Digital advertising is becoming increasingly complex, and honestly, this won’t change for some time. While the advertising ecosystem is strategically preparing for the long haul, peak season is upon us and before you know it, summer will be gone.

With transparency and media quality at the top of publishers’ minds, it will be interesting to see how Q4 plays out. External factors such as Google’s decision to maintain third-party cookies are only further complicating things.

For brands, brand safety is a major concern, especially during election season like this one where advertisers are projected to spend over $12B on ads across all channels. With brands opting out of placing ads next to election content, or news entirely, the question arises, what do brands have to be afraid of?

At the recent AdMonsters Publisher Forum in Boston, Jana Meron, the newly appointed VP of Revenue Operations and Data at The Washington Post, challenged the conventional wisdom around news and brand safety. Speaking to a packed room of publishers and tech vendors, she questioned, “Why would you avoid reaching this audience when they’re most engaged?”

A few years ago, an IAB study found that 84% of consumers trust brands they see in the news, which highlights the importance of addressing misconceptions about news content. Yet, despite this trust, Resonate’s Fall 2024 Consumer Trends Report tells us that consumer spending is down, which is no bueno for publishers, brands, and agencies already grappling with declining ad revenue and sales.

“The challenge continues for advertisers trying to navigate trust and brand safety,” said Jonathan Neddenriep, co-founder and CTO of Postie. “This also puts pressure on the large tech platforms to double down on ad and content safety tools, something that isn’t always a popular or easy investment (see the Meta CrowdTangle shutdown, for instance.)”

So, what’s a brand to do during times like these?

I recently moderated a webinar with Neddenriep and Bethany Bollenbacher, Customer Success Senior Team Leader at Postie, where they dropped a ton of jaw-dropping gems to help brands stay afloat. If one thing is for sure, and two things are for certain, brands should definitely incorporate direct mail into their strategies. With Postie, direct mail now offers digital capabilities like real-time reporting, website re-targeting, and targeting that exceeds even digital channels. 

Here are some insights and strategies to help brands navigate holiday and election campaigns.

• Election Season: The Catalyst for Surging  Ad Rates
  During election years, the surge in political ad spending significantly impacts ad rates on major platforms like Meta and Google. The bid-based nature of these platforms intensifies competition for ad slots, driving up CPMs and CPAs. This situation is particularly challenging for ecommerce brands looking to grow during the holiday season. To navigate these fluctuations, brands should develop conservative forecasts for CPMs and explore alternative channels with more stable performance metrics. Implementing digital campaign levers like cost-capping can also help protect your budget from being drained by the rising cost of ad slots.
• Leveraging Direct Mail for Stability
  Direct mail offers a stable and predictable alternative amidst fluctuating digital ad rates. Unlike digital channels, where ad placements can be unpredictable and subject to sudden rate hikes, direct mail provides a consistent and reliable medium. Its ability to lock in rates and deliver steady results makes it an attractive option for brands looking to diversify their advertising strategies. Additionally, direct mail’s physical separation from digital noise can enhance brand safety—a key concern during politically charged periods.
  
• Develop Strong Personalization and Creative Strategies
  Personalizing direct mail is key to maximizing engagement and conversions. While basic tactics like adding a recipient’s name may have limited impact, tailoring offers relevant to the specific needs of each household can significantly boost engagement. For example, offering loyalty rewards or promoting local pickup to save on shipping can make direct mail more enticing. Additionally, tapping into the nostalgic and emotional appeal of the holiday season in your creative strategies can strengthen consumer connection and drive purchasing behavior. As Bollenbacher puts it, “Keep it warm, fuzzy, and cheesy!”
• Hone in on Your First-party Data
  First-party data remains a vital brand asset, especially as third-party data faces increasing scrutiny and regulation. By leveraging first-party data, brands can gain deeper insights into consumer behaviors and optimize their marketing efforts. Retail media networks, which capitalize on this data, are gaining traction to support both retailers’ and brands’ growth objectives. This data-driven approach enables precise targeting and personalization, enhancing overall campaign effectiveness. During a session at AdMonsters Ops titled “Retail Media In-Housing: It’s the New Wave,” speakers stressed how crowded the retail media space has become. To stand out, one strategy for RMNs is to tap into direct mail, a far less crowded medium in RMN.
• Remain Flexible to Keep up With Consumer Habits
  To run effective holiday campaigns, it’s crucial to understand and align with consumer habits. Different industries follow unique seasonal patterns, so your marketing should reflect these trends. For example, gift-giving behaviors ramp up in early Q4 while sectors like home services decline — no one wants to start a home improvement project on Thanksgiving when everyone is focused on eating. Brands can optimize their campaigns by targeting consumers at the right times and revisiting CRM strategies to encourage multiple purchases during the holiday season, boosting lifetime value.
• Understanding Publisher Concerns
  Publishers are facing a host of challenges, with transparency and diversity in advertising being especially critical for niche publishers striving to stay afloat. Media quality verification remains is also a hot topic, with industry experts debating its effectiveness. At Publisher Forum Boston, Claire Atkin from Check My Ads highlighted these issues, calling for ongoing dialogue and efficiency improvements. In this challenging environment, publishers need strong strategies to maintain and strengthen their market positions.

