Marketers in the cannabis space face a host of unique challenges. From navigating advertising regulations, to reframing stigmas, to understanding under-researched audience segments, the opportunities presented by cannabis are accompanied by significant hurdles.
Sam Hollander, Chief Digital Officer at Enlighten, joined the podcast this month to share what he's learned building an advertising framework for the largest digital retail and digital marketing company in cannabis. Listen in to learn why consumer education should be a priority for cannabis marketers, what first steps marketers should take before launching a campaign, which consumer profiles they should pay attention to, and more.
What’s new in the realms of paid search and social media? Basis’ Senior Vice President of Paid Search and Social compiles all the latest news, trends, and resources each month for easy access.
Report: Amazon Prime Users Increasingly Start Shopping with Google Search
eMarketer found that more than 57% of online shoppers begin their journeys on Google platforms—an increase of 3 points from May of last year, and a shift that's even more prevalent among Amazon Prime members. This is likely a result of Google’s recent focus on shopping-related initiatives, like offering free listings and allowing people to check in-store inventory directly within Google search.
How Google Uses AI in Google Search
Google continues to lean into machine learning to help Google Search return relevant results for users. Here, Search Engine Land offers an in-depth explanation of all of the different behind-the-scenes tools that work together (along with natural human search behavior) to influence ranking within the SERP. Learn when and where AI comes into play, as well as what search marketers need to know about AI’s influence on Google search.
YouTube Outlines Key Areas of Growth, Including the Rise of Shorts and its Expanding Creator Economy
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has shared an overview of the platform’s key areas of focus for 2022. These include a renewed focus on Shorts (Youtube's TikTok-like short form video platform), which recently hit 5 trillion overall views. Wojcicki also highlighted how creators can make more money on YouTube, which is key to attracting content developers and in turn capturing additional engagement from viewers.
With New Shopping Lenses, Browsing Products is Simple with a Swipe
Snapchat lenses have long been used to help Snapchatters engage with, try on, browse, and shop for products through their device’s camera. This new type of shopping lens also lets users see details on color options, sizing, similar items from the retailer, and price, as well as swipe through multiple products all in one place. Currently in early BETA, Shopping Lenses should be expanding in the coming months.
Pinterest Introduces AR Try On for Home Décor Shopping Experiences
Pinterest's new feature allows Pinners to shop for home décor inspiration using AR technology to virtually place items from US retailers into their homes. With millions turning to the platform for home décor inspiration monthly, this new experience aims to shorten the decision-making process for home décor in the same way that AR technology lets users try on beauty or retail products with your camera.
TikTok Partners with Zefr on Brand Safety and Suitability Measurement
Basis' TikTok reps recently shared the news that Zefr is launching new measurement solutions for in-feed ads in North America, the UK, and the EU to provide third-party reassurance that their investment is being delivered next to suitable content for their brand. Post-campaign video-level insights and analytics are available against all of the GARM suitability risk categories, in addition to TikTok’s built-in pre-campaign inventory filters that can be applied to qualify content in advance of placement.
Pinterest: 6 Tips for Idea Pins
Idea pins, though launched globally last year, are still a relatively under-utilized content format within Pinterest. An evolution of the story format, idea pins allow for full-screen video, designed to engage and inspire Pinners. With more people gravitating toward shorter-form video content, Pinterest released these new tips to help brands looking to test the format to get started.
eMarketer Reports: How Platforms Perform for Influencer Marketing
Recent surveys show that Instagram is the top channel for influencer marketing in the US, because of their creator-friendly environment and well-developed branded content tools. While Facebook sits in the #2 position, Twitter and Snapchat also made the list, with 25% and 17% of influencer marketers planning to use their platforms this year. Not surprisingly, TikTok has risen drastically since 2020, with two-thirds of influencer marketers reporting that they plan to use the platform in 2022.
US Social Network Users 2022 Statistics Report
eMarketer recently updated their forecasts for 2022 usage across Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, Tiktok, and Facebook/Instagram. By 2025, they predict TikTok will remain the third most-popular social network in the US, behind Instagram and Facebook in internet user penetration, followed closely behind by Snapchat.
Side note: eMarketer also published a new report highlighting which social networks excel at holding users’ attention, finding that TikTok tops the scales in average time spent per day on a social networking platform.
LinkedIn: Record Engagement Continues Amid the “Great Reshuffle”
As people continue to evaluate how and where they work, LinkedIn reports that the platform continues to be “mission critical” in helping to connect communities, job seekers, employers, skills, and sellers/buyers. Microsoft also reported increases in LinkedIn events, and announced some new tools within the events space.
