What’s new in the realms of paid search and social media? This month, Laura Kubiesa, Basis’ VP of Social Media Investment, and Lindsay Martin, Group VP of Search Media Investment, compiled all the latest news, trends, and resources for easy access.
Earlier this month, Meta released Threads, its Twitter competitor where users can share text, photo, or video posts, as well as like, comment, share, and repost others’ content. One of the platform's biggest assets is its connection to Instagram: Registration has been called “incredibly easy,” and users can automatically follow influencers, content creators, and friends they're already connected with on Instagram. Thanks to a slick signup process and an almost-instantly relevant content feed, Threads was able to capture more than 30 million users within just 24 hours of launch. (Note: the platform is without advertising opportunities...for now.)
You’re saying they have even more users?
In just five days, Threads reached 100 million users. Whoa. Conversely, user traffic on Twitter slowed upon its launch—according to Similarweb, traffic to Twitter was down 5% for the first two full days Threads was available, compared with the previous week (and was down 11% year-over-year). To add to the drama, Elon Musk and Twitter are already accusing Meta of stealing trade secrets to build this new platform.
ByteDance has launched its own publishing company, 8th Note Press, to capitalize on the success of BookTok, a highly engaged community on TikTok where users discuss and share books. Many authors have found overnight success from BookTok, and some are now concerned that the social media company’s promotion of its own books will compromise the ability of authors unaffiliated with 8th Note Press to achieve virality.
Pretty sure Gaston isn’t the target audience here.
Next year, there will be nearly the same number of social media users in the US as there are TV viewers, which eMarketer calls an “historic audience shift.” While it’s estimated that Meta and Twitter will see slight declines, other major social platforms will see increases in users, led by Reddit, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Advertisers who have leveraged Meta heavily for paid social initiatives should look to expand and diversify their social strategies and dollar allocation to tap into the growing user bases of other social platforms.
Google recently launched a new feature to improve where advertisements appear—and where they don’t. Brand Exclusions allow marketers to add a layer of control so Performance Max will not serve for branded queries that advertisers want to avoid across Google search and shopping inventory. Advertisers who require brand exclusions, or advertisers who require specific budget parameters associated with branded traffic, can monitor how this may impact reach, performance, and conversions.
Lizzo knows what to do.
Two new AI-powered Google campaign types aim to boost consumer interest through the path to purchase. Demand Gen integrates top-performing video and image assets across a variety of other Google ad formats such as YouTube and Discovery, while Video View campaigns are intended to complement Demand Gen efforts to maximize views. Initial testing showed Video View campaigns achieved an average of 40% more views than in-stream skippable cost-per-view campaigns.
Marketers can now tap into data from audio, long-form, and YouTube Shorts to identify songs that are trending with the Gen Z audience. Google’s algorithm will package such songs into the Gen Z Music Lineup, allowing advertisers to place ads near media that uses the music this audience is listening to. Read more from the official release here.
Great googly moogly, that’s a lot of Google updates!
An eMarketer report projects YouTube to earn over $15 billion in ad revenue in 2023, while holding an 8.3% share of US video ad spend and anticipating double-digit growth for YouTube’s CTV offering this year. How does the platform compare to its competition? YouTube is, of course, part of Alphabet, which ranks highest in the world for net digital ad revenues; YouTube on its own would be number six on that list, behind Meta, Amazon, Alibaba, and ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company). Meanwhile, TikTok’s share of US video ad spending continues to climb and is right on YouTube’s tail. For CTV specifically, only Hulu beats YouTube in US ad revenue, whereas YouTube leads in share of streaming time across its 236 million viewers.
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Over the past several years, the B2B advertising landscape has evolved dramatically. Perhaps the most notable shift is the rapid increase in digital ad spend, from just 29% of total B2B ad spend in 2019 to 47% in 2023. That’s a growth of more than 62% over just a few years!
This digital transformation is due to a variety of factors, including the lasting impacts of the COVID pandemic, a new demographic of younger B2B buyers, prolonged economic uncertainty, and the explosion of both time and advertising dollars spent on digital channels.
Amidst this digital revolution, B2B marketers face a challenging task: Find the right balance of channels and targeting to reach key consumers with the right message at the right time. To help B2B marketers as they approach this challenge, we called on Sean Cleary, Basis Technologies’ VP of Integrated Client Solutions, to answer a few key questions. With nearly 15 years of experience spanning campaign management to client and media services, he brings a wealth of knowledge to the B2B advertising space.
Read on for Sean’s top insights for B2B marketing in 2023:
Sean Cleary: To run a successful B2B campaign, marketing teams need to think about what their unique story is and how they’re going to tell it. Once they’ve got that nailed down, the focus shifts to getting that story in front of the right audience on the right channel.
In the last few years, we’ve seen this big shift to digital channels. And with these digital channels, there are now opportunities to hone in on targeting so you can get your message in front of the right audience for your specific product or service. Take, for instance, TV. Many teams might think of it in the more traditional format of buying in mass scale. Or radio, where you’re paying for ads that are reaching very broad audiences. But now, with digital channels like CTV and digital audio, we can leverage former mass broadcast formats into more targeted, efficient, and relevant activations. In other words, we’re not wasting money on scale here.
Beyond CTV and digital audio, there are a few other digital channels that B2B marketers are really leaning into to get their specific story in front of the right audience. Digital out-of-home is one, especially now that there are more screens in more places. Thanks to this explosion of DOOH screens, B2B marketers can now reach target audiences in contextually relevant environments. Take, for example, having a presence on a screen in a hospital elevator. For a health tech company, this would be a prime spot for reaching decision-makers at hospitals who might be looking for new technology solutions.
Another is social, but this is a channel where it’s especially important to think about the specific message you’re telling via a specific platform. For instance, many teams want to leverage TikTok, and that’s great. But TikTok is a fun, quirky environment, and the same creative that works on, say, LinkedIn, isn’t going to be as effective in this space. So, you may be able to connect with the right people on TikTok, but if you’re not connecting with them in the way that they are wanting to be engaged with then it’s not necessarily worthwhile to do.