A Worry-free Approach to Surviving Q4

Navigating holiday campaigns during an election year requires a multifaceted approach, balancing digital and traditional channels, and better leveraging first-party data, while understanding consumer habits. 

Brands and agencies must stay agile and prepare for fluctuating ad rates while optimizing strategies to cut through the political and holiday noise. Direct mail offers a stable, effective alternative, and personalized, emotionally resonant creative strategies can drive consumer engagement. Ultimately, a well-rounded, data-driven approach will empower brands to succeed even in the most challenging advertising landscapes.

Don’t sleep on the power of direct mail. To watch the full discussion click here.

The post Deck the Halls With Votes and Direct Mail: Mastering Holiday Campaigns in an Election Year appeared first on AdMonsters.

The challenges are great, and in a recent Think Tank hosted by Celtra, publishers came together and discussed their individual challenges and how to rectify them.

First-party Data and Letting Go

“We sit on a wealth of first-party data, and quite a high percentage of our ad revenue is data enabled,” said one publisher.

“Targeting is heavily utilized. In terms of the intersection of data with creative, there are places where we’ve been really strong and done a really great job, and we’ve had to sort of prioritize what we focus on. We have really strong first-party multicultural data, and we know that our advertisers really needed some guidance about what is the right way to message these audiences: ‘When should I deliver an ad in Spanish versus English? When should I have cultural nuances or words inserted that show the audience that I’m aware of who they are, and they’re more receptive to the message.’ So I would say multicultural is a place where we focused because we saw that there’s a huge opportunity.”

Letting go is hard in all aspects of life; in love, in death, and in business. More times than not, it’s the right call.

“It’s okay, to throw things away,” added another publisher. “I think a lot of times we forget that. It’s fine if you tried a product and you learned from it and now you don’t want to use it, you want to sunset it or phase it out. And I think sometimes it’s easy to say, ‘well, we put so much work into this, so now we have to keep doing it because we spent all this time and money and resources doing it.’ But then you end up supporting too many things and maintaining too many things.

We did that recently. We phased out a pretty big product that just never worked the way we wanted it to work. It was like, okay, we tried and we tried, and it was too hard and too expensive to make it better. And it was disappointing but it was the right move.”

Template Is Not a Bad Word

Everyone wants to feel special, have that custom, unique experience, whether it’s as an individual or a business looking for that “wow” factor. Advertisers can still have that wow factor with the use of templates on the back-end. Templates work, for starters, and they are also easy to set up and ease the burden on an already stretched-thin ad ops department. 

“We try and make sure that the client understands that even though it’s a template,  it’s going to meet their KPIs,” said one attendee. We try to make these templates as simple as possible for clients. And, it’s repeatable. The agency loves it because for some of our units, it’s three assets, video and image and maybe a poster thumbnail and the pixels. And then we can just crank that out. If agencies want to rotate five different titles or five different versions of creative for the same unit, depending on it, we’ll throw it in for them, because it’s so simple to do, and they know exactly what they’re giving us every time.”

“Template can almost be considered a bad word from a sales perspective, because sales wants to sell customized experiences,” added another participant. “Advertisers want to want it to feel custom, want it to feel special.

But on the back end, you can use a template, and the output can still look and feel like it is custom for that advertiser.”

The post Things That Keep Publishers up at Night appeared first on AdMonsters.

“Media now means comparing prices on the high street, sharing jokes with friends and booking your next holiday, opening up new opportunities for brands to connect with consumers,” said Jonathan Barnard, Head of Forecasting with Zenith.

Mobile ad spend is increasing too, with US advertiser spending on pace to reach two-thirds of their digital budgets this year—of which $16.41 billion is expected to go to mobile video advertising (45.6% of total digital video ad spend).