People rarely achieve career success in a vacuum. Throughout our long and labyrinthian journeys, we encounter colleagues, managers, executives, and—for those of us lucky enough—advisors and mentors who provide us with valuable external perspectives and open avenues to greater business pursuits.
At their best, meaningful mentoring relationships in the advertising industry are a two-way street. They represent opportunities for the mentee to expand their professional network and develop social capital while simultaneously helping the mentor keep the pulse of the perpetually changing trends that characterize the advertising landscape. Navigating the AdTech industry can be overwhelming and complex, and tapping into as many outlets as possible is a great way to do so more effectively.
With employees the world over coming up on two years of working from home, there may be a sense these once commonplace, all-too-critical career-building moments in the workplace are a thing of the past. In a workplace ecosystem where the majority of our interactions take place in Slack channels or formal Zoom meetings, it can feel increasingly difficult to gain access to senior leaders, have spontaneous conversations with a peer, or simply squeeze in time to seek out advice. This has left many employees—especially those earlier in their careers—afraid of being isolated or left behind in the career stakes.
By prioritizing mentorship, companies can effectively (and productively) fill the ongoing connectivity and community void that currently exists both within, and beyond, the walls of AdTech.
Building a personal advisory board can be integral to career growth, particularly for those at the outset of their working lives or in mid-level roles. By engaging in conversations and developing relationships with experts, young professionals can garner fresh ideas, develop reputational currency, and ultimately build for their future.
In our latest AdTech Unfiltered podcast, long-time mentor and thought leader Matt Barash speaks on this subject at great length. “I think it’s really important to look to a variety of different people and surround yourself with diversity to be able to become smarter and better at what you do,” he says. “There’s a big, growing AdTech ecosystem, (and) if you’re curious, and if you’re entrepreneurial, and if you’re willing to assume a little bit of risk, then there’s incredible reward to be found.”
Finding a great mentor is, of course, not always a straightforward undertaking. It takes time and commitment on the part of the mentee. Matt recommends starting simple and going to someone who’s already well-positioned to offer pertinent advice. “I say look at your manager first. If you’re bought into your manager and your manager is bought into you, that’s the first step toward success. Odds are that they’re a little bit more senior, they’re a little bit more experienced. And so perhaps they can impart some words of wisdom to help you be better at what you’re doing in your core competency, in your core role.”
Looking for a mentor inside your organization comes with other benefits, too—it is a move that can foster long-term friendships, trustworthiness, and mutual respect among colleagues that can contribute to a healthy and inclusive culture in the workplace. Meanwhile, from the company’s perspective, endorsing and facilitating opportunities for employee-management mentorship can help in nurturing and developing a cohort of future business leaders from within.
However, this is just but one option available to professionals who are seeking guidance. Mentors don't inherently have to share the same corporate circles as their mentees. Sometimes, having someone look at things from an entirely unrelated perspective can help provide an additional layer of clarity. “Get out and go to networking events if you can,” Matt says. “Get to know people. Have a cup of coffee with someone. Don’t be shy. Ask people for their time. You’ll be surprised—people will give it back."
The term “mentoring” itself carries different connotations for different people, so setting clear expectations is essential to the success of any mentee-mentor relationship. To Matt, that process starts with the mentee asking themselves some honest questions and clearly establishing their personal and career goals. “Where are you today? What are the things that you need to focus on? What are the areas you need to shore up and invest in to be better to get to where you level up? Having a good sense of where your curiosity is, of where your strengths are, of where you feel you have vulnerabilities, will help you to recognize how to best frame the conversation.”
Matt also stresses that mentoring doesn’t necessarily have to be about the big picture. “It’s really important to have conversations where you also look for the best practices in terms of the tactical part of your day-to-day to ensure that you’re handling things properly and you’re well-positioned. Conversations can range from having a strategic conversation around something that might be a multi-hundred-million-dollar M&A discussion to something as simple as, ‘Should I keep Slack notifications on at night?’”
The rapid shift to remote working has reshaped many aspects of business life, not least of which is how accustomed we've become to communicating with each other through digital forums. While it may feel somewhat paradoxical, in many ways, that virtual inter-connectivity makes this a perfect environment for pursuing mentorship.
“Saying ‘What if?’ is my biggest fear,” Matt says. “I never want to say, ‘What if?’ I want to say, ‘How do I have as many options as possible? How do I have as much understanding as possible?’” Mentorship is an effective way to attack those questions and unlock doors that would otherwise remain closed.
