyers of today are looking for inspiration, searching for a product, or making a purchase, all five of their top sources are digital: a supplier’s website, a supplier’s app, a marketplace like Amazon Business, emailing a sales representative, and social. Social media has become the most effective channel for driving B2B revenue: In 2023, 60% of US B2B marketers ranked it as their preferred option, followed by content marketing. Among social channels, YouTube and Facebook are particularly influential.
Despite this shift towards digital, person-to-person interaction is still key for the B2B buyer’s journey. One, B2B buyers prefer to work with people offline to negotiate purchase prices and make product repairs, and they’re equally apt to deal with warranties offline as online. Two, buyers score their in-person relationship with their sales rep higher than any other channel of their B2B buying experience. And three, among the other places buyers find inspiration, search for, or purchase business products, in-store and in-person are hot on the tails of the previously mentioned digital channels.
It’s also worth noting that the shift to digital hasn’t been without its hiccups: Case in point, 38% of US buyers say they’re “frustrated” with the online buying experience. They want better ease of product discovery, aided by features like enhanced search filters, personalized recommendations, and better product details. They also want a better experience on mobile—three out of the top four areas where buyers want businesses to invest and innovate are mobile apps, mobile sites, and mobile payment options.
Beyond wanting a more streamlined digital experience, what do B2B buyers care most about? Throughout their research, they’re most heavily influenced by customer ratings and reviews, as well as promotions and marketing. And, their most important consideration factors when purchasing online are price, payment terms, product availability, fulfillment speed, and ease of return.
What this means for advertisers: In order to evolve with the industry and meet their buyers’ needs, B2B marketers should refresh their strategies and prioritize investing in digital tactics, as the majority of buyers are now younger, digital-first shoppers.
As B2B buyers devote more time to online research and purchasing, industry marketers must focus on utilizing strategic digital advertising channels and tailoring messaging to address consumers’ needs during their buying journey. A robust digital advertising presence will help with reaching consumers where they’re at, and keeping up with competitors.
Programmatic advertising with an omnichannel approach allows for efficient use of media budget to connect with consumers throughout that broad, deep journey. Using programmatic will allow brands in the space to spend their media budget and reach target audiences efficiently.
Other tactics can elevate advertising relevance, like using a data management platform for audience segmentation and personalization, and pulling in web-based product catalog feeds for dynamic product insertion to enhance product discovery.
From an inventory standpoint, along with running display ads for reach and tapping into preferred social channels YouTube and Facebook, online video can create impact thanks to its visual storytelling capabilities.
Creative is another key aspect, which marketers should tailor to B2B buyers’ preferences and pain points. Options to consider in creative messaging include:
What this means for advertisers: B2B marketers must consider what today’s buyers value and tailor their creative messaging to answer those needs. Emphasizing customer reviews, competitive pricing, and technology features will capture buyers’ attention and allow brands to stand out in a cluttered environment. Consistent messaging will help establish brands and engage potential prospects throughout a long buying process, driving conversions and growth.
The B2B buyer and their process has changed, and B2B marketers must change along with them. These consumers expect businesses to create a more seamless, B2C-like shopping experience that fuses digital autonomy and personal attention. A strategic approach in a growing digital advertising space that considers relevant ad inventory and creative appeal will benefit B2B marketers who strive to be part of the solution.
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Advertisers today have a lot of noise to sift through. Advice, insights, headlines… much of it valuable, some of it hype that diverts attention from strategies and tactics that count. Knowing what to tune out and where to focus is critical. Our 2024 digital advertising trends report, Future in Focus, highlights the trends that advertising pros should follow and notes the hype they can safely watch from afar.
Audio is everywhere. And digital audio? Some might say it’s having a magic moment. More people than ever are tuning in—74% of US internet users last year, to be precise—and seasoned listeners are upping their time with the channel.
Whether through the true crime podcast they binge on their morning commute, the songs they blast on their smart speakers while cooking dinner, the live sports broadcast they stream on their laptop while knocking out a last-minute work project, or the tunes they jam to during their evening workout, digital audio is pervasive in people’s lives. It’s a channel that both complements traditional radio and extends beyond it, allowing listeners to tune in from virtually anywhere and enabling advertisers to use proven adtech tools to connect with audiences in the moments they’re listening.
Why is digital audio such a powerful medium, and how can advertisers harness that power in their campaigns this year? Today, we’re digging into all this and more as we explore the state of digital audio in 2024. Ready to talk about it, talk about it, talk about it? Let’s dive in.
