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Centro was recently chosen by AdExchanger as one of The 2020 Programmatic Power Players. AdExchanger provides an authoritative and informed voice trusted by marketers and advertisers. They created this list of the best agencies, tech providers and partners in programmatic advertising by choosing from hundreds of submissions received from across the globe. AdExchanger’s editors evaluated entries based on strength and breadth of offerings, documented case studies and client references.
Here is why Centro was recognized:
Services & Tech
What are some of the qualities that cemented Centro as a Programmatic Power Player? We have unique synchronicity of programmatic advertising services and expertise in omnichannel digital media operations built on the media workflow automation technology of Basis. While most programmatic providers offer a single point solution of either technology or services—Centro offers a bespoke, blended model of technology and services across all digital channels. This approach enables a holistic view of digital spending and performance across channels and tactics, resulting in workflow efficiencies, expedited optimization and enhanced performance.
Centro’s media services team is powered by our proprietary technology, Basis—an automated digital media platform that addresses direct buying, programmatic, connected TV (CTV), search, and social via a single interface. Our team uses Basis on behalf of our clients, to plan, activate, and manage campaigns. Basis facilitates automation that allows our media professionals to focus on the high-value strategic aspects of campaign activation such as bidding strategies, optimization, and cross-channel performance.
Flexibility
Another differentiator of Centro is the flexibility we offer clients and the wide variety of service options to choose from—managed service, path to self-service, or self-service. Agencies and brands alike can utilize Centro to extend the bench strength and capabilities of their teams; whether clients are staffing up for new business, adding to their offering, or needing more digital media strategy and buying support, Centro can help. Our team of digital media strategists, ad operations experts, performance analysts, and search and social specialists plan, execute, and optimize, across all channels and tactics, in partnership with clients. We implement the right solution for clients’ specific needs and provide ongoing flexibility along the way.
Centro’s newest service option enables a seamless transition to bring programmatic and digital media capabilities in-house. Through this offering, we begin the engagement as managed service, with our team handling the entire lifecycle of the campaigns. In using Basis, clients have full transparency of Centro’s planning approach, optimization strategy, performance and overall results. We take the lead, while the client observes and learns. If interested, and the time is right for their business, clients can take over and in-house their media—or they can continue leaning on the Centro team to support their needs. The top advantages of this solution are the campaign data and performance results that are stored within the client’s instance of Basis. Therefore, if the long-term preference is to in-house media, it is a turnkey process for clients to take control.
The Centro team is committed to delivering service, results, and high levels of client satisfaction. We create Raving Fans through extraordinary efforts by our team to exceed the expectations of our clients. Our service embodies a combination of great service and outstanding results powered by technology and top-rated talent.
Connect with us to learn more about Centro’s technology and service offering.
For many, advertising on social media platforms is comparable to trying to solve a puzzle that constantly rearranges its pieces. Whether it is the multitude of different campaign objectives, countless targeting options, or endless amounts of customizable creative available—running an effective social media advertising campaign on any platform can be daunting, to say the least.
While all the different levers available to advertisers ensure that no two campaigns will ever be the same, it's important to understand each platform’s algorithm and set-up campaigns that coexist with the on-going machine learning optimization that exists within each of them. This understanding will boost your confidence, and help you manage multiple social media initiatives simultaneously, and more effectively. Review our three key points to better understand and optimize your social media advertising, below:
Social media platforms have relied on user engagement since their inception. This is now more important than ever before, with advertising revenue accounting for a significant portion of each popular social site’s bottom line. To solve for this and meet business goals, social platforms have taken information from billions of users and created a digitized proprietary “brain” (i.e. algorithm) in order to sort what they show users, based on popularity and relevance.
Naturally, these algorithms have migrated over to benefit advertisers as well. Each social platform utilizes its algorithm to determine which ads to show to which users via machine learning, in order to ensure advertisers that their ads are being served in real-time to the most valuable user.