To hear more insights from Matt Barash, check out his conversation with Basis Technologies’ VP of Media Innovations and Technology, Noor Naseer. Matt describes how he became a mentor himself, talks about the tough side of being a mentor, and details the importance of thinking about your career development from a macro perspective.
In recent years, workplaces of all kinds have faced a reckoning. As people across industries call out their experiences of bias and microaggressions at work, and racial diversity reports demonstrate continuing systemic injustice, employers have renewed their commitments to create diverse, equitable, and inclusive organizations.
In the advertising industry, Black professionals have faced countless barriers due to racism. Despite this, Black individuals have made paradigm-shifting contributions to advertising throughout its history. Below, we look at five exceptional advertisers who have disrupted the marketing space in amazing ways:
After earning an M.A. in musicology from Yale, Roy Eaton began his career in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He worked as a concert pianist, performer, and lecturer before being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1953, where he wrote and produced radio programs. After leaving the military, Eaton was hired at Young and Rubicon as a copywriter and composer. He is now believed to be the one of the first Black professionals to work in advertising.
Eaton made a huge impact on advertising from his post at Young and Rubicon, writing iconic jingles for brands like Chef Boyardee and Texaco. Eventually, he struck out on his own and created Roy Eaton Music Inc., which handled music production for various advertising agencies. There, Eaton went on to collaborate with Michael Jackson and produce even more iconic advertisements for companies like Coca-Cola and the Ad Council. Eaton was inducted into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Fame in 2010.
When Vincent T. Cullers returned to the United States after serving as a Marine in World War II, he applied for an art director position at an advertising agency. He spoke on the phone to a hiring manager who told him to come in and start work, but when he arrived, he was told there was no position for him. This experience inspired Cullers to start his own agency in 1956—Vince Cullers Advertising, the first Black-owned advertising agency in the U.S.
Cullers’ agency provided a training ground for Black advertising professionals who faced many racist barriers to entry and success at other agencies. Additionally, marketers have Cullers to thank for the concept of targeted multicultural advertising, having pioneered the practice of serving ads designed to speak specifically to differentiated audiences. Cullers was inducted into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Fame in 2007.
Carol H. Williams started her advertising career in 1969, at a time when Black women professionals faced extraordinary prejudice that significantly limited their opportunities in the field. Williams rose in the ranks at Leo Burnett and, in less than 10 years, became the agency’s first female and first Black Creative Director and Vice President.
Like Cullers and Eaton, Williams eventually founded her own Black-owned agency. Started at her own kitchen table, Carol H. Williams Advertising is now the longest-running independent multicultural marketing shop in the U.S., serving brands like Disney, General Motors, and Kraft.
Williams has been called the "most decorated woman in marketing,” and her awards include the AAF’s David Bell Award for Industry Service, Chicago Advertising Federation’s Advertising Person of the Year, and the National Association of Women Business Owners’ Women Entrepreneur of the Year. Williams was inducted into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Fame in 2017.
Haitian-born Gary Coichy worked with agencies and brands like WPP Mediacom, Omnicom Resolution Media, BMW, and Dell for 16 years before striking out on his own. In his years in the advertising space and throughout the rise of audio, Coichy recognized a gap in the podcast market when it came to sourcing content from non-white, LGBTQ, and women creators.
Coichy's creation, Pod Digital Media, is the world’s first multicultural podcast network, and allows advertisers to tap into a diverse podcast audience while custom-aligning creators from underrepresented groups with blue chip brands. When COVID struck, Pod Digital Media got even more innovative, meeting podcaster’s needs by creating an in-app virtual recording studio. Coichy was included in Ad Age’s 40 under 40 list in 2019.
Natalie Gullatt may be earlier in her career than some of the other leaders on this list, but she’s accomplished a striking amount in her eight years as a marketing professional. Currently employed as a Customer Marketing Manager at HubSpot, Gullatt worked as a paralegal and planned to go into law before pivoting into marketing with the help of an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.
In 2017, Gullatt founded the Black Marketers Association of America, a group that works to “empower, elevate and educate Black marketers financially, mentally and emotionally through their marketing careers.” Her work to support and connect Black marketers while strengthening and diversifying the marketing industry earned her a B2B Innovator Award in 2021.
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The individuals on this list represent the thousands of Black individuals who have shaped the marketing industry with their talent and innovation. This Black History Month, we at Basis Technologies are grateful to these innovators and to all the Black marketing and advertising professionals who continually enrich, transform, and lead this industry into a better future.
Programmatic advertising is firmly on the path to becoming the default framework for digital media buying. Even when the world has had to press a large pandemic-shaped reset button, the medium has proven flexible and effective enough to continue asserting its profound dominance over the landscape.
