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In 2021, nearly two-thirds of all digital display ad spend will be native advertising. That equates to over $57 billion, representing a remarkable 21% YOY growth. How can marketers maximize the effectiveness of their native campaigns, differentiate their brands, and rise above the cacophony of banner noise?
In this month's Centro webinar, we'll be joined by Jonathan Kim, who leads Platform Partnerships at TripleLift—one of the pioneers in native advertising and a Centro partner—to look at why native continues to be a top performer and see why marketers should consider the various native formats available to them through platforms like Basis.
A U.S. Federal Government agency focused on national health safety was seeking to address the rise in opioid addiction and harm caused to communities. Each year, millions of Americans suffer from dependence or addiction to prescription or illicit opioids – a growing epidemic. The Federal Government in partnership with The White House launched a multi-tactical public awareness campaign to raise general awareness of the opioid epidemic and that addiction is widespread across the country and in local communities. Research showed many communities and citizens felt they were immune to the crisis. Storytelling messaging drove audiences to the campaign landing page to further engage with stories of diverse Americans impacted by the epidemic. The client partnered with Basis Technologies to build a digital strategy and tactical deployment around this important message.
The client’s goal was to aggressively confront opioid addiction by educating and engaging a broader audience who may not necessarily believe they could be directly affected by the epidemic and shift the perception that anyone can become addicted to opioids.
The challenge for this client was reaching the appropriate target audience and measuring impact against them. Through extensive research, the Basis Technologies team was able to strategically define the target audience from both demographic and geographic perspectives and use that information to guide tactic and partner selection. The campaign was designed to reach people ages 25-69, mostly blue-collar with a lower household income, in key states that have the highest drug usage. A brand lift study was included to measure the direct impact that the ads had on the audience’s perceptions.
The omni-channel media strategy was designed to connect with the target audience by generating initial awareness, encouraging engagement, and ultimately shifting perception. Utilizing a full-funnel approach, Basis Technologies partnered with Hulu to support campaign objectives over the course of fifteen months. Basis developed a layered targeting strategy with content adjacencies around news, health, and substance abuse, custom keyword alignments directly related to the opioid crisis, and third-party behavioral targeting based on target audience demographics and relevant interests (drug enforcement, drug policy reform).
The Basis Technologies team tackled ongoing performance by implementing real-time changes based on key performance indicators, exceeding the defined VCR, eCPM, and eCPC benchmarks. Ultimately, measurement through a Nielsen brand lift study proved the campaign was successful with an 84.9% overall lift in perception among exposed audiences, with 70% more likely to agree that anyone can become addicted to opioids compared to 37.9% of nonexposed audiences.
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Today's digital agency landscape is hyper-competitive. With swift shifts in technology, changing privacy laws, the sharp rise of new platforms and competitive disruptors, it’s more challenging than ever to maintain an agency's success.
For perspective on this topic, we speak with former digital agency president and partner Mitch Joel about his experience building, running and selling agency Twist Image (to WPP). Joel shares his thoughts on meeting client expectations, managing talent, assessing revenue models, and more.
In the months since Google announced it would be disabling third-party cookies in its wildly popular Chrome browser, the advertising world has been waiting anxiously to see what technology will take its place as the go-to digital identity solution.
One of the leading contenders? Surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) enough: Google, which in 2019 announced the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative. The promise of FLoC is that it will gather data on users, then group those users into groups (or cohorts) with like-minded individuals for marketers to subsequently target with relevant ads.
Advocates have said FLoC will provide advertisers with an identity solution that is nearly as accurate as third-party cookies while maintaining individual users’ privacy. Critics, however, have called the implementation a power grab by the world’s leading search and digital advertising company, meant to strengthen its grip on the industry while offering little in the way of actual privacy enhancements.
Regardless of where you fall on this spectrum, Google’s FLoC is now alive and kicking on many of its Chrome browsers as they test the new tech—but that may be just about the only place you can find it because pretty much every other major browser has already decided to block or not adopt Google’s FLoC tracking technology. This includes Mozilla (Firefox), Microsoft Edge, Apple’s Safari, DuckDuckGo, Vivaldi, and Brave.
Some publishers, including The Guardian, and online services such as GitHub are also resisting the new tracking tech from the global search and advertising giant, and WordPress is considering making “disable” its default FLoC setting. Even government officials are beginning to grow skeptical of Google’s new technology, with several regulators across the EU voicing concerns about FLoC.
Where does this leave marketers and advertisers in search of the One True Replacement for third-party cookies? Well, for better or worse, it leaves them right about where they were before FLoC debuted: in search of answers. The immediate future of identity and tracking appears to be an amalgamation of first-party data and a loose network of unaffiliated tracking tools, including the International Advertising Bureau’s Project Rearc, LiveRamp’s IdentityLink, Unified ID 2.0 (aka UID 2.0) and (yes) FLoC, among others.
As advertisers, publishers, developers, and consumers continue to sort things out, it’s important that industry players stay committed to working together: listening to the market, collaborating with regulatory bodies, adapting and developing new products, and keeping customers/users abreast of any changes as they develop. While a single identity solution may be appealing to advertisers, the near future demands a multi-faceted, multi-tool approach rather than betting too heavily on just one solution, as marketers will need to rely on a variety of options while the industry works through its options.
In other words: sit tight, folks. We may be here a while.
Looking for other resources on advertising life after the death of third-party cookies? Check out our whitepaper on “Embracing the Identity Crisis.”