While each platform’s algorithm is slightly different, common variables used in machine learning outputs include automating and maximizing each advertiser's bid amount in real-time, understanding the effective rate they'll have to pay in an auction in order to win an impression, and factoring in the perceived value of each ad to the end-user. This is real-time, auction-based bidding in a nutshell!
Now that we have a working understanding of social algorithms under our belt, the real work begins. It’s imperative that advertisers ensure their budgets, bids, and KPIs are clear and fully fleshed out, prior to launching any social campaign. Aside from that, given what we know about the algorithm and the signals it uses to make decisions, the best way for advertisers to get the most out of their social media advertising is to:
1) Create ads that are relevant and engaging.
2) Ensure campaigns are set-up to optimize the desired business outcome.
3) Take advantage of automated features within each social media buying platform to maximize the impact of its algorithm.
By working with machine learning (and doing these three things), you ensure that your campaign is set-up for success.
Finally, some quick and helpful hints to optimize your social media advertising:
Connect with us to learn more about social media advertising with Centro.
According to Treasure Data’s State of the Customer Journey report, 47% of marketers say that silos are their biggest problem when it comes to gaining insights from data.
A further 20% reveal they don’t even have the knowledge or capacity to extract insights from their data. Both of these issues can be solved by prioritizing effective data management to break silos down and expose valuable insights. Here’s everything you need to know about what data silos are, how they come to be, their impact on marketing, and how to get rid of them.
A data silo is a group of organizational data available to one person or internal team that exists in isolation. While data silos typically create problems for IT, administration, HR, sales, and other departments, nobody is more acutely affected than those in marketing. Data silos make it impossible to have a transparent view of performance and will inevitably create efficiency issues, make collaboration increasingly difficult, and prevent key insights from surfacing that could inform revenue generation opportunities.
Marketing teams are facing a new, very modern challenge as siloed data begins to seriously hinder their capacity to execute effective analyses. That’s because key developments in the field over the past few years have made silos more prominent and destructive than ever before. Here’s why:
More marketing channels and platforms
Today, marketing channels aren’t as simple as online and offline. Now there’s television, radio, mail, and newspapers, all paired with a growing number of digital channels including search, social media, email, messaging, apps, display, and more.
There are also more platforms that allow marketers to reach niche audiences, such as emerging social media giants like Snapchat and TikTok. YouTube has also evolved into a relevant search engine for marketers to target. Each of these platforms offers its own analytics capabilities, siloing marketing performance data more voluminously.
More relevant data
With more platforms comes more relevant audience data marketers can use to improve targeting and campaign optimization. Audience demographics, behavioral insights, and interests from social media and search can inform campaign targeting across disparate channels. Marketers can get a broader picture of audience demographics and habits from third-party data platforms. There’s also a new stream of location data derived from mobile and wearable devices. These new data sources are creating costly silos that didn’t exist even a decade ago.
More tools to manage all of the above
According to Scott Brinker’s MarTech Landscape Supergraphic, the number of marketing tools available has grown from 150 as of 2011 to 8,000 in 2020:
The growth in marketing channels has called for an increase in the number of tools needed to manage them and monitor performance. Rather than helping aggregate marketing data, more tools often just create more silos.
Many companies end up with siloed data by accident. However, few seem in a hurry to fix the issue. This is likely because they don’t fully understand the hugely negative impact data silos have.
1. Wasted time
Data silos don’t completely prevent employees from accessing different data sets, they just make it challenging to do so. Teams can waste countless hours analyzing data only to realize later they need additional information from another analytics source. Then they have to find where the data is located, request access to it, wait for it to arrive, then start analysis again. There’s also the unhappy and lengthy task of stitching different reports together. When siloed data sets need to be integrated, your team likely ends up spending the majority of their time on consolidation instead of tracking performance and optimizing strategy.
