Engagement – AUDIENCEX

5 Key Trends for Digital Advertising in 2020

2019 was a year of change for the digital marketing industry. Facebook and Google continue to dominate the advertising industry regardless of whatever scandals come their way. Meanwhile, new channels such as CTV continue to grow in popularity (now reaching over 60% of the US population) and ad share ($14.12 billion expected in CTV ad spend by 2023), as the number of cord cutters grows. But what is in store for 2020? Here are 5 predictions for how digital marketing will evolve this year.

The Beginner’s Guide to Connected TV Advertising

Television content is being consumed in more places now than ever before. From streaming YouTube on their smartphones to watching their favorite shows on Hulu using a laptop, consumers can now access video content wherever and whenever they want. With video content that’s so readily available, consumers are no longer confined to watching shows, the news, or other programs at scheduled times on televisions at home.

The 5 Benefits of Programmatic Advertising

Consumers are spending increasingly more time online, making digital marketing a powerful tool for companies of all sizes. While digital advertising is a great way to reach consumers, it’s important that you are able to target the most highly engaged and interested audiences. For your online advertising campaign to succeed, you need to match ads to the right audiences on the right platforms—at the right time. Doing so manually can be time-consuming and difficult to complete with accuracy.

Avoiding Archaic Success Metrics in Marketing

While many marketers are in the midst of holiday campaign madness, some are beginning to look ahead to next year. Even among the proactive, many are stuck on analytical autopilot, measuring success against archaic metrics that no longer fit their goals.

Finding the Best Digital Marketing Tactics for Your Campaign Goals

In this guide we will break down campaign goals into three buckets—awareness, acquisition, and driving traffic—and offer some specific digital marketing strategies you might want to try to achieve each goal.

A Beginner’s Guide to Programmatic Advertising

Digital advertising is one of the most dynamic fields to follow. A steady stream of new technological developments is constantly transforming the way companies create and deploy online ads, offering cutting-edge ways to ensure your advertising reaches your audience. One such tool is programmatic advertising: a method that automates and optimizes the purchase of ad space, using machine learning to deliver the most effective ads to potential customers.

In the past, marketers had to juggle proposal requests, quotes and tenders by negotiating with multiple people along the line. The term “programmatic” refers to workflow automation made possible by technology that employs algorithmic artificial intelligence technology to optimize the delivery of ads based on a visitor’s behavior. Brands and agencies use a demand-side platform (DSP) to determine which impressions to buy and at what price, and publishers use a supply-side platform (SSP) to sell their ad space to brands. With this form of marketing, advertisers stop wasting money on delivering ads to poor quality leads.

Programmatic advertising takes place in the blink of an eye, in the time it takes for a web page to load, making it one of the least understood forms of marketing. We’ll cover everything you need to know, including the benefits of programmatic advertising, the options available and how it works.

What Ad Formats Are Possible with Programmatic Advertising?

Programmatic covers the full range of possible advertising formats. If an ad can be placed on a web page, it can be done with a programmatic approach. The bulk of programmatic advertising is targeted to the following formats.

Display: The majority of programmatic ads are in the good old-fashioned display style. These banner ads come in standard sizes and are often static, but HTML5 has allowed display ads to incorporate animation and other eye-catching features to improve click-through rates (CTR).
Mobile: There’s no escaping the popularity of mobile. Mobile traffic increased by 222% between 2013 and 2018, making mobile advertising a key area for programmatic ad placement. These are the ads that appear while you’re scrolling mobile-formatted sites, and even on a number of free apps.
Native: Native ads rely on relevancy and audience targeting to blend in with a site’s normal content and structure. Programmatic buying helps advertisers maximize relevancy through analytics and AI. With this technology, advertisers get better performance by presenting the content to the right lead at the right time.
Video: In-stream video ads play before you start the video you clicked on, out-stream video ads play in the middle of online articles, and in-display video ads are those that top the “up next” column on your YouTube feed. Programmatic buying helps advertisers better capture elusive attention spans with segmentation and targeting.
OTT: Over the top (OTT) content is streamed through the internet directly to a smartphone, laptop, connected TV (CTV) or another device. It is similar to traditional TV advertising, but marketers have a greater ability to target audiences with programmatic OTT ads.
Interactive: An up-and-coming form of ad is interactive. These typically appear in apps and contain an element in which a user is invited to perform actions on the ad like clicking and/or dragging. It shows how an app or game may work, and programmatic buying helps make it more likely that the ad is served up to someone who will actually interact with it.

What is an Independent Trading Desk?

For many businesses, finding and engaging with their online audience can be a major challenge. How can you reach your audience effectively when there are so many screens, devices, and apps to be targeted?

Let Your Brand Be Heard with Programmatic Audio Advertising

With the proliferation of digital audio, podcasts, and streaming radio, the way we listen to content is ever changing. By 2021, the average US adult will spend 86.88 minutes a day with digital audio, according to eMarketer.

Tis the Season for New Holiday Campaign Strategies

Happy holiday marketing planning! It may still feel like summer, but ‘tis the season to get prepared for some high-powered Q4 campaigns!

Not sure where to start? Our campaign strategists have analyzed thousands of holiday campaigns from the last several years and compiled a few tips and tricks to help your holiday campaigns get ready to shine.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

New strategies to drive successful brand holiday campaigns
Key stats and figures that show when your budget is best used
When to launch your campaigns to capture as many shoppers as possible

The 2019 holiday shopping season is a bit shortened this year, because Thanksgiving Day falls late in the month on November 28, giving only 27 shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. This shift puts additional strain on shoppers, retailers and marketers alike.

Last year, Cyber Monday was the heaviest online spending day in history, with a reported $7.87 billion in sales. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving and Black Friday experienced significantly above-average growth rates as they become more important shopping days for e-commerce. This means promotional campaigns should be launched by early November, with pacing plans in place to allow for increasing your media spend in the week before Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Fill out the form below to download the guide. And happy holiday campaign planning!

Our campaign strategists are available to talk about your goals and how we can help you exceed them. Contact us to schedule a time to talk.

Integrating Search & Social Advertising

As marketers, we know that the customer’s buying journey touches several different channels along the path to conversion. From awareness to conversion, the message should follow the customer and stay with them as you work to maintain and expand their business.

Managing, measuring, and optimizing these channels side-by-side allows for improved budgeting, bidding, and targeting decisioning. How can you run and optimize cross-channel campaigns simultaneously in a way that provides the best performance? How can you leverage data from one platform to improve performance in the other?

Our team of campaign strategists have put together a quick guide to help you integrate your search & social marketing for maximum impact. Fill out the form below to download the guide.