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When COVID-19 hit early last year, the world of healthcare marketing seemed to come to a halt. Media budgets and the people who controlled them paused, leaving marketers to reflect on how to move forward and the changes that would likely come due to the global pandemic.
While messaging and targeting may have changed, the one thing about healthcare marketing that hasn’t changed is that caring for and improving the lives of patients remains at the center of the industry.
Whether it’s advertising healthcare facilities, hospital service lines, new drugs, updated medical devices or simply continuing education for healthcare providers (HCPs), healthcare marketing still revolves around patients. What has changed is the way HCPs reach and engage with their patients and other people in their fields, and how healthcare marketers help them accomplish that.
Healthcare marketing is still focused on simplifying care for patients and keeping the relationship between HCPs and patients strong. However, things are now shifting to a digital-first approach.
A good example of these changes relates to telemedicine. It’s true that telemedicine isn’t exactly a new advancement in medical technology—in fact, it’s been around for decades—but its usage numbers saw a significant spike in 2020.
With the pandemic leaving people in quarantine and unable to visit their HCP, telemedicine offered a way to keep patients and HCPs connected and ensure that patients still received the care and attention they needed. The challenge that healthcare marketers faced was that telemedicine wasn’t the most popular or well-known service, to either HCPs or their patients.
While healthcare marketers couldn’t entirely control HCP usage and adoption of telehealth services, they could help get patients on board for doctors who already signed on to the “new” platforms. Shifting patient-centered campaign messaging away from showcasing service lines, clinic locations, and offerings, and towards making it clear that a patient’s HCP was still available, just in a different way, was integral to keeping relationships between patient and HCP strong.
Despite a gradual and hesitant adoption of a new technology, as it turned out, telemedicine’s shining moment in the midst of a pandemic impacted the healthcare industry more than anticipated. FAIR Health reports that the United States saw a 5,680% increase in telehealth claims, from privately insured patients, from May 2019 to May 2020. According to a survey from Doctor.com, 83% of patients expect to use virtual appointments even after COVID-19 dies down.
While there will always be a number of issues or conditions that do require an in-person visit, for the remaining conditions, the number of patients likely to choose a virtual appointment over going in-office are strong and keep rising.
Another big change in Healthcare marketing is the balance between non-personal promotion (NPP) and personal promotion budgeting and strategy. Previously, NPP budgets had taken a back seat to personal promotion, like drug sales-rep meetings or event booths and sponsorships.
While effective, personal promotion was a bit outdated and challenging even before COVID-19 entered the scene. Since COVID-19 forced a sort of evolution in the outdated practices of engaging with HCPs, NPP has increased rapidly. MM&M surveyed medical marketers recently, and 45% said they were increasing NPP, with 73% of those individuals citing COVID-19 as a significant factor for that increase.
This is by no means bad news—it’s actually a big step towards a more digitally evolved healthcare industry which benefits everyone involved. But it also presented a unique challenge for healthcare marketers… how do you make non-personal promotion feel personal? This question pushed marketers to work smarter and reevaluate how HCPs are targeted online and how they’re consuming media, which is something that will last long after COVID-19 ends.
In short, COVID-19 gave the healthcare industry, and thus healthcare marketing, a big push into the digital space, where it will remain long after COVID-19 dies off. Telemedicine, more non-personal promotion, and the ever-evolving digital solutions for healthcare, are here to stay. And, so is the responsibility of healthcare marketers to keep communicating the industry trends to both patients and healthcare providers, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Connect with us to learn more about healthcare marketing with Centro!
As a digital marketer, analyzing and unraveling data is a critical part of the game. Aside from defining precisely what you want to track, an increasingly important consideration is how often you plan to review the metrics you’re focused on. And guess what? It’s impossible - and unworkable - to simply throw a blanket over different metrics and treat them all with a single formula. Depending on the model and strategic objectives of a given business, marketing teams need to adopt their own distinct analytical cadences.
For some marketers, that means tracking key performance indicators on a week-over-week basis, as opposed to once per month, or even once a quarter.