Back in early 2020, facing a wholly unfamiliar reality, marketers were forced to scramble as they sought to determine what mechanisms would most effectively support their advertising efforts in the “new normal.” While programmatic ad spending was initially hit hard because brands could simply pause campaigns instantaneously, it rebounded quickly to continue growing at double-digit rates year-over-year. In 2022, eMarketer predicts that a shade more than 90% of digital display ad dollars will be transacted programmatically, with the dollar volume of programmatic display close to doubling the 2019 figure ($115 billion and $61 billion respectively).
These are not insignificant milestones and point to the fact that opportunities for expansion and refinement within the programmatic sector still abound despite its prevalence and popularity. With connected TV (CTV) adoption showing no signs of slowing down, the digital out of home (DOOH) market back and booming, and the use of audio platforms rising rapidly, advertisers are awash with new programmatic inventory to better connect with their audiences.
Naturally, venturing into these emerging forums will present novel technical and strategic challenges, ones that will sit alongside broader industry goings-on—most notably those pertaining to the impending deprecation of third-party cookies and the growing prioritization of consumer privacy. To help marketers strategize and structure their organizations to embrace the next stage of programmatic evolution more effectively, we’ve compiled a list of the latest trends within the space that point to where 2022 priorities ought to lie.
With the removal of third-party cookies from Chrome lingering just over the horizon, 2022 will be a make-or-break year for the development of new identifiers and technologies that can either reimagine the concept of tracking codes or replace them entirely. This is very much a watershed moment for the advertising industry—one in which organizations must seize the opportunity to become more transparent with their audiences. It is vital that new identity solutions put consumers in the driving seat and empower them to control how, when, and where their data is used.
These changes, of course, do not need to incite any panic. The end of targeted campaigns is not upon us. Programmatic advertising—even in the absence of many once-relied-upon persistent IDs—will continue to give media buyers access to publishers and placements, with contextual targeting likely re-emerging as an integral piece of the puzzle.
There is actually a huge opportunity here for savvy brands to deepen their relationships with consumers in ways cookie-based tactics never truly allowed. Recent research by Deloitte Digital exploring emotion-driven engagement revealed consumers prefer contextually sensitive brand experiences since they tap into their more immediate concerns, rather than over-relying on past behavior or browsing habits. By embracing the use of contextual data in programmatic campaigns, marketers can foster meaningful connections with consumers that inspire and frame the depth of brand loyalty and brand advocacy.
A mere decade ago, only a handful of brands were managing their own programmatic ad buying. Today, however, the story is considerably different. A 2020 IAB report dissecting the general state of programmatic found more than two-thirds (69%) of marketing organizations globally have partially or fully brought their programmatic campaigns in-house in a bid to remove the medium’s black box aura.
The primary driver behind this trend is a desire among brands to strengthen consumer bonds and control first-party data and operational functionalities that relate to both legal and regulatory compliance. In other words, advertising teams want increased transparency into the buying process. At a time when consumer sentiment changes like the wind, media buyers must be closer to the action with direct access to the raw, real-time data they need to react in the moment, create relevant content at a faster clip, and run off-the-cuff A/B testing. In-housing programmatic comes with other benefits, too, not least monetary savings and resource efficiency. By cutting out managed service fees and eliminating associated data consolidation and integration costs, advertisers have more dollars to throw at campaigns and more time to optimize strategies. The end result: greater ROI.
The process is not all rosy, though: it can often be many years in the making and extremely complex, involving much more than just a deal with a DSP provider. Business leaders need to think about the set-up, change management, data centralization, tools, and talent (which is scarce). You can learn more about the nuances associated with this subject here.
With the worlds of TV and digital gradually coming together over time, more and more consumers have chosen to unplug from traditional linear TV options and embrace online streaming—a move that’s fueled the connected TV phenomenon. Then, as the pandemic gripped the world and forced people to spend more time at home, the media landscape was set perfectly for CTV adoption to soar to new heights and, now, what was once a “nice-to-have” programmatic channel is unequivocally a “need-to-have."
Programmatic's penetration of the CTV arena reached a massive 70% in 2021 and it is expected to surpass 78% by 2023. However, while there is undoubtedly momentum here, there are still some obstacles to further growth. Unlike, say, mobile app advertising, where the vast majority of inventory is available within just two operating systems—iOS and Android—the CTV space is infinitely more fragmented in terms of different devices and providers where an ad could be displayed. Think streaming sticks (Apple TV, Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku, Android TV), games consoles (PlayStation, Xbox), and Smart TV devices (Samsung, LG, and other manufacturers), each of which have distinct standards and advertising capabilities. In 2022 and beyond, programmatic CTV has huge potential, but to maximize campaign success, advertisers must carefully consider where they are serving their ads and which devices to embrace.