SC: Effective segmentation and targeting. The focus on these has increased a lot in the past few years, likely because digital channels have exploded and advertisers have realized how much more specific you can get with your ad spend thanks to digital segmenting, targeting, and measuring capabilities.
For B2B, in particular, advertisers are often looking to connect with a very specific group of people, and they need to give specific messaging to that audience. Teams want to spend the right amount of money and have the right impression thresholds as they reach these audiences.
To do so, it’s important to have really rich audience data, and to be able to slice, dice, and activate it in a strategic way. Because there are a lot of people B2B brands could target—but what’s important is focusing in on specific audiences, ensuring ad spend is aligned with those people you want to target, and not wasting ad spend elsewhere.
SC: One thing B2B teams should be paying attention to is keeping their data clean and organized. Depending on who you’re partnering with and where you’re running ads, some folks will promise you leads. But the question is: Do you really want other people handling your potential customer data? Do you have confidence that they have the security and compliance in place to be able to manage that data responsibly?
This is important when it comes to privacy compliance, as well as regulation of your own customer data. Because when we think about recent developments in regulation, we know that consumers have the right to ask anyone who has their data to not use it anymore. So what happens if you got a consumer’s data from someone who got their data from someone else? How are consumers able to opt out?
For folks trying to get those leads, it’s beneficial to capture them directly (ideally, through a form fill on your own website). If you capture the leads yourself, you have a lot more control over the ability to qualify those leads and guarantee your practices are privacy compliant.
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Interested in working with experts like Sean to level up your B2B marketing efforts? Connect with us and learn how our media strategy and activation services can ensure your B2B campaigns are telling your story on the right channels and in a compelling way.
First off, let us provide a quick disclosure: This blog post was written by a human.
It’s a bit crazy to think that, this time last year, no such statement would have been necessary. Sure, if you got enough monkeys with keyboards together for an infinite amount of time, they would eventually have written this very piece (along with the complete works of William Shakespeare). That’s just science. But in 2023, there’s a new player in the content creation game, and it has the potential to disrupt just about every aspect of digital advertising: Generative AI.
The next generation artificial intelligence tech burst onto the scene late last year with the debut of ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, both from Silicon Valley AI pioneer OpenAI. ChatGPT, in particular, became an over(five)night sensation when it reached a million users in just five days. And in January 2023, ChatGPT was estimated to have 100 million active users—making it, at the time, the fastest-growing consumer app of all time. To put that in perspective, it took TikTok nine months (and Instagram two-and-a-half years) to hit 100 million users.
One of OpenAI’s biggest early investors, Microsoft, has since poured an additional $10 billion into the company and announced a host of new AI-powered features, including a ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine that launched in May 2023 to its million-plus person waiting list. And that interest could be a big (dollar) sign of what’s to come: Microsoft estimates that gaining just 1% more market share in search could translate to an additional $2 billion in ad revenue.
In turn, Google introduced the world to Bard, its own AI chatbot, and invited users to test its new Search Generative Engine, or SGE, which Google says “uses generative AI to give you more information and context to your searches.” Bard initially stumbled out of the gate upon its February 2023 release—pumping out inaccurate information that embarrassed its owner and rattled Alphabet’s stock price—but Google has turned things around in recent months as it introduced new AI-powered features in Google Docs and Gmail and rolled out Bard to new key markets, sending Alphabet stock soaring.
And another potential player, Meta, has spent nearly 10 years and billions of dollars on AI, but had to remove its new chatbot “Galactica” from the internet after just three days after receiving “an avalanche of complaints about Galactica’s mishaps”.
Altogether, AI is already proving to be a powerful disruptive force in the tech world, and the wider implications of this potential AI revolution could be extraordinary. Microsoft’s own founder, Bill Gates, has called AI as major a tech innovation as the internet or the PC, and also warned that AI’s emergence will inevitably result in the loss of white collar jobs. Or, as the Harvard Business Review put it, “The question isn’t whether AI will be good enough to take on more cognitive tasks but rather how we’ll adapt”.
But how will AI—be it generative or otherwise—affect marketing and media buying?
In some ways, AI already has its virtual fingerprints all over digital advertising. Machine learning, which most would consider falling under the larger “AI” umbrella, is at the heart of programmatic advertising and real-time bidding. And digital advertising platforms leverage AI to facilitate custom campaign optimizations, facilitate time savings, reduce ad spend waste to optimize media, increase conversions with best device type, placement, and price, and inform decision-making with real-time data and insights.
Top agencies and brands have relatively quickly found additional applications for generative AI today. According to a recent Basis survey, nearly three-quarters (72%) of marketing and advertising professionals say they currently use generative AI tools as part of their digital marketing/advertising work at least once a month—embracing the tech for everything from content creation to research to personalization. And that large group of early adopters may be the first domino to fall in a new, AI-driven future of marketing, with approximately four in five marketers saying they believe AI will radically transform digital advertising in the next 3-5 years.
Now, how will AI shape the future of the industry? To find out, we asked Basis Technologies’ April Weeks (EVP, Media Services & Operations), Amy Rumpler (SVP, Paid Search & Social), and Ryan Manchee (SVP, Brand Marketing) for their perspective on all the latest buzz surrounding AI and its potential impact on media, marketing, and digital advertising:
April Weeks: It's an interesting time to be in the industry. During a relatively short period of time, AI has become a consistent topic of conversation with what seem to be endless opportunities. The rate of evolution is fast. I believe benefits and opportunities will start to emerge across the advertising industry that enable more efficiency and potentially better work.
Amy Rumpler: I think they're very exciting, and honestly, not that surprising. AI has been integrated with media in various ways for a while now, although most of those developments have been on the back end, driving innovation like how ads are targeted to—and appear in front of—consumers.