The benefits of conducting weekly evaluations are many. Primary among them is that they help you pivot and adjust your campaigns more quickly and keep things on pace to meet monthly goals and benchmarks. Regular performance check-ins allow you to identify specific aspects of your ads - whether that is creative, messaging, or keywords - that are resonating with your audience and then iterate as required on those that clearly aren’t before they drain your budget. You may, for example, have just added a bunch of negative keywords to prevent your ads from showing up on irrelevant searches and in the process damaging your relevance score. Comparing campaign performance for the current week against that of the preceding week helps expose if those alterations had any impact. Similarly, if you increased bids in an attempt to improve your visibility on the search engine results pages, you can track how that affected key metrics including conversions, CPA, ROAS, and Profit. By gleaning this type of information in weekly cycles, you become empowered to design goals that reflect evolving capabilities. Even if you’re running a longer campaign with a slow release of promotional material over the course of a month - say, on social media and your blog - it’s still important to look at your campaign metrics on a weekly basis in order to stay agile and modify your tactics based on near real-time data.
In this blog post, we explore what effective weekly performance analysis looks like using dashboard features complete with real client data.
Overview:
Format: Single Value Tiles and Line Charts
Time Period: Week-Over-Week
Metrics: Impressions, Clicks, Cost, CPC, Conversions, Revenue, CPA, ROAS, RPC, Profit, Conversion Rate, AOV
In this widget, we’re presented with two different views of the same fundamental data points. On the right, we’ve got an easily digestible snapshot of the primary KPIs in aggregate, and then on the left, we can see those numbers broken down by day in a time series line graph. A marketing dashboard should be viewed as a steering wheel for optimum performance and this handy visualization helps you smoothly navigate the digital ecosystem of your industry. Within seconds, you can pinpoint any anomalies and major events and evaluate whether your campaigns are trending according to your forecasts.
We can see from the data showcased here that throughout the previous seven days our client generated revenue of a little over $294K compared to $220K the week prior. That’s a 30% to 35% increase, week-over-week, and something that certainly warrants a more exhaustive investigation into the cause.
A swift glance leftwards at the line graph tells us that the variance came from across the entire week, with one particularly meaningful spike on a single day. Armed with that insight, you can then switch over to more granular dashboards to really dig into what triggered the spike. By observing how your metrics fluctuate daily from a weekly perspective, you eliminate any overhasty conclusions from your analysis and avoid latching onto false signals that could easily result in a misallocation of funds.
Overview:
Format: Table
Time Period: Week-Over-Week
Metrics: Impressions, Clicks, Cost, Revenue, Conversions, Profit, ROAS, CPA, Conversion Rate, CTR, CPC, and RPC
As all digital marketers will attest, campaign performance typically varies widely by segment, whether that be by channel, publisher, or any other dimension you’re working with. Once you’ve learned about the state of your program at a very high-level from the charts above, you can then dive deeper into some selective elements.
We can see, for example, that the upturn in revenue was across both Google and Bing despite fewer impressions, a negligible difference in clicks, and incredibly, in the case of Google, far fewer conversions week-over-week. It’s also worth noting that Bing is doing a great job at complementing this particular client’s PPC strategy, bringing in the conversions at a much lower CPA and significantly higher ROAS than Google. Such insights are extremely valuable because they help you continuously optimize your initiatives, exploit previously unforeseen pockets of improvement, and reshape the strategy behind how you’re distributing your marketing dollars to reach your end-of-month - and yearly - objectives.
Overview:
Format: Stacked Bar Charts
Time Period: Week-Over-Week
Metrics: Spend and Revenue
Completing this dashboard look, we have a series of stacked bar charts depicting further granular visualizations of spend and revenue. With marketing campaigns continuing to grow in their complexity as more data, channels, and tools become available to advertisers, the main purpose of this widget is to help you simultaneously compare totals and determine which sharp changes at the item level are likely to have had the most influence on the movements we saw in the components above.
As marketers, we’re tasked with making crucial monetary decisions on behalf of the company every day. By tracking this type of information weekly, you can get a sense of whether a particular device, network, or advertising channel is performing better or more poorly than expected fairly quickly, ultimately empowering you to either pause or invest more heavily in ads where appropriate.
The cycle of experimenting, measuring, and optimizing is rigorous and never-ending. What automated weekly reporting does is provide the actionable insights you need to form better hypotheses and drive accelerated growth by connecting effort with outcome at both micro and macro levels.