Following what has been a challenging period for the medium, digital out of home is spiking again as advertisers search for creative ways to target consumers who are back on the go. US DOOH spending will reach $2.58 billion in 2022, and with more and more digital advertising screens dotting cities across the country (and the world), programmatic looks poised to take an even a bigger slice of that pie in the future.
The appeal of investing in programmatic DOOH ads is multi-faceted. First, they offer the obvious benefits of wide reach, being impervious to ad blockers, and dwelling in non-invasive environments. And second—and perhaps more importantly—this media newcomer should be a major beneficiary of the cookieless future due to its alternative means of audience targeting and the opportunity it presents for contextual marketing to come to the fore. To put it another way, PDOOH is not executed on a one-to-one basis, yet rather one-to-many. Brands employing this technology can tap into fluctuating societal, cultural, and environmental trends in real-time, and reach consumers en masse with relevant ads as they navigate their daily journeys.
It also opens up new creative opportunities, great examples of which include when Renault bought OOH inventory to promote its latest electric car whenever air quality dropped below accepted levels, or when Flonase ran DOOH campaigns anytime pollen levels rose in target areas. Brands that adopt PDOOH have an opportunity to create meaningful, head-turning experiences that leave a marked impression on consumers. There is no doubt that this channel is emerging as a compelling disruptor to brands and advertisers looking to develop their presence during uncertain times.
After a decade that’s been dominated by visual media, audio advertising has surfaced as an important outlet for brands. It is a channel that empowers marketers to evolve their omnichannel strategies naturally through its capacity to reach highly targetable and mobile audiences in brand-safe ecosystems where screens are removed from the equation.
In recent years, fatigue from spending too much time glued to our smartphones has become real. More than half of millennials and Gen Z—the holy grail of advertising demographics—say audio represents a welcome escape from too much ongoing ocular bombardment. These sentiments have become tangible as well, with eMarketer predicting that, per day, listeners will spend 97 minutes with digital audio—nearly a half-hour more than the average user will spend on social media (70 minutes). Unlike their visual equivalents, audio ads are served one at a time in places where consumers are not typically connected to a screen—be that listening to a podcast during their commute, listening to a playlist during a workout session, or unwinding with Pandora after dinner. In essence, audio ads are both unique and highly valuable as they offer premium environments and an effective way to fill otherwise untouchable voids in the user’s buying journey.
Beyond that, programmatic audio offers remarkable granular targeting capabilities. Media buyers can tap into a range of advanced audience segmentation parameters, including location, point of interest, device, weather, user, agent, format, genre, day parting, mood, and more. Through this channel, the ability to engage a user in the right place, at the right time, and within the right context becomes just that bit more accessible.
Compelling, insightful, captivating creative is one of the foundational pillars of effective advertising, but, for a host of reasons, this age-old connection has been badly severed. Unprecedented technological advancements over the last 10 years have led many advertisers to shift focus toward media optimization as opposed to creative optimization: smarter targeting, omnichannel expansion, algorithm hacks, and evermore granular reporting have all become top priorities... often leaving creative behind as an unfortunate casualty.
It is an approach that has bred general content erosion and brand dilution. Without any creative spark, performance ceilings become much lower, and regardless of how good advertisers are at maximizing media outcomes, they will never be able to mitigate the shortcomings of ads exhibiting underwhelming creative. This is particularly pertinent with the cookieless future looming. The digital marketing industry as a collective must now reappraise all the levers that contribute to driving results and no area is riper for improvement than creative delivery.
This is not to say advertising teams should constantly be creating new swathes of creative concepts. Instead, they should focus on building a library of assets and then tweak and refine them depending on the nuances of their targeting strategy. By generating a high volume of creative iterations, programmatic marketers can better react to market changes, tailor their messaging for audience personalization, and A/B test on every channel they are invested in. They will essentially be able to stay one step ahead of the competition.
Advertisers today must navigate an ethical minefield on a permanent basis. While programmatic brings untold opportunities to the table, it also presents some perpetually evolving challenges—namely ad fraud, concerns around brand safety, and ads appearing in disreputable contexts.
Consider these statistics from a 2020 survey by the Brand Safety Institute:
What these numbers highlight is the value consumers now place on how and where brands intersect with society. As such, it is more important than ever that digital messages appear in safe, trustworthy, and suitable environments—not just to avoid risk, but also to effectively reach the right audiences. Ultimately, this is a call to action from consumers: “Be proactive about where you put your ads, or we’ll take our business elsewhere.”