2. An incomplete view of performance data
With a multi-channel marketing strategy, you have numerous siloed analytics tools offering relevant performance insights, such as Facebook Analytics, Google Analytics, Bing Analytics, call tracking software, email marketing analytics, etc. This makes it near impossible to get a comprehensive view of how your campaigns work together to reach your marketing goals. Once you’re able to integrate all data and performance analytics, you become empowered to expose new opportunities to drive efficiency, growth, and revenue.
3. Lower data quality and confidence
It’s not uncommon for teams to use different tools and strategies to store and analyze data. The longer data is siloed this way, the more inconsistent and potentially inaccurate it will become. People working on independent marketing initiatives may miss important data streams or accidentally consolidate similar data categories that should remain separate. Some may also end up working with older versions of the same data. Poor data quality can lead to very different analyses, which decreases everyone’s confidence in the accuracy of reporting.
4. Wasted resources
The growing amount of marketing channels and relevant audience data has caused most marketers to expand their MarTech stack to manage data streams, analyze them, and implement their marketing strategies. This means spending more money, time, and resources on different technologies. Storing all your marketing data in a centralized location and analyzing it from there saves significant resources that were necessary when data was siloed.
5. Limited cross-team collaboration
Data silos create difficulties for teams needing to collaborate. Each internal organization is forced to work with their own data to derive their own insights to make decisions. This makes it tough for individuals to share their vision and goals. Rather than working together, teams often miscommunicate and can end up working in competition to reach business goals.
Once you understand the negative impact data silos have on your business, you’re ready to investigate different approaches to fix the problem. Here are some strategies you can use to start integrating your data.
1. Change your company culture
Breaking down silos isn’t just about having systems in place to aggregate data. You also need understanding and buy-in from people who use data at all levels of your business. Even if you use a data management platform, it’s easy for team members to create silos again if the company culture doesn’t change.
When addressing the issue, start by communicating why data silos are so damaging to your marketing initiatives. Make your goal to move marketing data to a single source of truth clear to employees. Leaders can also take steps to encourage the kind of cross-platform performance analyses that are only possible with consolidated data.
2. Invest in a holistic third-party platform
As opposed to looking for solutions to help you integrate data on your own servers, you can invest in a third-party platform to manage it all. Intelligent platforms like Basis can help to unify all your business data in one place, including from Facebook, Google, Bing, your call center platform, offline data sources, and other channels.
What sets our software apart from other data management solutions is that it also has native analysis features. So not only can users access marketing data from a centralized location, they can use the same tool to uncover insights, create visuals and reports, and share these with internal teams. When everyone uses the same platform to store data and create reports, it’s easy to update analyses based on the latest insights, add in new relevant streams of data when necessary, and collaborate effectively.
3. Set data governance standards
Once you centralize your data, it’s a good time to set governance standards to ensure it’s used properly to avoid creating new silos. This is easy enough to do. Employees may use some data and analysis features but don’t necessarily need access to all your marketing data. You can use your software to set up account levels and permissions to grant levels of access to different employees. It’s also possible to put rules in place for how employees can use and analyze data. Otherwise, you’re likely to get instances of employees exporting data to spreadsheets for analysis, creating new silos again.
The customer journey is becoming more complex year after year, with new touchpoints online and offline that influence decision-making. This provides a wealth of marketing data to go along with relevant operational and sales data you can use to optimize all sorts of processes. Harnessing a wide variety of data types from different sources means that database management is now a top priority for businesses small and large. The negative impact of data silos will only grow if leaders continue to ignore this need.
Many marketing experts predict the retail industry will be forever transformed by the Coronavirus pandemic. While some retailers have struggled to survive and store closures are on record pace, others have embraced new business models designed to cater to consumer demand for convenient shopping, shipping, and return methods.
eCommerce sales, for example, are expected to jump more than 35% this year, according to eMarketer. This shift in fulfillment has forced many retailers to get creative in order to keep revenue coming in because of the differences in building awareness for new products online, pressure on supply lines to meet demand, and increased costs associated with processing online orders.
In order to source sales in new ways and meet consumers where they are spending their time, retail marketers are turning to an array of digital advertising programs. By following these digital strategy tips, retailers can build brand awareness, create long-term customer value, and drive immediate sales.