Recently, those features have started to take more of a front seat for media buyers to explore and interact with. In social, for example, Meta's Advantage+ features use machine learning (or AI) to help you create campaigns that can efficiently and effectively reach the right audience with a variety of creative options and optimize in real-time to drive performance. ChatGPT and similar AI models are taking these concepts a step further by making the interaction between the person using the tool and the tool itself feel more conversational and less transactional. I'm interested to see if that helps build trust and confidence in AI and its ability to do the job requested of it. If people believe the machine can do what you're asking it to quickly, effectively, and to the standards of what you'd expect if a person was behind the controls, then adoption will rise—which benefits both the tools’ continuing to improve, and the individual’s ability to focus on other tasks.
At the same time, I think like any other evolving technology, there's a need for better understanding of how these tools will be used, policed, and controlled that's necessary to address (and probably should have happened before they became broadly available to begin with). For example, if we're using an AI app like ChatGPT to return search query results, then we need to be able to control what information these AI systems have access to, how they compile it, deem it credible or accurate, return it in a way that's not discriminatory, inflammatory or fictitious, and credit the original source (if available). Without a strong legal precedent, and an internet full of false information, I think this question has to be addressed immediately and should be a primary focus of this discussion.
Ryan Manchee: I’m absolutely fascinated. Twenty years ago, when I first started in the advertising industry, the most significant innovations were around rich media advertising, ad serving, and search. Mobile was nascent, and dial up was still commonplace. Seeing how the industry adapts and adopts new technology is what makes our jobs so much fun. I believe we are in the very early stages of AI, but seeing how the language models allow for greater accessibility and exploration of this technology is going to drive smart, creative ways to rethink approaches to marketing.
AW: The impact will be significant and likely on a similar scale to the emergence of the internet, and the disruption that resulted across the industry. Current processes, workflows, and performance insights will be automated and ultimately change how work is created, delivered, and possibly monetized.
AR: I hope that AI will help further streamline and automate the work we do to create, implement, and optimize campaigns so that strategists, creatives, and analysts can spend more time improving and ideating and less time on manual tasks. When it comes to search and social specifically, I fully believe AI will be integrated in how we develop and optimize content, research keywords and other targeting opportunities, identify new partners and placements for plans, and adjust things like budgets or flight dates in more automated ways than we can imagine based on our surface level experiences with AI thus far.
RM: I'm bullish on the possibilities, but I don't think anyone has it figured it out quite yet. My hope is that the hype around AI will bring a renaissance to creativity and redefine what we mean by “personalization”. Is a hyper-personalized ad really just swapping out the copy of a city name, distance to a location, and plugging in the weather while swapping a background image in an ad? Or is it about creating an experience that is inspiring in a unique and compelling manner? I don't view AI as a threat to anyone's job in the next three-to-five years, but I do believe it will take the place of responsibilities from three-to-five years ago (and today).
AW: Marketers should keep a close tab on AI developments within the industry, start to identify how AI could be leveraged within their organizations, and begin testing to gain early learning.
AR: The first thing marketers should do is take time to educate themselves on what's currently possible and test the tools that are publicly available to start to get familiar with them—including their capabilities and their limitations. There's a lot of speculation in the news right now, but I think the best way to start to envision how AI might change or benefit your current role is to experiment with it yourself.
RM: Explore, experiment, and get more people and teams involved. There are creative opportunities and challenges, there are legal challenges and opportunities, and there are operational workflow opportunities and challenges. Don't make rash decisions, but have some fun and stay curious.
AW: AI will drive increased automation and fundamentally shift how we work across the industry. What today takes a week will be compressed to a day with an increased level of insight and intelligence.
AR: I think it will revolutionize the way we as marketers think about creating and implementing advertising campaigns, and it will equally impact the way we as individual consumers of media interact with and experience content, entertainment, and the internet at large—and in a shorter period of time than some might think.
RM: While most of the focus right now is on the visual and content outputs of AI, the biggest innovations in the industry will come from how it helps marketers more smartly plan, execute, and optimize their digital media.
AW: The industry should embrace regulation at the onset. As we've seen, regulation is an important part of digital advertising, and establishing the right regulatory framework early will enable adoption and maximize the benefits of AI.
AR: Yes, absolutely.
RM: It's too early to regulate, but early adopters should be aware of potential legal challenges. With that said, my high school freshman son has classmates who have attempted to pass off AI generated essays as their own, and this is being regulated!
AR: Advancements in AI are going to cause a paradigm shift that causes younger generations to reconsider career focus areas, create rise to new fields of expertise, and reshape the future of how we use and support digital, connected, AR, VR, and internet-enabled devices and tools. But it's also going to require a deep understanding of how to get the most out of the machines powering the systems, as they've not yet developed to the point that they can 100% operate independently and return accurate information or recommendations without better inputs from their human users.
People need to understand that they can't assume these tools are going to return the same quality of outputs as they [humans] could. As an example: if you ask an AI to write a poem describing tulips, it might be factually correct, but it also might be nonsense that doesn't connect on an emotional level the way you or I might write a poem describing tulips. The same is true if you ask an AI program to develop an ad promoting a new brand of diapers to women who have just given birth. There are just some things that an AI program can't yet fully grasp or understand, but that a person maybe could.
RM: Watch out for the fakes. Both the companies that are jumping on the AI bandwagon calling their pseudo tech AI, and the fake information, fake visuals, and fake work. Our future will not be given over to AI, but these wonderful new tools and systems will help the smart, creative people in our industry continue to do amazing work.
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With so much hype around generative AI’s applications in marketing and advertising, it can be hard to discern what current adoption looks like and how your peers and competitors are thinking about the future of this new technology. To provide some insights in this arena, we surveyed over 200 marketing and advertising professionals from top agencies, B2B and B2C companies, non-profits, and publishers. Download our report today to explore how marketers like you feel about generative AI and gain new insights on how it’s poised to shape the industry going forward.