Once you have that capability at your fingertips, you can pinpoint market trends like never before and outpace your competitors absolutely everywhere.
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Our universal reporting and analytics technology is instrumental in driving consistent growth for marketing teams large and small. See for yourself how powerful it can be.
2020 accelerated a slew of consumer trends at a pace our industry had never seen before. Now, we’re looking ahead at how these developments will further impact and create new opportunities for brands and advertisers.
In this webinar, Ryan Manchee and Noor Naseer share what they’re anticipating and excited about for the year ahead.
One of the most critical aspects of building a robust digital marketing strategy is engaging your audience in a consistent, meaningful way online. Social media platforms offer a huge opportunity to do this, yet it’s easy for your brand voice to get lost in the noise these channels generate if you don’t continually test and track your efforts.
Failing to optimize your social media strategy puts you on the path toward poor performance, wasted time, and misallocation of your marketing budget. If you’re serious about social media marketing, you need powerful reporting technology with built-in social media dashboard templates that empower users to continually improve performance.
A social media dashboard is a tool that marketers can use to track the KPIs from all social accounts to ensure strategies are being executed as intended. While you could create your own reports using spreadsheets, it’s much more effective to use a social media dashboard to automate the process. Dashboards pull data directly from your social platforms and summarize performance in easily digestible visualizations that update automatically based on the latest data.
If you’re interested in using social media dashboards to monitor marketing performance and optimize your campaigns, here are five tips for success.
Before investing in a dashboard tool, it’s important to first have a clear understanding of your social media marketing goals. Essentially, you need to be able to answer these questions:
Defining the exact make-up of your strategies before you implement them is paramount. This means investing in a dashboard reporting tool that includes all the integrations and key reporting metrics you need to monitor progress.
Most social media platforms have their own native reporting tools, which leads many marketers to (mistakenly) believe that they are sufficient enough to track performance. While your Facebook Insights Report and Twitter Page Report are valuable, you need to view your data holistically to understand social media performance overall.
When you use a reporting tool that creates social media dashboards, you can integrate performance data from every major platform, including:
If you have any additional social media performance data you want to add to your dashboard beyond these reports, you can import it using CSV files, or arrange for data to be regularly uploaded automatically.
Next, you want to ensure your dashboard reports include the critical data points you need to examine campaigns and work towards achieving your social media marketing goals. With that, there are likely certain KPIs that you’ll want to prioritize and view quickly at a glance. You could build your dashboard reports from scratch, yet the best strategy is to start with a premade template and then customize it to highlight your preferences. Templates include widgets dedicated to the most important performance indicators built right in, affording users the opportunity to rearrange them, switch them out, and build a custom dashboard to fit performance goals more accurately.
Some important KPIs to consider are:
Followers
It’s important to look at the total number of followers you have on each social platform and how they’ve grown over time. The great thing about dashboards is that you can see a combined total of followers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can understand, therefore, how your social media efforts are impacting your follower growth overall.
Likes and Shares
Tracking how many likes and shares your posts get isn’t just for social media influencers. Marketers can learn a lot about how their content is resonating with their target audience by how they react to it. Tracking your likes and shares across social media channels also tells you a great deal about how each platform is performing. Your number of likes ultimately gives you an idea of how many potential leads you can target on a platform.
Impressions and Reach
These metrics show you how many people could see your posts in their social feeds, regardless or not of whether they have interacted with them. Having high reach and impressions is important to gain visibility for your brand and increase potential engagement. If your impressions and reach are low, you may want to change your posting strategy or invest in boosting posts to garner increased visibility.
Engagement Rate
Having a large number of followers actually isn’t all that important if you’re not doing a good job of engaging with them. There are plenty of brands who build their following and post frequently but are never able to truly interact with their followers and nurture them as leads. That’s why it’s really important to monitor your engagement rate and make sure your marketing efforts work to improve it.
Engagement rate has a formula:
(Total social interactions [Likes, comments, shares, clicks, etc.] /Total number of followers) x 100
Essentially, if you get 1,000 social interactions a day with ten thousand followers, your engagement rate will be much lower than if you got the same number of interactions with only a few thousand followers.