We’re living in the age of big data—so why does data so often feel more like a problem than a solution? If you’re a marketer struggling to reconcile your reporting responsibilities with the rest of your client work, you’re not alone.
Read on to learn why reporting has become such a pain point for agencies, as well as what lies ahead for media planners looking to create more efficient and sustainable reporting workflows.
Marketing reports are how media planners prove out the value of their partnerships with clients. They’re also an integral part of telling the story of who you are and what you can accomplish as a marketer or agency.
The numbers prove out the value of reporting: A McKinsey survey found that agencies who used data-based reporting intensively were 23 times more likely to acquire customers than non-intensive agency users, and that they were 19 times more profitable as well.
Despite the value of reporting, marketers are running into two main problems when it comes to their day-to-day work:
Media planners aren’t running into challenges with data because of their own professional inadequacies. Rather, these problems arise from the marketing landscape itself, and how the use of data has naturally developed within our industry.
Media complexity has tripled in the past 20 years. Beginning in the 1990’s, the digital age triggered a proliferation of new channels to connect with consumers. Flash forward to today, and marketers are working out of a variety of different platforms to run their campaigns across search, social, programmatic, website, CTV, and more.
Enter our first problem: With media planners working out of many different platforms to run their campaigns, they must also sift through each of those platforms to pull reports. At the same time, clients want cross-platform insights in order to holistically understand the impact of their ad spend.
To deliver these insights to clients, media planners spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to wrangle their data into a cohesive story. This often signals the use of time-consuming, inefficient, and plain unpleasant manual processes.
In a survey by CtrlShift, half of the campaign reports created by programmatic media buyers from November 2018 to January 2019 were done manually, according to 60% of their 93 respondents.
Media buyers are relegated to these manual processes because the infrastructure to manage and analyze these large data sets is still being developed.
Finally, marketers are hindered by data saturation. We’re now able to collect consumer data so effectively that the volume of data has become unwieldy.
This proliferation of data, coupled with the lack of infrastructure, has led to what some marketers call "infobesity:" The collection of so much data that it becomes inconsumable.
Automated reporting is the inevitable future of campaign reporting. Many platforms have been created to solve for the pain point of manual reporting in marketing.
If automated reporting isn’t an option, marketers will need to find creative ways to make their reporting workflows more efficient.
MarTech columnist Matt Umbro advises spending no more than 25% of your client's monthly billable hours on reporting. To make the most of that time, start with your client's goals. What problems are they trying to solve?
Pull your insights based on what will be most helpful in telling the story of how you're solving their problems—and don't feel like you need to make use of every data set available to you.
Basis by Centro is the most automated, intelligent, and comprehensive solution on the market. Learn all about it here.
In this webinar, Ken Rood, Centro's VP of Media Systems, will share recommendations for how you can create a healthy media operation, how to prepare for a future with different identifiers, and offer specific action plans for your programmatic, search and social campaigns.
Which digital segments are driving the most growth in 2021? Despite the tumultuous state of 2020, certain mediums have proven their value, with more growth anticipated. Download the infographic below to view the digital segments driving the most growth, the ad spend outlook for the U.S. in 2021, and digital ad spend growth by industry.
Advertisers and marketers are facing an identity crisis. Major changes to Apple's iOS 14, coupled with Google's announcement about the deprecation of third-party cookies, means that we must find new ways to target audiences and measure performance.
While many groups are working towards innovative identity solutions, media planners are wondering what they can do now to adapt to these changes.
Read on to find out how you can prepare your DSP, social, and search campaigns for iOS 14 and the loss of third-party cookies.
PMP deals have proven to be a successful alternative to connect with the right audience. Many publishers offer their first-party data as PMP deals.
Contextual targeting has a variety of benefits beyond privacy compliance, such as the ability to safely target sensitive categories like healthcare, real estate, and cannabis.
Convert offline records, such us e-mail or physical addresses, into custom targetable segments for your digital media executions.
Enable machine learning to gather knowledge for your campaigns.
Apple’s iOS 14 will have a limited impact on the following (for more detail, check out LinkedIn's help center article):
The impact on Google Products will include:
Looking for more content on the future of data privacy? Check out this episode of AdTech Unfiltered featuring Facebook's head of privacy, data policy, and advertising; or this Centro Institute webinar featuring IAB Tech Lab's senior director of product management.
Like many sectors, the financial services and banking space has been transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic. By and large, these changes stem from the consumer demand to manage finances virtually, rather than in-person.
Banks and other financial institutions had to scramble in 2020 to boost or create virtual service options for their clients. Although lockdowns are now lifting in some countries, the preference for online banking is here to stay.
As a result, here are four trends that will continue to shape banking and financial services in 2021 and beyond:
Mobile and online banking will grow in coming years, fueled by wide adoption among millennials and Gen Z. At the same time, eMarketer forecasts that in-branch banking use will steadily decline.
Neobanks, or banks that only operate online, are making a dent in the market. Successful brands fueling accelerated innovation include Ally, Aspiration, Chime, and Varo.
A growing preference for contactless payments is another development that just makes sense in the context of COVID-19. From 2020 to 2021, the number of contactless payment users in the US rose by a whopping 29 percent!
Virtual assistants and chatbots may not be new for financial businesses, but different uses of AI are emerging. These will focus on providing data-driven insights for finance management, and enabling frictionless online customer service.
For more insight into the opportunities available to finance marketers, check out Vertical Viewpoint: Conquering Challenges as a Finance Brand.
Plus, take a look at our Finance in 2021 infographic for more insights about the consumer and market trends driving change this year.