It can produce music, create digital art, and even compose text in the style of specific writers. But since its public debut back in late 2022, generative AI has been met with skepticism—entirely reasonable skepticism, we might add—both from within and outside of the digital advertising world.
Given the mixed feelings around this new technology, we wanted to better understand how marketers and advertising teams are thinking about its role in the future of digital advertising. In surveying more than 200 marketing and advertising professionals—spanning agencies, non-profits, and publishers—we found that 86.6% of them believe AI will radically transform the industry in the next 3 to 5 years. At the same time, 28% of teams aren’t using this new technology at all.
This is a notable, though not unsurprising, disconnect. With such ambivalence towards this new tech, it makes sense that its use is varied. But, given widespread belief that it will radically transform the advertising landscape, it’s a tool that can’t be ignored.
Today, we’re digging into everything an AI skeptic should know: What the risks are, how to address them, and how your team can embrace (or, at minimum, dip their toes into) its possibilities. Ready? Let’s dive in.
From questions around its regulation, to concerns over how it might spread mis- or disinformation, to the threats it poses to content authenticity, there are plenty of reasons to be wary of generative AI. And in order to experiment with (and eventually leverage) this new tech effectively, it’s important to understand the specifics of its liabilities:
First, the US does not yet have any specific legislation to articulate AI regulation, though it’s something that has been a hot topic in the past several months. With both the White House and Congress showing their support for regulation (not to mention Open AI CEO Sam Altman’s direct plea to lawmakers that AI be regulated), it’s likely we’ll see developments on this front in the near future. For advertisers, this lack of certainty makes using AI more complicated. Without knowing how—or how much—it will be regulated, it’s important that teams not put too many eggs in the proverbial AI basket.
Another risk of AI is the authenticity, quality, and validity of the content it produces. For instance, its role in spreading mis- and/or disinformation is of particular concern. This is recognized by misinformation experts and marketing professionals alike, with a Basis survey revealing that 99.5% of advertising professionals agree that generative AI poses a brand safety and misinformation risk for digital marketers. Couple this with the fact that more than half of advertisers believe consumers will find a brand less authentic if it uses AI-generated content in its marketing or advertising efforts, and it’s clear there is substantial concern over the quality of the content that can be produced by AI.
Despite these risks, there are ways to leverage this new tech in a way that combats these concerns head-on.
As we mentioned earlier, the best way to address the lack of tangible AI regulation is to take it slowly. Find ways to experiment with generative AI tools and use them effectively (more on that shortly!), while maintaining and leveraging your current set of tools and systems. Then, as details around AI regulation become more concrete, you can adapt your practices to ensure you’re compliant with these standards.
When it comes to combatting mis- and dis-information, it’s important to recognize where the content in a generative AI chatbot or image creator is coming from, and to do due diligence to ensure that information is accurate. For instance, if you ask generative AI for statistics or research, be sure to look up the original sources to confirm the validity of information. And, if you encounter anything that appears to be mis- or disinformation, be sure to flag it appropriately within whatever system you’re using.
Finally, to ensure the content you’re producing is authentic to your brand and brand voice, recognize the limits of AI. Though generative AI’s capabilities are impressive, the content produced lacks the nuance, expertise, and authenticity that’s inherent to human-created content. As such, we recommend against simply copying and pasting AI-generated content and slapping your brand’s name on it. Anything that’s been written or produced by AI should be carefully examined and edited by a human, to ensure it aligns with your brand’s distinct voice. Even better? Leverage AI for preliminary or supplementary materials, rather than using it to generate your most important content.
To make the most of the AI opportunity, it’s important to recognize the technology’s strengths as well as its weaknesses. Now that we’ve examined the risks of AI and how to address them, let’s explore how generative AI can be used effectivelyfor marketing and advertising efforts. You might consider experimenting with generative AI in service of:
If you’re in that 28% of teams not currently using AI, consider experimenting and playing with one of these uses—and don’t be afraid to pivot if it isn’t the right fit for you!
It’s clear that generative AI offers many benefits to digital advertisers. And, with tech leaders and advertising industries agreeing on the impact it will bring to the industry, it’s a force that can’t be ignored. By approaching this technology with a healthy balance of wariness and wonder, advertisers can begin to leverage this tech in a way that ensures a positive net benefit for their teams.
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Hungry for even more insights on how digital advertising professionals feel about generative AI? Check out our new report, Generative AI and the Future of Marketing. In it, we share the results of our survey of over 200 marketing and advertising professionals, dig into the research on how AI fits in the digital advertising landscape, and analyze the potential impacts on the future of marketing.
Less than one year after its public debut, generative AI has the marketing and advertising world’s full attention.
The next-generation artificial intelligence tech burst onto the scene late last year with the debut of ChatCPT and DALL-E 2, both from Silicon Valley AI pioneer OpenAI. ChatGPT, in particular, has grown into a near-overnight sensation, reaching a million users in just five days and hitting 100 million active users faster than any consumer app in history to that point.
One of OpenAI’s biggest early investors, Microsoft, has since poured an additional $10 billion into OpenAI while beginning to introduce a host of new AI-powered features, including a ChatGPT-powered version of Bing search engine.
In turn, Google—a generative AI innovator in its own right and the first company to utilize large language models (LLMs)—has introduced its own AI chatbot, Bard, its own AI chatbot, while promising new, soon-to-launch AI-powered features in Google Search, Gmail and more. Another major player, Meta, has spent nearly 10 years and billions of dollars on AI and has taken to touting its LLaMA as a powerful open-source language model. And dozens of other companies have also begun introducing generative AI-powered tools into the marketplace.
Altogether, AI is already proving to be a powerful disruptive force in the marketing and advertising world, and the wider implications of this AI revolution could be extraordinary. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has called AI as major a tech innovation as the internet or the PC, while also warning that AI’s emergence will inevitably result in the loss of white-collar jobs. Or, as the Harvard Business Review put it, "The question isn’t whether AI will be good enough to take on more cognitive tasks but rather how we’ll adapt."