If you’re investing in paid ads, other important metrics to include might be:
Your main dashboard can include reports on any KPIs you want through the use of customizable widgets.
Social media dashboards give you a quick, valuable overview of social media performance with insightful reports. The main benefit of dashboards, though, is the opportunity they offer to zoom in on different reports and break down your data to surface more actionable insights. With just a few clicks, you can change your reports to show performance for different time periods, or filter data by platform, content type, conversions, and more.
By digging into your dashboard reports, you can get a better understanding of how different factors are influencing performance. For example:
You can also examine other key metrics that can reveal opportunities for improvement and inform you where it’s best to invest your marketing efforts, namely:
Succeeding in social media marketing isn’t just about growing your followers, engaging them, and driving traffic back to your website. You want to find the people who are most interested in what your business has to offer, target them on the social media platforms they spend their time on, and optimize CTR and conversion behaviors to drive your marketing goals. Your social media dashboard provides all the data insights you need to achieve this.
If you want to get the most value out of your social media dashboards, then this is the most important tip you should follow. Social media dashboards aren’t just for checking how you’re doing - they’re designed to help you monitor performance and determine how your marketing campaigns are influencing key goals.
Once you understand how your social media engagement performs as a baseline, you can introduce different marketing initiatives to improve it. Dashboards help you monitor week-over-week engagement changes to see if your efforts are paying off.
Your dashboards can also be used to understand how your marketing campaigns help your brand perform compared to competitors in the social media space. You can monitor changes in factors such as:
Dashboards provide the most value when you utilize the actionable insights they expose to create refined, more optimized social media marketing campaigns. Intelligence gleaned from your dashboards can help ensure your efforts are always focused on the right platforms, the right audiences, and the right tactics to achieve your goals.
Social media marketing offers huge opportunities to engage your audience, build your brand image, generate leads, and drive conversions. However, you can end up wasting a lot of resources on social channels if you don’t monitor performance effectively.
Building dashboards is the best way to surface the insights you need to understand how your marketing efforts are driving key goals across your social outlets. Start by investing in a robust reporting platform, then follow the tips outlined in this article. You’ll end up with all the data you need to build a winning social media strategy.
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At Centro, our universal reporting and analytics dashboard empowers marketing teams to make better, data-driven decisions for campaigns. You can view metrics from programmatic, direct, search, social, and connected TV via one platform. Ready to learn more? Get in touch with us today!
Located in Oklahoma City, VI Marketing and Branding is a fully integrated marketing and branding firm that specializes in behavior change.
In order to maintain their status as leaders in the digital marketing industry in the Oklahoma City area, VI Marketing and Branding’s goal was to bring programmatic digital advertising in-house to build more transparent relationships with clients and increase digital revenue. Past third-party DSP partners had not allowed them to be proactive, transparent, or accountable with their clients. This was causing strains in their relationships and not allowing their business to grow.
Growth: 19 new team members in 2018
Mobility: 18 promotions agency-wide in 2018
Morale: Additional focus on work/life balance, recognition, training, and dedication to being at the forefront of the industry. The VI team using Basis has allowed for additional personal growth for their team members with unparalleled support from the Basis team.
Efficiency: Managing campaigns internally with Basis has allowed ad operations specialists to have more time for strategic optimizations and improving campaign performance rather than resolving delivery issues for clients and trafficking creative tags.
Business Development: The transparency of reporting and increased campaign metrics available in Basis has emboldened their clients to shift more dollars towards digital tactics.
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Renée Harriman, Vice President, Media, VI Marketing and Branding:
"Using Basis, the transparency of reporting and increased campaign metrics has emboldened our clients to shift more dollars towards digital tactics, namely paid search and programmatic video and display."
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The selection and implementation of a demand-side platform (DSP) is no small feat. If you've identified a need for one, it's time to consider other requirements, beyond the ability to buy programmatically, in order to support your growing organization. Hint: you need more than a DSP. The decision to in-housing programmatic buying requires the input and involvement of top stakeholders and teammates alike. Read our guide to learn more about the process and do more down the road.