Share of voice is crucial in retail marketing. It’s important to ensure you’re reaching your target customers with enough touchpoints to influence purchase consideration and sales. For maximum impact, consider a well-rounded digital media mix that takes advantage of programmatic mobile and display, high-impact units, paid search and paid social.
This level of omnichannel marketing will ensure an optimum amount of frequency to encourage purchases. Build out well-rounded, full-funnel programs that are optimized to guide the purchase journey with cross-device and cross-channel targeting.
The most powerful tool any retail marketer has available to them is their own first-party data. Knowing what your core, high-value customer looks like, and using that data to nurture sales can create incredible impact. For example, you could target a specific set of previous buyers who have not visited your store or website recently and show them a special offer based on their past purchase habits.
You can also use that data to build a new prospecting audience modeled off of those who have purchased specific items in the past. When combined with additional data points (such as Facebook data showing what products people are likely to be interested in, or third-party data that captures people who have recently visited a competitive store or website), you can effectively reach new audiences with your message.
One challenge retail marketers sometimes face is tying ad engagements and performance to product sales—especially when products are sold offline. Often, the data needed to connect those dots is siloed or disparate. Ecommerce marketplaces like Walmart, Amazon, and Instacart help facilitate closed-loop sales measurement because the same company is running the ad and selling the product advertised.
Retailers who operate their own brick and mortar shops must also look for ways to integrate web and mobile campaign analytics with online and offline sales data. If a significant amount of your digital media is run across Facebook, for example, you can look to integrate in-store POS data into their Attribution tool to credit sales based on media exposure touchpoints.
Today’s retail consumer expects relevant, personalized product recommendations. In order to provide that, focus on opportunities that are designed to know what product a person is interested in, and immediately direct them into a frictionless, mobile shopping experience that makes it convenient to buy.
Shoppable ads, for example, bring together a catalog of product information and user data in order to dynamically show an individual items they are likely to be in the market for, based on which products they have been browsing online.
These types of ad programs are commonly found on social platforms like Facebook or Snapchat but can also be implemented programmatically on display and mobile devices, or on the Google Search Network.
Alternatively, if your brand or product needs additional awareness, consider interactive, high-impact, or video ad units that will leave lasting impressions for potential customers—but be sure to align the format and messaging with the audience you are targeting.
Ultimately, it’s important to remember that retail consumers have a lot of product and shopping options available to them today. Whether your products are sold in-store on online, keep the customer experience in mind in order to build better media plans and shopping experiences.
Connect with us to learn more about retail marketing with Centro.
The secret is out! Social media advertising is a highly effective digital media partner for top-performing brands across the globe. EMarketer shares that 43% of small businesses report social media advertising as the channel that helps them achieve their marketing goals over other digital and traditional means of advertising.
That said there isn’t a “one size fits all” strategy that leads to an effective social media campaign. Rather, here are three of the top considerations we use at Centro to create effective and efficient media strategies for our clients:
“There is no significant correlation between click-through rate and any Nielsen Brand Effect metrics” according to a study led by Facebook and Nielsen.
As media has evolved in the past decade, so have the ways we are able to measure performance. What was once only trackable through impressions and clicks can now be connected back to deeper signals like conversions or brand lift—allowing advertisers to understand more about the quality of audiences they are reaching with their ads.
The most successful campaigns are those that consider a business’ core objectives to guide the choice of their key performance indicator instead of prioritizing site traffic and impression delivery as those signals. Rather than optimize to a click—brand awareness, messenger engagement, lead generation, and conversion campaigns pulling in signals from your website, your app, and even offline data can paint a much more complete picture of success.
Many of these goals can be met across one of all social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit or TikTok. The right platform for the job depends on the audience you are trying to reach.
You should know that when investing in these strategies on certain platforms, you may see a high cost per click and cost per impression result. The reason is the media buy is focused on generating an efficient cost per “action” – and you could end up paying more per click or impression in order to get an ad in front of the highest quality audiences that are going to drive that deeper impact to business objectives.