If you’re thinking it’s time to invest more resources into getting your mobile creative on point, you’re absolutely right. With mobile, it’s really easy to rely on data and targeting strategies to meet business needs instead of creating high-quality mobile ads that truly resonate with audiences.

We spoke with UnSun Lee, VP Global Creative, GroundTruth and learned seven ways mobile advertising could become more interesting, relevant and effective. These seven best practices hold just as true for publishers with their own in-house studios or who develop house or native ads as it does for brands working alongside agency partners—and especially in the realm of programmatic creative.

1. Keep Your File Size and Copy as Light as Possible

Lynne d Johnson: We hear a lot about latency being a killer to user experience (UX) when it comes to mobile advertising, especially once you throw programmatic into the mix. What should publishers and their agency partners focus on to make sure people are paying attention?

UnSun Lee: Mobile user attention span is short—there’s always the risk of distraction and interruptions from the outside world as consumers commute, stand in line, or simply kill time on their phones—so it’s important that your ads load quickly. All publishers prioritize their own content to load first and ads are the last item on a page to load, so it’s important to keep those file sizes small.

Speed is an issue with ad exposure, too. It takes consumers about 400 milliseconds to react to a mobile ad. Are your ads equipped to pique their interest? We know that ads with copy that are five words or fewer perform 67% better when it comes to visitation rates. In other words, keep messages short and sweet and let the visuals do the talking.

 2. Add Images to Increase Engagement

LdJ: So, it looks like less words mean more if agencies and publishers are looking to optimize creative for better performance—and higher engagement. Is that correct?

UL: Yes, that is true. Studies showit only takes 13 milliseconds for our brains to process an image. Neuroscientists at MIT found that subjects were able to see new images “more than 20 times as fast as vision typically absorbs information.”

The right creative image can mean the difference between an ad that’s overlooked and one that incites a consumer. The visuals you choose will, of course, depend on the nature of the messaging and campaign objectives, but one thing’s for sure: Including a human or product image performs 55% higher in visitation rate than not having any image at all.

With this in mind, it’s best to pick a picture that’s more likely to intrigue potential customers.

3. Always Include a Call to Action

LdJ:Given that no one in the industry agrees on how to measure viewability, shouldn’t mobile ad creative do more than just cause a user to look at an ad?

UL: Of course, you’re going to want your users to be engaged with your advertisers’ ads. We all know the value of a strong call to action—yet not all mobile ads include this key component. Featuring a CTA with the words “buy now” improves visitation rate performance by 51% over the average, so depending on what you want the user’s next move to be—watch a video, learn more, and so on—you always need to encourage them to take action. This is something that publishers, advertisers and agencies all need to be thinking about.

4. Spice up Creative With GIF Animations

LdJ:But it’s not always so easy to get people to click on ads nowadays. Are there any special creative tactics that should be considered?

UL:Sure. According to GroundTruth data, adding a subtle GIF animation improves Click-Through Rate (CTR) performance by 25%. What’s more, it boosts visitation rates by 44%. Even a simple animation has what it takes to help your ad stand out.

Just because most mobile ads are simple in nature, that doesn’t mean they have to be boring. Whether you pronounce it “gif” or “jif” — we’ll save an argument about the merits of each for another article — GIF animations should be on your radar during the ad design process.

5. Use Location as a Traffic Driver

LdJ: Everyone knows that one of the greatest advantages that mobile ads have over desktop is location targeting, especially when it comes to driving foot traffic. At GroundTruth, you did some research that highlights how certain creative considerations that use location data prove this, right?

UL: Right, our research shows that including dynamic distance overlay to the nearest store improves visitation rates by 53%, so leveraging that physical data is key for marketing.

When a mobile user is mere steps away from a store that offers products relevant to their current wants and needs, they can make a visit without disrupting their day—and you can make it easier for them by providing directions on the creative.

Create a seamless message by combining the distance overlay with branded copy. For example: “Dinner is just 1.23 miles away.” Be sure to make the font as large as possible too, as this will make it legible at a glance.

6. Deploy Ads at Opportune Times

LdJ: Are mobile ads like social media posts—are there certain times of day when they perform better?

UL: Devising a successful mobile ad campaign isn’t just about what the ad looks like and where it’s placed, but also when it’s received. Our data shows ad engagement is at its highest at 2 PM on Saturdays. This type of information can help you understand the right days and times to run your campaigns. But it’s also important to use logic too.

If you’re trying to help your advertising partner promote Black Friday sales, then you won’t want to wait until the weekend.

