How programmatic marketing can help you target specific demographics
Over the last five years, the way advertisers have bought media and the way publishers have sold it has changed significantly. Influenced by technology, sophisticated platforms, and automated processes, advertisers have the ability to target groups in real-time, through a range of segmentation methods and demographics.
In theory, this new way of buying should bring marketers and media planners closer together. With the new level of transparency, it’s surprising how many marketers still do not understand the programmatic media buying process.
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According to eMarketer, the total UK spend on programmatic advertising is expected to more than double from £1.99 billion in 2015 to £4.52 billion by 2019.…
Facebook advertising predictions and Facebook advertising are one and the same: always evolving. With that in mind, as an advertiser, it’s crucial to stay up-to-date with the exciting opportunities available to market your product and brand, on the world's biggest social platform.
In this article, I discuss five Facebook advertising predictions you should know about to conquer 2018.
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Prediction #1: Personalized subscription products will gain more attention
It’s no secret that shoppers like personalized experiences. It’s also no secret that they like personalized products delivered straight to their door with no fuss. Think Amazon Prime Wardrobe, meal-kit delivery service Blue Apron, and Dollar Shave Club, which all provide a customized subscription box service. These services…
Digital advertising trends have shifted from desktop to mobile in recent years. This mobile-first approach is quickly taking over as the preferred method for digital advertising and is on the cusp of being the most focused on medium for ad campaigns.
But mobile-first is not the only digital advertising trend that has pushed to the forefront of the marketing sector. We’ve researched what the future holds for digital advertising, and have come back with some deep and interesting insights into five advertising trends that will have a strong impact through the rest of 2018:
Mobile-first advertising
Personalization in digital marketing
The effectiveness of video advertising
Impact of location-based targeting
The effect of micro-moments on consumers
Mobile-first advertising
Mobile-first was intended to notify consumers that a company cares for its websites and digital forms of communication while remaining…
Paywalls, donations, monthly subscriptions, stealing your processing power!?…..the internet’s struggle to figure out which model works best for service providers, content creators and consumers.
Recently, Gizmodo broke the news that online torrent search engine, The Pirate Bay, had been caught trialing a new means of monetizing site visitors by getting them to mine cryptocurrency through the browsers on their devices without their knowledge or consent.
Naturally, people weren’t happy. I mean who would be? Modern device battery times deteriorate faster than fruit from Aldi.
But this does raise a good question, just how much is that content worth?
We are all very easily detached from the human and technological cost of our favourite media sites and flavour of the month apps. Ads have served as means of covering these costs for quite some time. The systems are in place, easy to implement and are very much a natural part of the online ecosystem.
However there…
Chart of the day: People skip video ads because the content doesn't resonate with them
It's a familiar sight now, when watching online videos there is either a video ad before or during. Research carried out by MarketingSherpa found what we'd expect: people just want to watch videos without interruption. But in a world where we need advertising to fund content, there has to be a balance. The next highest answer was that the content doesn't resonate. We've talked before in our guides and blogs about personalisation and how the more personalized the content the more it resonates with customers. Perhaps video ads should be relevant to the specific video content?
The research shows people don't want their videos to be interrupted. Facebook recently changed their video advertising to show ads throughout the videos. This research suggests that it may cause more frustration. Respondents…
How you can stand out in a world dominated by Facebook and Google
Just because you believe something to be true doesn’t make it so. It’s one of my favorite adages, and it has some correlation to what’s going on with our friends over at Facebook and Google regarding digital advertising. I fervently believe this duopoly, as it’s now called, will be impenetrable by other paid media platforms.
But is this true?
These two powerhouses, according to some reports, account for nearly 85 percent of all digital media spend. All other platforms are collectively scrambling for the table scraps. Take Twitter, for example. As far as mobile goes, it controls just 2 percent of the total ad spend — down from 2.6 percent in 2016.
The good news is that brand marketers can find efficiencies by focusing on just two platforms with…
Auto-play video and banner ads are seen to be least effective digital formats by global CMOs
What digital ad formats should you use to get the best ROI online? One way to answer the question is to flip it on its head, and ask, what are the least effective formats?
According to a survey of global CMOs, the worst ad formats are auto-play videos and standard banners. Standard banners are hardly surprising, as ad blockers and 'banner blindness' have taken their toll of the years. It's gotten so bad that on many sites the majority of banner ad clicks are actually accidental.
It's interesting that no CMOs thought that sponsored content was an ineffective technique, and very few thought pre-roll ads were ineffective. This shows that it isn't video ads that are ineffective, just video ads starting when the user hasn't opted in to watch anything.
…
How to use Artificial Intelligence to boost ROI from advertising
For marketers, the tide of artificial intelligence has finally crashed ashore.
It has begun making waves at industry events like WSDM: The 9th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining Web Search and Data Mining conference in San Francisco. In his keynote address, Google research fellow Jeff Dean told attendees it’s time to embrace techniques like deep learning. Once a land of buzzwords, rapid improvements in machine learning have made AI a pivotal member of marketer’s toolkits. As best practice guidelines on Machine Learning at Google shared by Martin Zinkevich (technical) show, Google are actively using Machine Learning in many projects.
Dean and others are excited about AI because it will finally allow marketers to take full advantage of the hordes of data they’ve begun collecting. While we’ve been able to generate mind-boggling mounds of data for a while —…
JP Morgan Chase found it was advertising on 388,000 sites to no effect. Brands using programmatic advertising need to sit up and take notice.
Over the past several years we've seen programmatic ad spend saw, Icarus-like, to dizzying heights. At the start of this year, UK programmatic spend was predicted to increase by over 30% in 2017, whilst US programmatic ad spend has tripled since 2014, becoming the single fastest growing ad medium. So-called gurus predicted this trend would continue, by doing what so-called gurus always do and assuming the future will resemble an extrapolated version of the past. Hence the predictions that programmatic spend will double by 2020, reaching an incredible $42 billion dollars globally. But the present has got in the way.
Ever since The Times uncovered programmatic ads for major brands appearing on the websites of far-right hate groups or terrorists (See Mercedes Advert on an IS video below), brands have…
A brand-building case study focusing on format length, branding and testing best practices
YouTube is becoming an increasingly important tool for digital marketers, both from an owned and paid media perspective. Over the last five years the platform has continued to grow and with over a billion users and many millions of views a day, Google can genuinely claim to have both the first and second largest search engines on the planet and a media platform to rival many mainstream broadcasting rivals.
From an advertising perspective, the reach YouTube offers marketers is phenomenal, however as with all forms of advertising, optimising the media alone will only get you so far. I’ve recently been involved in a multichannel equity campaign and due to the storytelling nature of the content we’ve had to really think about how best to recut the main TVC for the YouTube TrueView campaign (which is using skippable pre-roll ads).
The…