The cannabis landscape continues to grow (pun intended!) with more holding companies, growers, and dispensaries being created each month. While there is a lot of opportunity within this vertical, keeping up with the latest regulations (whether that be at the state/federal level or within the cannabis lumascape) can be a full-time job.
Read on for a deep dive into cannabis, CBD, and the channels that can be included in a paid cannabis marketing plan.
In order to know what channels to tap into, we first need to understand the differences between cannabis and CBD. While both come from the same plant, cannabis sativa, the key difference is that cannabis is allowed to have THC levels of 0.4% or higher, while CBD must have a THC level less than 0.3%.
This subtle difference is the reason why cannabis brands look to programmatic and site direct partners for paid media opportunities.
There are scale implications when running both age-gaited and geo-exclusive campaigns, but programmatic advertising allows brands to access multiple inventory sources, including:
It also allows brands to layer on custom behavior personas, top-performing site lists, prescriptive contextual segments, hyper-local targeting, and hand-raisers who have begun their exploratory research.
We recommend adding site direct partner(s) to a media mix if the brand needs unique data, inventory, or has found a publisher who doesn’t offer programmatic inventory.
Some examples include:
The rest of the partners (local and premium sites, high impact creators, mobile-first partners, etc.) can be bought and accessed through a programmatic private marketplace deal (PMP). This allows cannabis brands access to premium inventory without having to pay a fixed CPM.
While there are other compliant inventory sources (ad networks and data providers, for example) there is more opportunity to create custom messaging and scale with programmatic and site direct partners.
As this the industry continues to expand, we expect other channels to pivot their restrictive guidelines in order to capture the growing ad revenue from holding companies and brands alike.
Want to know more about cannabis advertising? Check out Centro’s partnership with MyRemede and our performance with Pax Premium Vaporizers.
If you’re ready to start building your cannabis media mix, connect with us to learn more.
Marketers have been prioritizing the digital experience over traditional advertising channels for many years now, with most businesses today opting to pursue omnichannel marketing: the strategy of creating a seamless user experience across multiple channels simultaneously.
Omnichannel marketing drives all sorts of key business goals such as improving engagement and retention and driving more sales from your marketing investment. However, optimizing for digital experiences across disparate platforms and handling the massive amounts of data needed to achieve this is a huge challenge that limits these benefits for scores of marketers. That’s why many businesses are increasingly investing in a Marketing Intelligence Platform (MIP) as a consolidation solution.
The struggle to keep up with the demands of omnichannel marketing can manifest itself in countless ways across your business and marketing initiatives. Here are a few key signs that indicate a MIP is the answer to your problems:
If you’re having trouble keeping your data centralized and standardized, you’re among friends in the marketing space. There are so many different marketing channels, CRM systems, offline sales data, product information, and more to work with that most marketers struggle to keep up with data integration — or fail to achieve it entirely.
Ongoing data integration efforts can also sap huge amounts of time, so much so that you end up spending more time on integration processes than actually using them to implement better, more streamlined customer experiences.
A Marketing Intelligence Platform can help fix this problem by automating major aspects of data management. A strong MIP integrates with all your existing systems to gather relevant customer data, with features in place to help clean up your data by removing duplicate entries and organizing everything into uniform categories.
Getting all your data integrated and standardized in a centralized location using a MIP not only saves you time, but also increases your confidence in its accuracy. Being able to trust your data makes it easier to derive valuable insights and act on them to improve your campaigns.
Today’s customer journey is so complex that businesses can easily end up dealing with hundreds of touchpoints their audience takes on the path to purchase. Every marketer knows how important it is to track and understand audience experiences in the digital space, though doing so in any comprehensive way can be particularly challenging. Consumers interact with your business through numerous different channels and devices, not to mention third-party brands that can influence their purchase decisions.
If you feel like you don’t have a complete picture of the customer journey, you need a Marketing Intelligence Platform. If you’re missing key data points or data is difficult to access and analyze, you’re much more likely to make marketing decisions based on what you think the customer journey is like, as opposed to what you know.
Using an incomplete customer journey to make decisions for brand building, advertising, and audience communication can cost you significantly. When your customer journey isn’t optimized and your advertising message and targeting is even slightly off the mark, you can end up wasting a meaningful portion of your budget.