7. Target Audiences With Personalized Messages

LdJ: We’ve been hearing a lot of ruminations about the death of the cookie and the rebirth of context. This means that publishers (and advertisers) will have to do a better job at leveraging their first-party data. Also, impending 5G networks will enable greater personalization. What should publishers and agencies be thinking about when it comes to helping their advertising partners with mobile ad personalization?

UL: Well, personalized ads definitely produce results. Recent research shows 44% of consumers will consider switching to a brand that does a better job of personalizing its marketing communications, and 90% say messages that aren’t personalized are “annoying.”

It’s easy enough to create two different versions of an ad that speak to two different audiences, like these examples targeting millennials and parents. Doing so stands to improve response rates and create a more appealing ad experience.

Make Your Mobile Ads Suck Less

Publishers who don’t think of themselves as being in the creative business might think these practices don’t apply to them, but as programmatic becomes the norm, it’s become increasingly important to monitor your mobile ads for content, placement and quality. That is unless you want to turn your users away. The quality and delivery of ad creative have a huge impact on the effectiveness of campaigns, so use these seven best practices to your advantage. Not only will they improve your campaign performance, but your audience will appreciate your more engaging and relevant ads.

The post 7 Best Practices for Better Mobile Ads appeared first on AdMonsters.

In today’s digital advertising world, fast is key. And, as attention spans shorten, webpages load quicker, and clicks become swifter, advertisers are increasingly vying for consumers’ attention at breakneck speeds.  

On the sales side, the architecture to buy and sell advertising in a matter of milliseconds is already in place. In fact, programmatic and real-time bidding is more than a passing fad or some sort of novel idea; automated sales and buying has become a formidable force in the digital ad world. According to new numbers by real-time ad platform company PubMatic, RTB accounts for almost 50 percent of non-direct sales on its network.  And, its CEO Rajeev Goel expects programmatic premium to be a $1 billion business by next year.

But, as the momentum of automated sales roars towards what some may call an inevitable preeminence, online creative has stayed comparatively stagnant. And, in an industry known for its shrewd and inventive problem-solving ways, creative’s push into this new wave of digital advertising is, in gist, uncreative.

Brands and agencies are beginning to understand the importance of changing creative; and, companies coast to coast are popping up with novel ways of solving the sluggish evolution of display creative in today’s rapid digital ad world. From content redistribution to eye-popping visuals, companies are employing a wide array of tactics to grab consumer attention and pump up conversions.

Today, brands realize that the content and context of an ad is just as important, as if not more so than, the presence of an ad on a website. Engaging with consumers is crucial to the conversion process (and always has been); but, today, that engagement has to happen almost instantly, with consumers making that connection with a brand or product at the ad’s point of impression.

Here are three companies who believe that display itself isn’t the problem; rather, it’s the ad industry’s lethargic and non-evolutionary take on display that leaves such a bad taste in brands’ mouths.

Let Big Data Do the Heavy Lifting

There’s lots and lots of data out there, covering everything from someone’s eye color to their preferred beverage; and, tying that wealth of data to creative is the goal of Cognitive Match, a firm that uses both cookie data and its own data backend to help target creative to individual consumers.

“Everywhere a brand wants to be, we can tell them more about their audience,” Cognitive Match’s Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Natalie Kubitz, told AdMonsters.

Microtargeting is tedious; and, for some brands, almost impossible. But, with data-driven creative, brands may be able to get closer to a consumer than ever before, using a crazy array of data points — from environmental data, such as weather and location, to third-party and CRM data, such as demographics, income, interests, age, etc. — to target consumers across wide swaths of varying audience segments.

“Some of the things dynamic creative solves are true marketing challenges – things that just aren’t scalable,” Kubitz said.

There’s never been a time before in which the consumer drives and controls the ad experience as much as she does today. A consumer chooses when, where and how she sees and interacts with an ad. And, in such an environment, creating consumer engagement means knowing the consumer – and being able to act quickly on what you know.

“It doesn’t have to be a perfect data set to make an ad relevant to the user,” Kubitz said.

Brands and advertisers that employ engaging creative that takes advantage of a variety of different data will ultimately lead the curve. But today, many data-driven banner ads aren’t the flashiest or the most innovative, and hardly work to mask the fact that they’re using data.

So, what’s next? Well, for one, moving away from the humdrum look and feel of data-driven banner ads. You know, the ones that tell me I just looked at the new Justin Timberlake album because, well, it’s telling me to pre-order the new Justin Timberlake album. Data-driven ads should seem seamless, in ways, concealing the idea that the consumers’ data is driving the advertisement.