Audience data is a major conversation in the digital space as consumers and platforms prioritize privacy and control of personal information. Over the years we’ve seen these trends transpire in the form of government-led policy (like GDPR or CCPA) or platform capability updates (Chrome’s cookie updates, or Facebook’s limit of targeting options for housing, employment, and credit advertisers).
While it’s necessary to communicate how you are collecting your audience’s data, and to give them the option to have a say in how it is used—advertisers should also look to use as many sources of data as possible to help identify the most relevant audiences and personalize ad messaging to them.
Here are some tips to get started:
Advertisers can no longer expect one good commercial blasted across TV, programmatic video, and paid social to create a decent return on investment. The market is cluttered, and audiences are being inundated with more ads than ever before. In this environment, ads need to stop the scroll and command the audience’s attention.
On social, most active users browse the platforms via a mobile device as opposed to on desktop/other devices (with the exception of LinkedIn). This means that the following mobile best practices will get you ahead:
Use these core principles to lay the framework upon which you’ll build your own effective paid social advertising strategy. Remember: there is no cookie-cutter approach!
To learn more about social media advertising with Centro, check out our managed service solutions.
It’s safe to say that 2020 has been a year like no other in modern times. Every industry has been affected by the events that have unfolded, and search engine marketers have had to be more nimble than ever before in adapting their strategies. While it looks like returning to some degree of normality might be a possibility in the months ahead, there’s no reason to assume SEM will ever go back to business as usual.
Here are nine SEM trends you need to know when planning your program for 2021.
2020 saw a massive decrease in advertising investment as businesses in different industries faced shutdowns and even financial crises due to a lack of customers. Since advertising investment overall has been on an upward trend for years, most people working with Google Ads expect the spending levels to simply bounce back in 2021.
That said, as the pandemic continues and the economic fallout of it is likely to extend for years, it’s hard to really say how ad spend will change in 2021. According to IAB’s latest survey of media buyers, only 9% feel very clear about their ad budget outlook for 2021, while 70% either have ballpark estimates or no clarity at all:
Marketers preparing for 2021 should have their budgets ready, and if investments don’t evolve as expected, then rest easy knowing it will be cheaper and easier to bid for top ad spots in search results.
There have been many changes to YouTube’s advertising options that will make it more valuable to search engine marketers in 2021. Google Ads has recently introduced new metrics to improve ad optimization on YouTube, including engaged-view conversions (EVCs) and view-through conversions (VTCs). They also brought in audio ads for YouTube, designed to connect brands with audiences that listen to music on YouTube.
Advanced contextual targeting is another feature they’re now using to drive mass reach for advertisers in specific contexts. Large brands are already starting to make the most out of YouTube’s reach and relevant content to meet their business goals. New targeting, ad types, and optimization features like these are sure to make YouTube particularly appealing for advertisers in 2021.
Google’s efforts to minimize how much advertisers can access and analyze data through the platform have been trending for a while now, and 2021 is expected to be no different. Google Ads regularly introduces new machine learning-powered features designed to automate insights, which typically presents challenges for advanced advertisers who want to construct their own analyses.
Since the majority of Google advertisers don’t have the experience or expertise to do this, it’s likely the trend towards automating insights will continue as Google rolls out more features. The important thing to remember in 2021 is that machine learning is helpful, and there’s still a lot you can do to customize and guide automated bidding. With so many relevant data points available that can influence bidding decisions, some degree of automation is necessary in order to keep up with it all.
The plethora of challenges advertisers now face managing their campaigns on Google Ads could encourage many to invest more in non-Google SEM options to deliver the results they want. While Google still remains the biggest search engine in the market by a considerable distance, using other options will become more appealing as it continues to control what advertisers can or can’t do on the platform.