So, how will the next generation of AI affect marketing and advertising?
For this report, we surveyed over 200 marketing and advertising professionals from top agencies, B2B and B2C companies, non-profits, and publishers to see how marketers are feeling about AI today and how they believe it will shape the industry going forward.
Findings include:
Say you're running an ad campaign, and you want to target 35-year-old moms who enjoy board games and luxury fashion. How do you serve ads to that specific audience? Without knowing where board-game-loving, luxury-fashion-buying moms spend their time, it could take months of trial and error to figure out which ad placements will reach that audience most effectively.
The great news? Programmatic advertising allows marketers to leverage data and streamline the process of connecting with the right audiences on the right channels. Today, we’re digging into how marketers can use different campaign targeting tactics to reach consumers, as well as how they can do so in ways that respect consumer privacy.
Unlike site-direct planning, programmatic media is focused on audience buying. In other words, programmatic allows advertisers to focus more on finding the right audience than on finding the right website. This emphasis on audience means that advertisers can pull from a variety of data sources to determine how best to target consumers based on where they live, the content they consume online, their brick-and-mortar visitation, the apps they have downloaded on their mobile device, and more.
By targeting specific audiences, marketing teams can ensure they aren’t wasting ad spend on consumers who aren’t likely to convert. And with a variety of targeting options and the ability to combine them within one campaign, programmatic makes it easy to use your budget wisely and efficiently.
There are many targeting options available for marketers using programmatic. Read on to learn about six common targeting strategies in detail:
Behavioral targeting allows marketers to serve ads to unique individuals across multiple devices based on their demographics, behavioral attributes, intent, or interests. Demographic data could include gender, age, income, or education, while interests might include cooking, gardening, or fitness. In addition to using second- and third-party data for behavioral targeting, marketers can leverage first-party data gathered via tracking behaviors or actions completed on their websites (i.e., page activity, purchase history, etc.).
It's important to note that the deprecation of third-party cookies will impact how advertisers can leverage third-party data in behavioral targeting. To adapt to the privacy-first future, marketers will need to lean into more privacy-friendly targeting techniques, such as first-party behavioral targeting.
Leveraging website or app targeting is a great strategy when you know what sites or apps you want your ads to run on. Marketers often combine inventory types in a single campaign to best use the targeting options available. For example, you can use a list of sites you want to target (either website or app), and layer on the audience segments you’re looking for on these pages using behavioral targeting.
Custom site lists help ensure your ads are serving on the desired sites and generally come at a more efficient cost than private marketplace deals (more on these shortly!). The only downside to running custom site lists programmatically is that there is less control over where ads will serve on the site and how much budget will spend. If an advertiser needs more control, it’s better to go through a private marketplace deal.
A private marketplace (PMP) provides access to prepackaged deals where publishers and providers bundle high-quality ad inventory. Typically, these deals come at a higher CPM and ensure that the best ad placements on a website go to the highest bidder. Though less cost-efficient, PMPs are one of the best ways to get your brand in front of qualified traffic in highly visible placements. For example, within Basis, users have access to an Inventory Directory. There, users can select deals or negotiate directly with providers. The PMP will show all details on price, volume, device types, and supported ad formats.
PMPs are a great option for campaigns where a brand wants to be exposed to high-quality traffic and premium placements. Even more, PMPs are a privacy-friendly way to tap into high-quality, targeted audiences.
Depending on the product, it can take several visits before online shoppers decide to make a purchase. To keep consumers engaged, marketers can leverage retargeting to bring them back to a website, maintain their interest, offer additional info, or keep their brand top of mind.
How does it work? Well, in platforms like Basis, advertisers can build audience pools based on website interactions such as specific page visits, cart abandonment, or button clicks, and then target custom messaging to those segments. Overall, retargeting is an essential strategy for engaging consumers who have already shown interest, and earning their conversions.
Geotargeting or geofencing is a hot topic for marketers because it focuses on targeting individuals within a specific geographic perimeter, or “fence.” These digital boundaries are built around specific places of interest, such as a competitor’s location or a place where your audience group is congregated.
Geotargeting allows teams to reach audiences in strategic locations, and to do so in a privacy-friendly way. Marketers can leverage first-party data (such as a zip code entered at checkout) or location-based data (summer in Texas = HOT) to personalize ads and target them to key audiences.
Contextual targeting is another privacy-friendly targeting solution that advertisers can leverage in their programmatic campaigns. Contextual targeting serves ads based on the content of a specific website, page, or channel. This could look like an online bank running ads during a personal finance podcast, a makeup brand serving display ads on websites with makeup tutorials, or a sports gambling company targeting live sports content on CTV devices. That’s the beauty of programmatic: You can get very specific with targeting different types of content on specific pages. These content targeting segments can be topics as broad as sports, news, or entertainment, or as specific as baseball, healthcare news, or award shows.
Targeting is one of the areas that the impending cookieless future will impact most. The good news is that many of the targeting strategies we just discussed are either inherently privacy-friendly (such as PMPs and contextual targeting) or can be adapted to be privacy-friendly through the use of first-party data.
That said, this shift will require advertisers and marketers to test and adopt new strategies and technologies for effective programmatic targeting. Advertisers will need to focus on building direct relationships with consumers, leveraging their own first-party data, and shifting their targeting tactic mix to identify and reach relevant audiences in a privacy-conscious manner.
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Want to learn more about how marketers can connect with audiences in meaningful and privacy-friendly ways? Check out our guide, Beyond Third-Party Cookies: Your Guide to Privacy-Friendly Advertising, for a deeper dive.
What’s the weirdest museum you’ve ever been to? If you haven’t visited the National Mustard Museum in my home state of Wisconsin, I’m here to tell you that you’re missing out. It’s got everything: An exhibit on the history of mustard, the “exquisite Gibbons Collection of sterling silver and porcelain mustard pots,” and thousands of varieties to try and buy—from root beer mustard to Pear mostarda to gingerbread Dijon.