The fact that this phenomenon is actually influencing buying decisions has pushed it to the top of the marketing priority queue. The industry has made tremendous improvements in this area over the last two years, with top DSPs integrating brand safety mechanisms into their platforms, but agencies and brands must continue to be scrupulous in their programmatic media planning to ensure brand suitability is upheld day in, day out.
If 2020 was marked by uncertainty and 2021 was all about the rebound, 2022 is the year programmatic marketers can return to focusing on growth initiatives and begin capitalizing on the opportunities that have sprung from the pandemic—specifically, the rise of connected TV, digital out of home, and audio advertising. Now is the time for advertisers to stare down the challenges they face and implement media solutions that are going to really move the metaphorical needle.
If you’re looking to level up your programmatic game, check our Programmatic Readiness Guide, which breaks down the barriers to success with the medium.
In the past two years, the world has faced a cascading series of economic crises—from the COVID-19 pandemic, to ongoing supply chain woes, to creeping inflation, to the Great Resignation. Many (if not all) of these predicaments are due to global shifts beyond the control of any one company or brand. However, as a result of these myriad of challenges, brands are facing an unprecedented test when it comes to maintaining customers’ patience, focus and allegiance.
As supply dwindles, prices rise, and challenger brands emerge from the digital world to threaten the supremacy of legacy brands, brand loyalty is very much under threat. In 2021, more than 80% of consumers bought a different brand than their usual choice, driven largely by lower prices and/or dwindling supply. Of those, more customers said they’d prefer stick with their new brand than return to their old go-to’s.
In this cutthroat environment, marketers will need to embrace new tools and strategies to distinguish themselves from the competition—and, of course, to maximize their success once they’ve got someone’s attention. Three factors in particular are key to thriving: showcasing your brand’s values, creating a seamless omnichannel experience, and capitalizing on your data across all channels.
In a world of seemingly endless online options that are one Amazon click away from stealing your customers, brands will need to change how they advertise and present themselves to the world. One key for advertisers will be to go beyond products and services to highlight their brand’s heartbeat—i.e. the traits, culture, goals, mission, vision and community that brand embodies.
Generationally speaking, this is a matter of particular import. Studies have found that half of millennials and nearly 60% of Gen Z say they don’t trust companies, while around 40% of millennials and almost half of Gen Z believe most brands come across as inauthentic.
In an era where audiences have more choices than ever—and many millennial and Gen Z consumers aspire to support companies whose corporate values and “style” reflect their own—showcasing your ethos can drive brand loyalty in an era where stickiness is increasingly hard to come by. Ads trumpeting values and purpose help lend brands some much-needed authenticity, and that is a currency that’s always in short supply but high demand.
Once your brand has honed its voice and launched campaigns showcasing its “heartbeat,” it has to show it can deliver an experience that meets customers’ sky-high expectations wherever and whenever they want to engage.
Modern consumers expect a seamless, unified brand experience across all channels. As such, savvy marketers have increasingly come to rely upon omnichannel strategies. Again, this is particularly essential for brands that want to reach younger audiences, with 88% of Zoomers saying they prefer an omnichannel brand experience.
From the moment a consumer sees your ad on Instagram, to when they visit your website to learn more about the product, to their subsequent trip to your brick-and-mortar location for in-store or curbside pickup, to the follow-up emails you’ll send them showcasing other products or service they might enjoy, today’s customers want (and even demand!) a seamless and personalized experience. An omnichannel approach can ensure that brands not only convert more of their leads into customers, but that they keep them coming back for more.
However, if a company is going to truly capitalize on omnichannel marketing, it also needs a comprehensive and effective data strategy.
Dynamic data collection and data analytics solutions are foundational to any modern marketing campaign, but perhaps nowhere more so than omnichannel campaigns. Proper data processes can give marketers a host of key insights, such as where and when specific audiences are likely to spend their time, how your brand can best engage them, what products and services may make for repeat customers, and much, much more.
With the right lessons from the right data, marketers can confidently make the messaging, budgeting, and timing decisions they’ll need to create and convert as many opportunities as possible—or to make mid-campaign adjustments as necessary. And in a world where brand loyalty is tenuous at best, the ability to stay nimble and adapt to customer expectations is critical to success.
Change is constant. Consumers’ preferences are always evolving, and the pandemic has accelerated that evolution and brought about major shifts to many elements within the digital marketing world. Whether it’s eroding brand loyalty, DeFi advertising, or the future of cookies, marketers have no shortage of questions for the year ahead.