This is especially true as other search engines like Bing have made it very easy to import campaigns from Google Ads so marketers don’t need to start from scratch. Investing in non-Google SEM can be extremely worthwhile and empower advertisers with the control they need to reach the right audiences and drive more conversions at a better cost-per-click.
Google recently introduced a new, more intelligent Google Analytics using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and better cross-platform integrations to help brands surface more critical insights into marketing performance. GA can detect data trends like an increase in demand for certain products or even future actions your customers may make. Here’s what a churn probability report looks like in the new GA:
These insights are incredibly useful for optimizing campaigns and bid adjustments to maximize PPC revenue. Smart marketers will use GA to their full advantage to improve SEM in 2021.
Google Shopping Ads are a powerful solution to bring in new customers to your business. According to Smart Insights, Shopping Ads make up 76.4% of retail search ad spend. The massive increase in online shopping in 2020 means Shopping Ads now represent an even bigger opportunity for retailers to drive breakthrough ROI.
This alone is reason enough for the competition to surge as more marketing organizations start investing in this ad type. However, that’s just the first half of the story. In April 2020, Google officially opened up Shopping Ads to all businesses for free. Before this, you had to pay to display this kind of ad. Now, Google is allowing businesses to compete for Shopping Ad space just like they do with other ad campaigns. It’s safe to say, then, that we can expect an intensification of competition for Shopping Ads in 2021.
In recent years, platforms like Google and Facebook have made massive walled gardens of data, making it difficult for marketers to access and utilize the audience data they need. This has led to an increased interest in gathering and managing data independently. While this wasn’t easy to do before, it’s become even more complicated now that global privacy policies are restricting third-party cookies across browsers.
There are no longer any easy solutions to help businesses capture and manage their own audience data. Forward-thinking marketers that focus on developing their own data strategy will be setting themselves up for success in 2021 and beyond. While the cookie is dead, there are other ways to monitor how your audience interacts with your business online, such as device fingerprinting.
In today’s advertising world, it’s not just targeting and bidding that you can optimize using artificial intelligence, but also your ads themselves. Responsive search ads (RSAs) are a type of ad that allows Google AI to optimize your headlines, ad description, and call-to-action to make them more relevant to the search query and audience. While this feature has been around since 2019, enough businesses have now tried RSAs to confirm they work very well at improving cost per click, cost per conversion, and conversion rates across the board.
Google Ads has introduced many automation features that the majority of marketers dislike, but RSAs are certainly not one of them. Their ability to craft and deliver effective messaging to searchers at exactly the right time will make them a staple ad-type for campaigns in 2021 and beyond.
It has long been an important strategy in PPC advertising to choose keywords and create ads that speak to the original intent of your audience. People interested in different products or services, or who are at different stages of the sales funnel, shouldn’t be targeted with the same message. While smart marketers are constantly working on segmenting to achieve this goal, it’s about to get much easier in 2021.
That’s because Google recently launched a new custom audiences solution. This brings custom affinity and custom intent audiences together for better segmentation and targeting. When creating custom audiences, you can now easily set targeting to:
This makes it much easier to target and optimize your ads for people in the awareness, interest, decision, and action stages of the sales funnel.
It’s difficult to know for sure what’s going to happen in 2021, especially after such a strange year in 2020. Businesses investing in SEM need to pay close attention to how changes in the economy, their communities, and industries can impact their success. That said, there are some trends in new technologies and marketing strategies that businesses can expect to be important moving forward. Be sure to take advantage of the things you know for certain and keep an eye out for new changes in a year that’s bound to be much better than the last.
While few brands remain untouched by the impacts of COVID, healthcare marketers have been uniquely challenged to repeatedly adapt their digital strategies over the course of 2020.
At Basis, we’ve tapped into our years of experience in the healthcare vertical to support our clients through strategic shifts in messaging, campaign goals, and investment strategies. No two initiatives are the same, but a few key channels and ad variations can position any brand as a trusted voice in the healthcare conversation.