That’s what makes MIPs so essential for success. Better data management allows your business to avoid regular bottlenecks of gathering and interpreting data from different points throughout the customer journey.
Perhaps centralizing your data isn’t the problem. A great many businesses have more relevant consumer data than they know what to do with. They simply lack the resources, know-how, or capacity to derive actionable insights from it all.
If that sounds like your business, then a Marketing Intelligence Platform is the ideal solution. You need a tool that offers advanced analytical insights, but also helps you discover them within your own data. A top-of-the-line MIP harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze your data and discover valuable insights for you.
Not only that, but a MIP can summarize these insights into custom dashboards using data summaries and visuals to illustrate the most important insights for you. These dashboards are interactive, so you can get a closer look at data reports and adjust them using filters. They also update with the latest data insights in real-time, empowering you to interpret performance from large amounts of consumer and performance data with pinpoint accuracy.
Most businesses today work in industries where fast, regular changes to their marketing strategy can improve performance immensely and drive improved ROI. Depending on what tools you use to create data reports, it’s possible you’re just not getting insights quickly enough to make the optimizations you need to succeed. The challenge is even greater if you also have to wait on reports from different departments or your data analyst to expose and extract insights.
Marketing Intelligence Platforms with native dashboard features are the perfect solution for this. Data integrations combined with dynamic visualizations will help you easily keep up with all the important aspects of your marketing initiatives while simultaneously lessening your reliance on disparate teams to report on or analyze your data sets.
MIP dashboards also make it quick and easy to share performance reports with different departments and individuals within your company. Compare that to creating reports manually, where you have to handle data consolidation, preparation, analysis and presentation before anyone can see any insights. MIPs automate each of these steps so you can focus on the most important task: taking action to optimize your marketing campaigns.
The digital marketing landscape has changed massively in recent years. Now there are so many relevant channels to target that even enterprise businesses with substantial marketing budgets need to be careful how they allocate it.
If marketing competition in your industry has intensified and you’re struggling to keep up, inefficiencies in budget allocation could be to blame. Even minor oversights and inaccuracies in execution on different marketing channels or campaigns can make it very difficult to stay apace with competitor tactics.
A Marketing Intelligence Platform comes with many benefits that ensure you’re spending your budget effectively. The key to all of it is unified data management. Analyzing data from your entire suite of marketing tools combined with relevant product and business data will empower you to better understand what campaigns and customer segments are driving the most ROI. Customized reports can also be utilized to determine how increases in budget allocation can influence crucial marketing goals like revenue and retention.
Real-time reports also allow you to quickly understand how changes in the competitive landscape are affecting your campaigns. Armed with this knowledge, you can make swift and relevant changes to your investment strategy to improve efficiency and stay ahead.
94% of marketers and 90% of agencies say that “personalization of the web experience is critical to current and future success.” You know that personalization is important, but like many fellow marketers, you probably struggle to implement it at scale. Having a consistent and pertinent customer experience across channels and devices is a heavy task to take on.
MIPs can address this challenge in numerous ways, primarily by helping you understand behavioral patterns across platforms. Comprehensive data reports can, for example, make it possible to see how individuals who first engaged with your brand through Google went on to convert through Facebook. Exposing the complete picture of all audience touchpoints and behaviors across your program will make it much easier to segment audiences and optimize personalization initiatives at scale.
If you run an enterprise-level marketing program, there are likely many key players who work on your campaigns and drive performance, within and without the marketing department. While team leaders may understand what areas need to be focused on to improve performance, it can be challenging to keep all relevant players up-to-date on what to prioritize.
If your business struggles with this problem, a Marketing Intelligence Platform can help. Instead of keeping key data insights in the hands of analysts and team leaders, dashboards help you share them with all relevant team players. The same dashboard reports can be shared across devices and viewed by anyone who could benefit from understanding how different initiatives impact program performance. Including data from sales, marketing, and other relevant departments can help individuals from different teams understand how their work plays a role in overall performance.
Anyone can get a closer look at customized reports to see how their performance compares to your business objectives. The ongoing feedback these dashboards provide can also help guide their focus towards initiatives that can further key business goals.
The year 2020 created a lot of uncertainty for businesses, but it did make one thing very clear: the focus on digital experiences is more important now than ever. Businesses that haven’t started investing in omnichannel need to get started, while those that have need to optimize their efforts for success.