Our 2022 Trends Report walks through four of the key trends marketers need to know to keep up with consumers and stay ahead of the curve.
What's new in the realms of paid search and social media? Basis' Senior Vice President of Paid Search and Social compiles all the latest news, trends, and resources each month for easy access.
How the Metaverse Went from Sci-fi to Mainstream in One Year
The pandemic accelerated the use of digital worlds for work and entertainment. While Facebook’s rebrand to Meta helped put the word "Metaverse" on many people’s radar for the first time, a lot happened in 2021 to support this evolution. eMarketer provides a quick chronological recap of all the Metaverse-adjacent events that happened in 2021.
Platforms Catch Social Commerce Fever
It’s clear that social platforms prioritized expanded ecommerce features in 2021, although some are more sophisticated than others. eMarketer has compared and contrasted the features available on Facebook/Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest to show where the industry stands.
Insider Intelligence Q&A with Google Commerce: Understanding the Google Shopping Ecosystem
eMarketer recently spoke with Google’s lead of strategy, operations, and go-to-market initiatives for Google Commerce, Martha Walsh. Read this to get her take on the trends influencing consumer shopping behavior, how Google's relationship with brands has evolved in recent years, and what Google Commerce is doing to improve the ecommerce experience.
Pinterest Insights: Male Pinner Usage
The platform’s latest research reveals information about how their male user base is planning (and planning on spending) in 2022. More importantly, Pinterest provides some recommendations on how brands can get into their consideration set as searches and intent begin to convert into sales.
Brands Need to Leverage Customer Content Now
Luggage maker Calego shared insight into how they began leveraging UGC during the pandemic in this interview with Search Engine Land. The result was a wider top of the funnel than ever before, and higher than average conversion rates as they harnessed the power of customer reviews.
TikTok Tops Facebook and Google As the Most Visited Website
Cloudfare analyzed web traffic from 2021 and found that TikTok was the most-visited website and the most widely used social media platform of the year. This article also includes the other top 10 most-visited websites of the year, as well as the top social media platforms (in order).
How TikTok Drives Offline Sales Impact
Through a series of offline sales lift measurement and MMM studies, TikTok aims to prove how the platform drives offline sales outcomes and positive return on ad spend. Overall, the studies showed a 14% higher paid media ROAS compared to all digital media measured, and a 2x offline sales efficiency. In-feed video was, not surprisingly, proven to be the best performer against these metrics.
Report: US Social Video Advertising in 2022
eMarketer updated their forecasts for how much US advertisers will spend on video ads on social networks in the coming year. Spoiler alert: video ad spending will make up over a third of total US social network ad spending. The report also discusses how iOS privacy changes continue to affect social video advertising, and how advertisers are approaching video to drive both branding and performance goals. One key theme that stands out is marketers investing in more informal creative, likely as a result of the rise in popularity of TikTok.
Check out Basis' Video Unleashed Guide for a deep dive into how to leverage video advertising.
Report: Social Media Video Sees as Much Consumption Time as Traditional TV
A new study conducted by the Consumer Technology Association showed that user-created content on social platforms accounts for 39% of all weekly media hours consumed by Americans. The trend is more pronounced for teens, who spend more than 56% of their time with user-created content. The data shows the evolving shift away from traditional media and toward social media platforms as the key form of content consumption. As a side note: Google also recently weighed in on this topic on their blog, Think with Google.
New Year, New Snapchat Features
Snapchat released a few new features earlier this month to help make messaging with friends more expressive and interactive, including: chat replies in ongoing conversation strings, Bitmoji reactions in chat; poll stickers for Snaps and Stories, and improved video and audio calling capabilities.
For fast reference, Twitter recently published a comprehensive list of all the important events to plan your year around. You can use this link to navigate between months (and regions across the globe) for a better understanding of upcoming key moments.
FloC is dead. Long live Topics?
Some seven months after delaying the removal of third-party cookie tracking from its incredibly popular Chrome browser until 2023, Google introduced a new toy into its Privacy Sandbox: Topics API.
The search and ad behemoth’s new identity solution would pull in a user’s web history from Chrome, then utilize that information to assign that user up to five Topics (such as “Auto & Vehicles,” “Books & Literature,” or “Rock Music”) that advertisers could use for targeting relevant audiences. New topics would be determined every week, and after three weeks, old topics would be permanently deleted. Also of note: Google is officially putting an end to its FLoC experiment, thus ending the life of its previous (widely unpopular) proposed identity solution.