If you’re working with a budget that can support multiple channels, be discerning about maximizing that channel’s key offering, and play to its strengths. Here are a few ideas:
Maintain an evergreen brand presence with paid search. If any channel should be keeping the lights on all year round, it’s this one. Ensure that anyone searching for the brand or related services will be able to find yours.
Search learnings can also be invaluable. Keyword volume can tell you when people are most likely to be looking for certain content. For example—is January really the best time to run a weight loss campaign, or do people start looking for dieting tips in December? Spoiler Alert: Start that campaign in December!
Search traffic can also be a valuable tool for audience insights, showing you the age, gender, and interests of your most engaged audience(s).
Consider social—specifically Facebook—to increase your scale with lookalike audiences. CRM data and lookalike modeling can be especially difficult to maneuver in the healthcare space, where privacy is even more paramount. Facebook can be an incredible asset in that sense, allowing you to easily create lookalike audiences based on engagement with the landing page or ad variants.
Bolster your social learnings by including at least 3-5 variants of each creative. This doesn’t have to mean a significantly higher lift in creative production – instead, consider one image with a few different headlines, or a single headline with a few different images.
Once you’ve got a strong set of ads, let Facebook test them in every nook and cranny of their network – Instagram, Messenger, Stories, Marketplace – to find out which part of the platform your audience is most engaged.
Reach niche audiences at scale with Programmatic Display and Native. By partnering with leading healthcare data partners like Crossix, Adstra, and Pulsepoint, Basis can implement behavioral targeting for your most niche audiences with Basis DSP. We’re talking segments for people with “grass allergies” or “osteoporosis of the knee”–incredible specificity!
All of Basis' data partners are entirely CCPA and HIPAA compliant, and trusted leaders in the audience data ecosystem. Learn more about our partnership with Adstra here!
Access to a wide range of audiences means you can more confidently test out-of-the-box audiences, and pivot quickly based on performance. For example:
Oh, and remember that lookalike audience targeting we mentioned before? That can also be done programmatically, using your landing page!
Now that you’ve got a few channels in the mix, make sure they’re working together. Ask your media strategist to download a list of top-performing keywords from your Search campaign and use them to identify relevant content for your programmatic buy. If a specific behavioral segment is delivering the best performance on your Display campaign, consider testing similar interests on Facebook.
Our most successful clients don’t have the magic touch when it comes to finding the right words—they test and learn! There are so many cost-efficient and low-risk ways to test copy and imagery without going all the way back to the drawing board. Start by running a few versions of your headline or sub-copy and go from there.
Once you’ve started to gain an understanding of which ad formats resonate most with your audience, become an active participant in the conversation by swapping content regularly.
Many brands positioned themselves as thought-leaders in April, May, and June, informing their audiences of COVID regulations and news. Over the summer, they pivoted that messaging to begin encouraging patients to keep their regular appointments, advertising the health and safety precautions they’d instated to inspire confidence in the minds of patients and families.
Again, the best brands don’t get lucky by writing one headline that works all year long – they pay attention and promote consistently relevant, trustworthy content.
Want to learn more about how Basis can help take your healthcare initiative to the next level? Get in touch!
Subset Media, formerly known as Variant, is different by design. As an end-to-end digital agency, Subset specializes in creative and media services and ties them together with the thread of meaningful human connection. To Subset, “meaningful human connection” is more than a marketing strategy—their modern business model is founded on making a positive social impact and the agency donates hours, media, and money to community initiatives.
After founding and subsequently selling his first media company, Matt Parker set out to build something different in the media world—an agency whose margins yield social good. He put together a team of passionate media and creative experts, but Matt needed a platform that could enable Subset to live up to their potential and make the impact they were capable of.
Subset had specific needs for their future digital ad tech:
Basis has enabled Subset's team to get out of the weeds and deliver on those meaningful human connections. “Basis has literally everything. We have third-party data lists, a massive amount of different vendors, private marketplace deals, and a ton of partnerships that are available from day one. We don’t have multiple ad tech vendors—it’s all in Basis.”