While quirky destinations like these are fun for townies and tourists alike, creative marketers can also benefit from understanding the significance of such local attractions—especially in today’s industry, which is slowly but surely transitioning toward more privacy-friendly methods of serving tailored messages to consumers.
Unconvinced that America’s Favorite Condiment Museum has anything at all to do with winning marketing strategies in a cookieless world? Stick with me here and let’s take a look.
Like the Greeks and Romans prescribing mustard to cure the bubonic plague, geo-based targeting can serve as a balm for marketing organizations transitioning away from third-party cookies (except that localized marketing actually works...no offense to our Hellenic ancestors!)
How, exactly? Despite Google delaying third-party cookie loss to 2024, the fact remains that our industry is in the midst of an identifier crisis. News coverage of data breaches and data privacy regulation, combined with updates to iOS and Android that have increased the transparency of mobile data collection, have levelled up consumers’ understanding of how companies collect and use their data. As a result, consumers (understandably!) want more control over how companies gather and leverage their personal information and online behavior. To accommodate consumers and regulators alike, the marketing world is on the brink of a tectonic shift away from a targeting world that revolves around the third-party cookie.
In their place, marketers must lean into other targeting methods. Contextual and geo-based targeting, for example, are both not only tried-and-tested, but often more cost-efficient than user ID-based targeting. We’ve already taken a closer look at contextual targeting, so let’s examine some of the ways geo-based targeting strategies like location targeting, localized marketing, and geotargeting can help advertisers reach their audiences.
Location targeting might seem basic to some marketers, but it’s hard to understate the power of doing it right. Targeting by country, city, or even zip code presents advertisers with information that’s ripe for personalizing brand messages: language, food, weather, sports teams, music, history, landmarks—the list goes on. This type of targeting presents the opportunity to build custom creative with specific audiences in mind (sometimes referred to as “localized marketing”). Advertisers can use information about different locales to relay brand messages that feel thoughtful and personalized, but not invasive.
For instance, to promote their original series “Wednesday”, Netflix ran localized, place-based advertisements around the world that featured creative geared towards the culture of those markets. Take a look at this billboard from LA, for example:
These localized ads played into a bold, omnichannel advertising strategy from Netflix, in which consumers encountered Wednesday ads everywhere from the TikTok and Uber apps to the trays in airport security lines. Wednesday is now the second-most-viewed English language series on Netflix, thanks in part to their innovative marketing approach.
While the tone of the Wednesday creative matches the personality of the character upon which it’s based, not all location-based ads have to be so cutting. Consider the following examples:
In Toronto, Nike built a brand awareness ad around local transit frustrations.
In Philadelphia, Vitamin Water featured a piece of locally-loved slang to get their message across.
In Chicago, Red Bull made the iconic Chicago Loop the star of a billboard ad.
If you’re from Toronto, Philly, or Chicago, seeing one of these ads may have made you smile—which is exactly what localized media is supposed to do! At its best, a localized ad feels like being seen by a brand—like the two of you are sharing an inside joke—and elicits positive associations that come with knowing that brand spent time and money to connect with you and your people.
Those warm fuzzy feelings are priceless from a marketing perspective, and for that reason, ads with localized creative might be some of the most enjoyable and unobtrusive that consumers can come across. They’re just targeted enough to feel tailored, but not so targeted as to feel creepy (i.e., "How did you know I was just talking to a friend about wanting to visit Dijon next summer, internet??”). And in the modern marketing world, that’s a crucial balance to get right.
Of course, just because we live in a certain zip code doesn’t mean that we spend all our time there, and advertisers can get even more granular in their geotargeting based on consumers’ real-time location data and/or locations that they’ve recently visited. In a privacy-first world, using first-party data is a no brainer here, because consumers generally understand first-party data collection as something that’s meant to streamline their digital experience (like Weather.com remembering your zip code or the Kohl’s app knowing that February in Chicago is sweater weather, not swimsuit season).
Brands can also tap into second- and third-party data to power geotargeting campaigns, but this is where marketers must tread lightly, as the use of that data opens up privacy concerns. This kind of geotargeting uses information like GPS data collected from mobile apps to serve ads to customers when they enter specific geographies. But location data, in the eyes of regulators and consumers, is personal data—and that means marketers must be extremely careful about how they gather, utilize, and store it. Under pieces of legislation like GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, and COPPA, there are rules for how companies can interact with location data. If brands don’t comply, they run the risk of legal consequences and subsequent loss of brand loyalty once the news gets out.
The issue gets even more complicated considering that due to the complexity of the media supply chain, many data providers and brands simply don’t know that they’re violating these regulations. For example, a report from fraud detection platform Pixalate found 70% of the top 1,000 most popular apps directed at kids on the App Store and Google Play share GPS signals or IP addresses with marketers, implicating those marketers in potentially violating COPPA. There are a lot of companies out there that have no idea where their data comes from and they’re using it anyway—don’t be like those companies!
Despite privacy concerns, the location data industry is growing at breakneck speed: 90% of global companies that use location data expect its use to become more important in coming years, and location data is seeing rapid adoption in the retail, CPG, travel, finance, real estate, and logistics industries.
So, how can marketers tap into second- or third-party location data without running the risk of violating consumer trust and data regulations? Here are a few guidelines:
An example of guideline number two in action: Basis is integrated with intelligence and measurement company Cuebiq, which allows Basis marketers to build audience pools based on mobile users’ location behaviors, and measure in-store visitation resulting from ads. Cuebiq prioritizes privacy by always asking users to opt into sharing their location before collecting it, and by providing users with multiple options to opt-out of location sharing at any time. Plus, Cuebiq was one of the first location providers to join the Network Advertising Initiative, a group that maintains and enforces high standards for data collection and use, which is another good sign that they’re serious about privacy.
All in all, geotargeting can be a huge boon for marketers, but with great power comes great responsibility. And failing to uphold your responsibility to consumer privacy can result in catastrophe (kind of like the catastrophic shortage of mustard France is experiencing right now—but that’s a story for another day).