In an increasingly fragmented (and, thus, complicated) digital media ecosystem, digital audio offers advertisers a unique opportunity to reach audiences in an intimate and targeted manner. By leveraging the power of sound to engage with listeners, advertisers can connect with audiences during the one-fifth of their daily digital media time spent listening to digital audio. Beyond commanding a substantial share of listeners’ time, digital audio’s popularity also spans age, identity, and background. In other words: It’s a great way to connect with a variety of audiences where they’re spending a good amount of time—and often highly-engaged time.
Digital audio’s popularity with listeners makes sense, since it allows them to listen to the content they want, when they want, and where they want. With this wealth of benefits and increased convenience, it’s no shock that listeners are increasingly tuning into digital audio over traditional AM/FM radio. Though, notably, broadcast radio still has a strong foothold with listeners, and can be effective when used alongside digital audio (more on this shortly!).
And just where are people tuning in to digital audio? Though listening can happen on a wide variety of devices—desktops, laptops, mobile phones, smart speakers, tablets, connected cars—74% of US listeners reported that smartphones were their top choice of device when listening to music and/or podcasts. Talk about tak[in’] it on the run!
If digital ad spend had a personal anthem, it would be “Where You Lead”—and it would be sung directly to consumers. Predictably, with people increasingly tapping into digital audio, ad spend has followed in kind. Don’t believe us? Check it out:
Plus, audio listeners are highly engaged with the content they consume and tend to respond well to audio advertisements as a result. Case in point:
All in all? For advertisers who still haven’t found what [they’re] looking for when it comes to their media mix, this might be the year to give digital audio a try.
Amidst the digital audio boom, broadcast radio remains a resilient and effective advertising channel, serving as a trusted companion for a diverse audience. Though it is less portable and offers less listener choice than digital audio, AM/FM radio still commands a sizeable amount of audiences’ time—an hour and twenty minutes per day for US listeners in 2024, to be precise. Its enduring presence, rooted in accessibility and widespread availability, provides advertisers a unique opportunity to connect with a broad demographic.
The great news? It doesn’t need to be an “either/or” situation when it comes to digital audio and broadcast radio: In many cases, they work better together. On the one hand, digital audio allows advertisers to reach specific audiences through targeting capabilities and personalized content delivery. This versatile channel can be effectively used at various touchpoints along the customer journey. In contrast, broadcast radio, with its widespread reach and established listener base, excels in building broad awareness and driving consideration. By strategically combining these channels, advertisers can establish a unified brand presence and engage with audiences at pivotal moments throughout their customer journey. And by leveraging an omnichannel platform that allows advertisers to tap into both digital audio and broadcast inventory through the same interface (alongside other digital channels), advertisers can gain a holistic understanding of their campaign performance, enabling them to optimize their ad spending and maximize impact in the competitive landscape.
In 2024, cookieless advertising is top-of-mind across the industry: Google’s third-party deprecation in their Chrome browser is officially underway and set to be completed by the end of the year, a seemingly-final blow to the identifier that was once ubiquitous in digital advertising. As advertisers grapple with how best to connect with audiences amidst cookie deprecation and widespread signal loss, channels that offer inherent privacy-friendly advertising features come with significant benefits.
Digital audio is one of these channels, as it allows advertisers to target specific audiences with contextual and walled garden opportunities. For example, teams can use contextual targeting in podcast ads to connect with listeners when they’re tuning into relevant content, or leverage dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technology alongside platforms’ second-party data to serve personalized ads to targeted audiences.
In the past, one of digital audio’s downsides for advertisers was that it lacked a clickable element—unless, of course, banner ads were used alongside the audio content in question. In a last-click attribution world (aka a world driven by third-party cookies), audio couldn’t deliver as effectively as other digital channels. However, the impending loss of third-party cookies is poised to redefine the rules of engagement, potentially leveling the playing field for audio advertising by removing that barrier to adoption.
Overall, as signal loss continues to pose challenges to advertising teams, digital audio stands out as a valuable channel, offering advertisers the ability to build genuine connections and capture audience attention effectively.
In many ways, digital audio advertising is what dreams are made of: Time spent with the channel is increasing, more and more people are listening each year, it provides a personal avenue to engage with consumers, and it allows for privacy-friendly and personalized advertisements.
Digital audio is everywhere, and the opportunities to reach consumers in meaningful, personalized ways that drive action are significant. For advertisers looking to connect with consumers when and where they’re spending time with media, including digital audio in your 2024 marketing mix just makes sense.