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Matt Parker, Founder, Subset Media:
"Basis was just a complete system. It was easy to use. At the time, all I wanted to do was put a piece of software in front of team and have them say, ‘we love it.’ Fortunately, we didn’t to go through tons of options to figure out that Basis was a great fit for us."
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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!
The Evolution of Global Advertising Spend (1980-2020) [:04]
As consumer behavior has changed over the last 40 years, advertisers have constantly adapted their media strategies. These adaptations have included shifting their advertising spend across the media landscape. No big surprises, but with the decline of print, and then more recently TV, digital has definitely won out. This article visually showcases that massive transformation.
Streaming Will Soar in 2021 and The Retail Landscape Will Never Be the Same [:04]
Normal doesn’t exist anymore and the shifts that will happen in 2021 are about more than COVID-19. The trends for 2021 won’t be a revision or edited version of 2020 but instead worthy of a fresh new take. With everything going online due to the pandemic, the world of brands being born & thriving has changed. Take a deeper look to learn what these changes are predicted to be.
Audience Isn’t the Only Solution to CTV’s Transparency Issues [:04]
The allure of CTV advertising is that it marries the promise of granular targeting (via programmatic digital advertising) with the engaging power of TV. Programmatic advertising in CTV is the future, but getting there remains a challenge with the complex, fragmented ecosystem which has created confusion about the inventory available, how ads can be targeted, and what kind of data is available. Centro partner Peer39 makes the case for content contextual signals serving as a counterbalance to audience.
YouTube Touts Audio Ad Results in Shot Across Spotify's Bow [:03]
YouTube's tests of a new audio advertising format drove a lift in brand awareness among 75% of brands that participated, according to a company blog post. The Google-owned platform has moved from alpha testing into beta testing the format, which inserts 15-second audio ads into music playlists and marks YouTube's first endeavor into radio-like ads.
Telenor Sells Tapad to Experian for $280 Million [:03]
Norwegian telco Telenor sold cross-device company Tapad to Experian in a transaction advised by LUMA Partners. Experian is acquiring 100% of Tapad for a cash consideration of roughly $280 million. It was less than five years ago that Telenor bought Tapad for $360 million in February 2016, amid much fanfare about telcos being able to take better advantage of their first-party data to inform real-time advertising. So, what does Experian get out of the deal?
The Restrictions On IDFA will Shift Mobile Budgets to TV [:04]
Apple’s planned changes for IDFA that require opt-in will force advertisers into other channels–most likely, connected TV. Working with a TV identity partner that can connect multiple IDs at the household level will help marketers reach their goals.
Nielsen to Launch Identity Graph ID Measurement System in 2021 [:02]
Following the trend of other ad-technology and media measurement companies, Nielsen is starting up its own identity graph product–an ID resolution system–for cross-media measurement. The trend in using ID measurement comes as more media companies move away from device-based digital cookies.
What Does the CPRA Mean for Behavioral Advertising? [:04]
The CPRA was touted as legislation that would fill in the blanks that CCPA left open and further CCPA’s consumer protections. Significantly for online advertisers, the CPRA more specifically addresses businesses’ obligations when engaging in behavioral advertising.
Under CCPA, some businesses engaged in behavioral advertising interpreted “sales” as excluding the exchange of personal information, such as cookie data, for targeting and serving advertising to users across different platforms, arguing that no “sales” were involved because no exchange for “valuable consideration” had occurred. The CPRA’s introduction of the concept of “sharing” closes this potential loophole.
Pepsi Says ‘Start Backwards’ to Create Ads Fit for Modern Culture [:04]
Cracking open the can to unlock consumer understanding, Pepsi has discovered that tapping into social as a springboard can help to quickly develop marketing that pops. They’re listening to the earned, social and digital media channels to inform, respond and position the Pepsi brands into the mainstream. Will even more brands look to adapt to fit in current culture? Related: Do the best memers build on popular culture or do they make pop culture? Sneak a peek into the life of the CMO (Chief Meme Officer).