With so many business factors influencing marketing performance, it can be difficult to understand where your inefficiencies are. However, if any of the telltale signs in this post resonated with you, then a Marketing Intelligence Platform is a smart investment you need to stay ahead of the competition in today’s digital marketing world.
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time-consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!
IAB 2021 Marketplace Outlook [:09]
The IAB’s final impact study of 2020 showcases that buyers are optimistic about 2021 and expect a 6% overall increase in their 2021 budget (versus estimated actual spend in 2020). However, they have concerns about: 1) Preparing for a cookie-less future / loss of identifiers, 2) the need for 1st party data, and 3) cross-platform measurement solutions.
This Year, Next Year: Global 2020 End-of-Year Forecast Report from GroupM [:09]
Despite the grim realities of a global economy that will be the worst since the Great Depression, advertising weathered the storm relatively well and will end up at declining by “only” 5.8% on an underlying basis (excluding-U.S. political advertising).
This annual report examines the eight largest markets—the U.S., China, Japan, the U.K., Germany, France, South Korea and Canada, and predicts that the global advertising market for 2021 will see 12.3% growth.
8 Marketing Trends to Watch For in 2021 as Aftereffects of a Volatile Year Linger [:14]
While 2020 is *finally* over, it’s set to be another volatile year for marketers. One item which remains top priority is first-party data. As cookies and mainstay methods of in-app tracking change, developing the personal connection with consumers will become essential. While there is no shortage of options in picking partners, there will be fresh new opportunities with companies like TikTok, Walmart, Target, Walgreens and Kroger.
The Jig Is Up : The End of the Identity Workaround [:04]
Just because there are workarounds to online ad restrictions doesn’t mean they should be taken. Both Google and Apple are weeding them out in the name of customer privacy. Most post-cookie solutions have been in other forms of ID-based tracking like device fingerprinting. The biggest risk in pursuing some of the alternatives that have come out are the potential reputational and ethical risks that come along with it.
2020 Was All About Digital Identity – And Expect the Same in 2021 [:03]
With 2021–and massive change–on the horizon for digital identity, there's a lot of scrambling, with some marketers proactively preparing for the changes, others putting together plans, and some still trying to piece together what is changing and how it may impact their advertising.
What's the Fate of Location Intelligence in 2021? [:03]
Now that we’ve said goodbye to the dumpster fire that was 2020, it’s time to project what’s to come in the newly arrived year of 2021. Rather than rattle off a list of projected happenings, Street Fight zeroes in on one area that’s central to their coverage: location data.
The Year in TV: A Major Shift to Streaming [:07]
2020 was nothing short of transformational. Major media companies had to adapt to overcome huge problems from a content development and distribution standpoint across the board, including the elimination of sports, the shutdown of production, and originals being pushed back.
Those that were able to adapt successfully saw massive gains in streaming due to more at-home media consumption, solid growth in ad-funded video on demand (AVOD) as consumers looked to cut or minimize extra costs, and an acceleration of innovations with tech integrations.
Global OTT Subs To Grow 65%, to 1.9B, by End of 2025 [:01]
Growth will be driven mainly by broadcasters’ turning to streaming services to compete with Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and other online video giants. Streaming services need to keep their offerings competitive to retain subscribers.
In-game Advertising Is on the Up — Here’s How it Can Support Your Brand [:04]
Video games have become an important stage for players to keep in touch, interact, and celebrate creativity. While games have always had a social element, today’s leading titles are emerging as the “third place,”or a social environment that people turn to outside of home and work, and a great place to consider exposing consumers to brands.
How Does the eCommerce Experience in China Differ from the West? [:08]
Home to the world’s largest ecommerce market, two of the world’s largest online retailers (JD.com and Alibaba), and more than 900 million internet users, marketing and selling in China is a tantalizing prospect for any western ecommerce company.
But the ecommerce landscape in China, while it has its similarities to the west, is also a distinctive one, with a different set of consumer expectations, different trends, and different interactions with brands. Understanding these differences is the first step towards building a successful strategy for the Chinese market, and for learning what trends could shift west and impact advertising.