Like people in the market for a new house or storefront, the marketers of the future will constantly be thinking about “location, location, location.” It’s hard to overstate the importance of place, and one thing’s for certain: Location targeting, localized marketing, and geotargeting will all be significant players in the digital advertising ecosystem of the future.
And, like 9th-century monks in Northern France making bank on mustard, marketers who tap into geo-based targeting (in privacy-friendly ways, of course!) will find themselves very well off, indeed.
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Speaking of geo-based targeting, did you know that 2022 marked the second consecutive year that digital out-of-home ad spend grew by more than 20%? It's a channel that's privacy-friendly, allows advertisers to personalize their messaging based on location-based contextual relevance, and comes with all the capabilities that give digital advertising its power and efficiency. Learn all about how to tap into this growing opportunity in The Power of Place: Your Guide to Digital Out-of-Home Advertising.
Digital out-of-home (DOOH) is making quite a splash in the world of advertising. As of 2022, the global DOOH market was valued at $18.80 billion, and it’s forecast to reach $58.67 billion by 2030. That’s an increase of more than 212%!
With the many benefits the channel offers, it makes sense that it’s experiencing rapid growth. DOOH allows advertisers to connect with audiences when they’re outside of their homes, in contextually relevant environments, when they often don’t have their eyes glued to their phones (but do still have them handy to interact with elements like QR codes). Put simply, when used as part of a holistic omnichannel strategy, digital out-of-home allows advertisers to reach audiences in key moments of impact.
And, thanks to its digital nature, DOOH allows advertising teams to harness the latest innovations in adtech to maximize their return on ad spend (ROAS). From its targeting, personalization, and reporting capabilities, to the real-time bidding and automation offered by programmatic DOOH (pDOOH), this channel combines the best qualities of OOH with the power of digital advertising.
Even more, DOOH is ripe for creativity. We’re talking big, bold messaging, compelling carousels of images, mesmerizing motion, and more. After all, these are messages that people are often seeing on their way from place to place—what better opportunity to have fun with the creative elements to capture their attention?
Today, we’re sharing several of the most compelling digital out-of-home ads we’ve seen, and digging into why they stuck with us. Whether they succeeded due to a strategic use of video or a humorous approach, or by tailoring relevance to the specific moment, advertisers can learn a lot about the DOOHs and DOOHN’Ts of DOOH (sorry, we couldn’t resist!) from these ads.
Remember when the price of eggs skyrocketed last year? While we were panicking about the future of omelets and quiches, the company JUST Egg saw an opportunity. They ran DOOH ads for their plant-based eggs, using messages like “Plants don’t get the flu” to elevate their product and brand at a strategic moment when the alternative (i.e., chicken eggs) was less available.
JUST Egg placed their messages in high-traffic, public places where they were truly relevant (think outside of a grocery store, or near a major shopping center). And, since they chose to use DOOH rather than a traditional OOH billboard or urban panel, they were able to leverage messaging that was relevant for a specific moment, and to make creative adjustments easily—by updating digital files—once the momentended (i.e. once the price of eggs returned to normal).
Our key takeaway: It pays to seize the moment. In other words, certain messages might make a more profound impact during certain times. Paying attention to the latest news, events, and trends can help ensure your brand is connecting with audiences in a way that’s meaningful to them when and where they are. And, using a channel like DOOH ensures that marketers can not only reach people in high-traffic, contextually relevant locations, but that they can also quickly adapt messaging if needed.
Ah, the holiday season. For most, it’s a time to be enjoyed with friends and family. And though we can’t speak for everyone, we know of a certain trope about spending time with in-laws (which might not be a trope if there wasn’t at least some truth behind it…).
For this campaign, Roku decided to keep it real and lean into these mixed feelings about the holidays. They ran digital billboards that joked about how consumers could use their streaming TV devices to escape time spent with in-laws—a message that, we’re sure, many could relate to. By using digital out-of-home, they were able to place their quippy creative on a big, bold display, and in a high-traffic location. And, by using the digital iteration of OOH, they ensured they could easily update their creative once the season ended, to avoid the ad looking outdated once the holidays were over.
Our key takeaway: Personalization looks different on a one-to-many channel like digital out-of-home. Rather than being tailored to specific individuals based on demographics, behavioral data, and other available personal data, DOOH is personalized to groups of people that are likely to encounter a specific ad. Here, Roku formulated a message that was relevant to the season and personal to many. By considering their target audience and the specific context and moment they’d see this ad, Roku was able to connect with viewers in a compelling way that felt personal.
To promote its new series, Resident Evil, Netflix took out a massive digital billboard in Times Square. But this wasn’t just any billboard—this was a 3D digital billboard, one which allowed Netflix to display a frighteningly life-like “licker” (a zombie creature from the horror series) moving about and seemingly smashing the “glass” it was contained by.
Our key takeaway: If we saw this while walking the streets of New York, it would certainly stop us in our tracks. Thanks to the digital nature of DOOH, there’s a significant opportunity for advertisers to use video and motion to captivate and mesmerize audiences. This could look like something as bold as the 3D billboard above, or could include using video footage (rather than a static image) to show off the features of your product in a more immersive way.
Remember how we talked about DOOH allowing teams to meet people with the right message, in the right moment? Red Bull took this to the next level with these digital signs. By using dayparting, or running ads at specific times of the day, Red Bull met viewers at the right time with the right message: “Feeling the afternoon slump? Red Bull can help!”
Our key takeaway: This is another example of the power of personalization on a one-to-many scale. By designing this ad specifically for the post-lunch moment, Red Bull was able to drive higher engagement than, say, a more generic ad that ran on a digital billboard all day.
With ad spend projected to increase dramatically over the next seven years, now is a great time for marketers looking to ride the DOOH wave to start testing and learning on the channel. Start with some of the ideas we outlined above: From seizing an interesting cultural moment, to using the latest digital tech to captivate audiences with motion, to leaning into the power of dayparting, DOOH offers a slew of ways to get creative in connecting with consumers.