What does this mean for the advertising industry? Certainly, it’s far too premature to know whether Topics is really the future of targeting on the world’s most popular web browser (from the world’s most popular search engine and the world’s most profitable online advertising business), but here is a quick look at the new proposal as well as some immediate takeaways:
Let’s start with the upsides. In a lot of ways, Topics looks like Google’s attempt to placate as many FLoC-related fears as possible while still maintaining a means for cross-site tracking based on browser history. As a result, Topics seems like a solution that may ultimately appeal to more stakeholders—but, as you might expect, not all stakeholders.
For advertisers (and regulators), Topics does not look like the sort of “power grab” that made FLoC the boogeyman to many in the industry and around Washington, while still providing key insights on consumer behavior that can help compliment a larger audience-driven marketing strategy. Publishers, meanwhile, have a blueprint for how their sites fit into to the new topic categories.
As for consumers, the new API’s simplified groupings and the absence of more sensitive identifiers such as “gender” or “race” may appeal to privacy-minded individuals who wish to remain more anonymous while using Chrome and retain more control of what advertisers can see and learn about them online. As Basis SVP of Media Operations Zach Moore puts it, “Topics seems like a much easier way to explain to privacy-conscious consumers that they themselves have the power in their own hands when it comes to targeted ads, vs. having to explain FLoC’s cohorts and algorithms.” Additionally, Google plans to empower consumers to easily review and remove topics from their profile, or to opt-out of Topics API entirely by simply turning the feature off, which may help some skeptics feel a greater sense of power over their own privacy.
Of course, it can’t all be good news, and there are still many aspects of Topics that Google will need to address—or at least iron out a bit—before any widescale implementation or adoption. For publishers and advertisers, Google’s initial draft around how they plan to categorize interests for Topics may be a cause for some concern. It would appear, at least for now, that Google intends to gather its behavioral data based on a website’s hostname alone—rather than the full context of a page’s URL—before bucketing those interests into one of 350 topics. That number makes Google’s list fairly distinct from, say, the IAB’s much more expansive content taxonomy.
However, this strategy may inherently overlook some meaningful contextual information and granularity that could potentially benefit advertisers, publishers and willing consumers alike. For example, someone visiting a website like Amazon or Target could place that user into the Topic of “Shopping,” but that information is much less helpful than knowing the full context of a specific page’s URL (ex. https://www.amazon.com/diapers/s?k=diapers), with which advertisers can infer much more about someone’s behavior and actual needs.Additionally, there will likely be many within the industry who question Google’s initial plan to cap topics at five per week. As Basis VP of Media Systems Ken Rood puts it: “I contain multitudes. Grouping me into five broad topics is good for privacy, but it may not be good for showing me the most useful advertising.”
As for privacy advocates, while Topics is clearly a step in the right direction as compared to FLoC, any browser-based cross-site tracking solutions are likely to face extraordinary skepticism, particularly when they come from Google. It also does little to allay the concerns of those who fear Google having an outsized influence on the online advertising ecosystem. Whether that proves to be a vocal minority or a larger segment of the population remains to be seen, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on in the months ahead.
In many ways, Topics looks an awful lot like another longtime advertising solution that has reemerged in recent years: contextual advertising. As we have previously detailed, contextual advertising shirks user data entirely and instead involves placing ads that are related to a webpage’s content. Topics, then, seems almost like a contextual advertising martini with a browser data twist. Whatever happens with Topics, the fact that it is so similar to contextual advertising only reenforces the important role that context will play in the future of digital advertising.
All in all, Topics may well be just another sign that there is no true “heir” to the third-party cookie throne. Instead, advertisers could be relying on a series of solutions (rather than one single solution) to stitch together their targeting strategies. One thing, however, still seems clear: in the land of the cookieless, first-party data will be king.
There will, of course, be much more to come on the topic of Topics, but the news is certainly a major development for the advertising industry and will undoubtedly be the subject of serious scrutiny in the months ahead.
In the meantime, media buying professionals are still looking for answers on the future of targeted advertising. For our perspective, check out Beyond Third-Party Cookies: Your Guide to Overcoming the Identity Crisis.
Finding a mentor is difficult in any industry, but the adtech world poses its own unique set of challenges for those seeking guidance in an ever-evolving field.
Renowned adtech sales leader, executive advisor, and ExchangeWire AdTech Personality of the Year Matt Barash has been a longtime beneficiary of mentorship and enjoys mentoring others as well. In this episode, he chats with host Noor Naseer about how to find well-suited mentors, how to make the most of mentor relationships, and reasons to become a mentor as you grow in your career.