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Want even more audio insights? In our guide to audio advertising, we dig deeper into this channel’s potential, and provide strategies digital advertisers can use to make the most of the audio opportunity. It’ll have you belting “I’ve got the power” at the top of your lungs.
Thanks to a great matchup, a hyped halftime show, and (perhaps) just a little help from the world’s biggest pop star, Super Bowl LVIII drew a record 123.4 million viewers across the US, making Sunday night’s event the most-watched telecast of all time. The game aired on CBS (which accounted for 112 million of those viewers—the most ever for a single network) and was simulcast on streamer Paramount+. There was also a kids-focused broadcast on Nickelodeon, Spanish language coverage on Univision, and additional streaming options available via the CBS Sports website and app and on NFL+.
Of course, fans weren’t just tuning in to see if Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs could take down the San Francisco 49ers and capture their third Super Bowl title in five years (spoiler alert: He could). They were also there for the ads, which fetched a record-tying $7 million dollars a pop for a 30 second spot on the main broadcast.
Let's take a quick look at some of the top marketing stories from this year's Super Bowl:
Football may reign supreme as America's most popular professional sport, but on the NFL's biggest stage, the advertisements also play a starring role. Two-thirds of viewers say they pay attention to commercials during the Big Game—with 12% saying they tune in primarily for the ads—showcasing why Super Bowl Sunday is still one of the most meaningful mass-market messaging vehicles available to brands.
This year, newcomers like CeraVe and Kawasaki joined Super Bowl mainstays like Budweiser and PepsiCo to tout their brands on advertising’s biggest night—and, in the case of most advertisers, for days or weeks beforehand, with teaser trailers and even full versions of some ads dropping as early as mid-January. Celebrities were a-plenty, appearing in 53% of commercials during the game by our count. And AI showed its influence, with ads for Google Pixel 8, Etsy, and Microsoft Copilot all touting their AI-powered capabilities.
In 1995, the price of a 30-second spot during the Big Game surpassed $1 million for the first time. Just 20 years ago, back in 2004, a Super Bowl ad cost $2.3 million. But in recent years, with the Super Bowl standing out as one of the few cultural events guaranteed to draw a massive, unified audience (and with streaming and social extending the hype around spots for weeks before the game itself), the price of a :30 second commercial has skyrocketed, hitting record-setting $7 million in 2023 and 2024.
Of course, with a single ad amounting to nearly eight figures, the question inevitably becomes: Is it worth it?
Well, research shows that brands who have Super Bowl ads can expect to see a 68% increase in online conversation volume on the day of the game. That boost ebbs to 22% in online and offline conversation volume within a week, and then to a 16% increase about a month after, before leveling off from there.
As for revenue, an academic study from Stanford University and Humboldt University found that brands can expect to see a post-game sales increase if their spot featured a new launch, had category exclusivity, and if the product has a low price point. Meanwhile, when brands air Super Bowl ads alongside their competitors, it tends to result in an overall sales increase for that category, though sales for specific products advertised within that category can be mixed. Lastly, products with higher price points can take longer to see an increase in sales, if any. So even with the wide reach that Super Bowl ads provide, a meaningful sales return is by no means guaranteed.
Brands in the Super Bowl ad roster may also see a spike in brand awareness. Ads featuring inspirational stories, smart casting, humor, and positive messages often correlate to a lift in positive associations, so the right creative and messaging can be key to success.
Which ads won the day among Basis employees? An internal poll of 136 Basis team members found that Dunkin’s “DunKings” ad (featuring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Matt Damon, and Tom Brady) was the most popular commercial during this year’s game. CeraVe’s inaugural Super Bowl spot, featuring actor Michael Cera (Cera? CeraVe? Get it?) was also a hit, taking the #2 ranking just ahead of Google’s heartwarming ad for its Pixel 8 smartphone and BMW’s Christopher Walken-centric ad.
Now, it wouldn’t be 2024 football coverage if we didn’t spend at least a few minutes talking Taylor Swift. The pop superstar began dating Kansas City tight end (and State Farm/Campbell’s Soup/Subway/Lowe’s/Experian/Pfizer ad star) Travis Kelce last fall—and her presence at games has brought a new level of interest in the NFL this season. It’s also brought in some serious cash, with one firm estimating that Swift has created a “brand value” of $331.5 million for the Chiefs and the NFL.
As for the Super Bowl, Swift was shown 12 times on the CBS broadcast for a total of 53 seconds (accounting for approximately 0.34% of the game’s 4:20 airtime). Kelce, meanwhile, logged nine catches for 93 yards in his team’s big win.