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Want to level up your DOOH expertise even further? Check out our guide, The Power of Place: Your Guide to Digital Out-of-Home Advertising. In it, we break down everything digital advertisers need to know about DOOH so they can leverage it effectively within their omnichannel media mix.
Pop quiz: In which digital space can you find the exact location of a friend, attend a virtual concert, send pics and texts that only last as long as you want them to, peruse digital content generated and shared just for specific audiences, and peek into the lives of celebrities? Snapchat, of course!
While the platform is sometimes dismissed a non-essential advertising channel, brands looking to reach younger audiences—as well as those seeking to be at the forefront of augmented reality (AR)- and metaverse-related activations—would do well to keep an eye on Snapchat. And while the app’s parent company, Snap, has been having an up-and-down couple of years from a performance standpoint, its AR-focused vision for the future and unceasing popularity with Gen Z and millennials offer distinct advertising opportunities to social marketers.
What led to this moment in Snapchat’s history, where does the app stands today, where will its future lead, and how can advertisers make the most of their Snapchat spend? Read on to find out.
Since it arrived on the market, Snapchat has seen some serious ups and downs (welcome to the wild, wild world of social media!) When it hit the app store in 2011, its offering was unique: Picture-based chat functionality that gave users the ability to limit the amount of time a recipient was able to see their message.
Snapchat then because first social app to popularize AR with the introduction of lenses in 2015, which allowed people to use a variety of filters that altered their appearance, has since fueled hours of wonder and hilarity as people experimented with making themselves look (arguably) more attractive (who remembers their flower crown filter era?), less attractive, and just plain ridiculous.
All together, Snapchat was the fifth most downloaded app of the 2010s—and Meta found that threatening enough to offer a $3 billion acquisition deal in 2013, which Snap declined.
Fast-forward to today: While the platform has continued to see strong user growth, its ads business has faced a turbulent past couple of years. 2022 was particularly difficult, as the company lost two of its top ad executives, laid off 20% of its employees and restructured, and saw its Q3 net losses almost quintuple year-over-year. Importantly, this didn’t happen to Snap in a vacuum—Meta and X (formerly Twitter) also experienced revenue losses, restructurings, and mass layoffs. And on the upside, Snap appears to have benefited from X's decrease in traffic last year: while traffic to X's ad portal decreased by 19% year-over-year in October 2022, traffic to Snap’s ad portal increased by 47%.
Even still, the core of Snap’s revenue troubles likely stem from the fact that Snapchat functions mostly as a chat app, which has made it harder to monetize with ads than it is for other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok.
So, does that mean advertisers should ignore Snapchat? Not at all! The app offers a consumer base that’s particularly engaged, with the average user opening Snapchat over 30 times per day and spending over a half hour on the app every day. And, when done well, Snapchat ads can prove particularly engaging: The travel app Hopper found that Snapchat users booked flights four times as often as customers brought to the app from other platforms. Even more, some exciting things may lie in store for Snap as it further differentiates itself with a renewed investment in AR.
As an AR pioneer, Snap is well-positioned to differentiate itself as a leader in the field. This could prove to be huge for the company (and for advertisers), as AR is set to explode in coming years:
While Snapchat’s current AR functionalities are mostly entertainment-focused, there’s significant room for development of more revenue-driving use cases, such as social commerce.
The big takeaway? While Snap has struggled to bring in consistently high ad revenue in recent years, the course it’s charted towards AR innovations could mitigate some of its struggles to monetize the platform. Of course, there’s a lot of uncertainty here, as these new AR features could take years to develop and refine. Still, for future-forward brands who want to be on the frontlines of advertising innovation while connecting with a highly engaged audience, testing and learning on Snapchat could pay off in a big way.
Let’s say you’ve made the decision to start working Snapchat ads into your marketing mix. What creative is most likely to resonate? How do you make the most of your investment? And how can you work Snapchat into your cross-channel campaigns? Read on for our top recommendations:
Similarly to TikTok, Snapchat rewards advertisers who make their ads feel native to the platform’s specific environment. Snap recommends using ads that last for five-to-six seconds, don’t come off as overly polished, and are designed for users watching with sound on. Creative that features user-generated content (UGC) can be particularly impactful.
Snapchat also provides several unique offerings that advertisers can leverage to take their campaigns to the next level. A few to consider:
As with any advertising channel, your Snapchat spend will typically be most impactful when you’re leveraging the channel as part of a cross-channel—or better yet, omnichannel—campaign. With a cross-channel approach, advertisers can reach their audiences at complementary touchpoints in the spaces where they spend their time, providing a smooth and more unified customer experience.
Of course, managing a cross-channel campaign comes with its own unique set of challenges, and hopping in and out of lots of different platforms can create the very opposite of a smooth and unified experience for advertisers, depriving them of a clear and easy way to gauge the success of one channel versus another and creating barriers to shifting spend based on performance. One solution for marketing teams here is to leverage an omnichannel advertising platform, where advertisers can track the performance of all their campaigns (including campaigns on social platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and Facebook) within a single interface, providing a single source of truth and eliminating the time-consuming need to switch back and forth between platforms.
While Snap (like all social media companies) has had its share of ups and downs, it’s never stopped innovating and adapting to consumer and technological trends. And while plenty of competitors have come and gone, Snapchat keeps users coming back day after day, and year after year. With that loyal audience and the brand’s commitment to leading the way in social media AR, Snapchat offers some enticing and unique opportunities to social advertisers.
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Want to make the most of your Snapchat spend? Then you’ll want to be a video advertising expert.
The video advertising landscape has evolved considerably in recent years, and between streaming video’s ongoing takeover and innovative emerging technology like interactive content and generative AI, that trend shows no signs of slowing. Check out the Video Unleashed Guide for a deep dive into everything marketers need to know.