Building Engaging Creative Is Simple

The conventional creative-building process took a lot of time, and even more money.  Many brands relied on the creative cognoscenti of Madison Avenue to develop impressive and humongously scaled campaigns, all while hemorrhaging money and garnering fewer conversions than expected.

Los Angeles-based firm Steelhouse is committed to proving that developing rich media and eye-popping display ads doesn’t take a creative agency – or $20,000.  With its A2 ad-creation service, Steelhouse offers brands video-based and interactive display ads that take no more than four hours on average to create, using a brand’s readily available video and image assets, social media properties, and more.

The company’s philosophy is simple – moving images and interactive nodes draw consumer attention. And, according to Steelhouse CEO Mark Douglas, the numbers show it – with an average 1.8% click-through rate for A2 ads served in the wild, and around 20% for those served on a brand’s website.

In the 12 weeks since A2 platform’s introductions, Steelhouse has created and delivered more than 1,000 ad campaigns, all of them 100 percent rich, interactive media. Big names, including TOMS shoes, Aldo, Calloway and MLB, are among the company’s list of clients.

Steelhouse’s ad campaigns are driven by two concepts – being fast and being friendly. Ad campaigns are built in two to four hours and employ HTML5, meaning a single ad can be easily served across different platforms – desktop, smartphone, tablet, you name it.

Some brands and advertisers can find themselves resistant to the all-in-one ad process, Douglas says. But, when you’re paying a fraction of the price that you would pay a creative agency (both for the creative and delivery of an ad), your ad campaign may become more of a low-stakes gamble. For instance, underperforming creative can be redone in a matter of hours rather than weeks, and without major cost.

Why would brands go down the dynamic display path? Well, for one, the speed at which campaigns are created. The quick and modular nature of dynamic display offers an alternative to conventional display advertising that is both less costly, faster, and seemingly more efficient at driving conversions.

But, with a modular platform like HTML5, creativity can seem somewhat finite in its permutation. For instance, a Ralph Lauren ad may employ its Twitter feed, a product carousel of its latest line and some video footage of its brand at New York Fashion Week. Another may have in-house b-roll, or even contain some sort of real-time offer. But, brands looking for a wider breadth of creative flexibility may feel shortchanged by dynamic display’s capability.

Content Driving Conversion?

Distribution of branded content is a whole other challenge – how do you get eyeballs on this or that sponsored post? OneSpot, which recently snagged up Steve Sachs as its newest CEO, has an intriguing method – using ad exchanges, algorithms and big data to target and retarget users, with brands using existing earned and owned media as content – say a brand-authored blog post or a well-known publisher’s review of a product.

OneSpot draws in potential conversions from higher up in the consumer funnel by figuring out who’s clicking on and engaging with a brand’s content ads (via a cookie drop), and retargeting content back to similar consumers. What OneSpot collects from that cookie drop is data, and tons of it, giving advertisers greater insight into who’s interacting with their advertisements (and, in turn, who to target).

“We use content to create ads that are interesting regardless of the channel,” said Matt Cohen, OneSpot’s president and founder. OneSpot builds relationships with consumers by collecting data and curating content-driven display ads that coincides with their place in the consumer funnel.

Taking On the Funnel

Dynamic display creates and targets ads that are appropriate to the relationship a consumer has with a brand, using data to pinpoint a consumers’ place in the so-called funnel. Being able to know whether a consumer is, for instance, seriously investigating a car purchase or simply just browsing a car brands’ latest models can be quite beneficial to the consumer relationship-building process.

Through dynamic display brands can target consumers higher up in the purchase decision-making process, building rapport with consumers both earlier and more effectively.

OneSpot, Steelhouse and Cognitive Match each point to a growing demand for display advertising that, through data, knows the consumer – display advertising that can morph with each consumer at the speed of a mouse click.

Data-driven dynamic display ads offer simple and effective solutions for many brands, especially those looking to launch large-scale campaigns over large segments that lack the resources to do so conventionally. But, dynamic display firms are just sliver of the pie that is the fray of big data ads.  

From publishers and media buyers to sellers and agencies, data (and a lot of it) is everywhere; and, as the lines blend between who sells and buys ads, dynamic display technologies may, ultimately, move away from a third-party solution, and land on the shores of agencies, publishers or even advertisers and brands themselves.

But, for now, dynamic display offers up a glimpse at the changing face of creative as display and banner ads try to keep pace with a hasteful digital ad world.

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