New Orleans is host to some of the world’s best music, cuisine, and festivals. But in March, it was host to one of the world’s preeminent conferences surrounding digital paid media – the Digiday Media Buying Summit.
Over the course of three days, Ramey Senior Digital Media Buyers/Planners Coyt Garrison and Lindsey Gonzales had the opportunity to connect with industry leaders, attend insightful sessions, and gain valuable insights into the latest trends and strategies in media buying.
In this blog post, they will be sharing some of the key takeaways from the Digiday Media Buying Summit, covering topics such as programmatic advertising, cross-channel marketing, data-driven insights, and more.
So, let’s dive into the insights that will help media buying professionals stay ahead of the curve.
Social Platform Transparency is Key for Agencies & Advertisers
The biggest concern for agencies and advertisers is the lack of transparency from the platforms. Transparency is becoming more and more important to both clients and agencies, which is due to increased regulations on data privacy and consumers’ skepticism of the accuracy of the information they get online. Henceforth, brands are fighting to earn the business (sales) and trust from today’s consumer, and the “era of distrust” is driving higher demand for transparency.
We also find that social giants are making changes without providing answers for why and how these changes could impact their campaigns.
With less transparency equating to less visibility, Ramey focuses on accuracy in targeting and in audience segmentation within social platforms. As more walled gardens are put up, the more vital first-party data becomes.
Shoppable Connections
Fun Fact: 85% of consumers said that they would NOT purchase again from a brand after a bad order or experience.
Brands need to remember that the story you are telling to get the consumer to buy is not complete if you are ignoring the consumer experience, from purchase to receipt of product.
Social Strategy Should Be Driven by Media and Creative
Marvel’s Vice President of Marketing and their Vice President of Integrated media led a discussion on how creative and media drives social strategy. With the rise of social media, brands need to leverage creative as their first point of targeting.
Our team took away several insights regarding this topic:
• Brands have to be agile and move quickly when it comes to social creativity.
• Social trends are causing ever-changing creativity — which means brands need to keep creative changing and updated with the climate.
• Brands need to test multiple variations to see which resonates the most with the target audience
• Brands should have different and direct calls to action for each creative variation.
Agencies continue to follow yesterday’s rules for today’s success, meaning there continues to be a segmentation between media and creative. But Ramey likes to bring both parties to the table to have an optimal conversation. We know strategies that work for one platform may not work on another and that we need to have a creative strategy for each platform. However, not only does Ramey believe that there needs to be strategy involved at every point in a campaign from start to finish, but in a social environment, it should be driven by media and creativity.
Reintroducing the Power of prDOOH with Social Media
prDOOH, or programmatic digital out-of-home, offers access to vibrant, large format digital screens in the same platforms used to activate your existing programmatic campaigns. And integrating these efforts with social media is a great way to engage omnichannel audiences. By combining efforts, it enables a greater reach among audiences and connects with them throughout their day-to-day routines. Consumer environments with longer dwell time can connect and amplify a brand’s message through DOOH and using social-first creative on mobile. All together, you will get a better understanding of the customer journey.
Experiment With Purpose
Want to maximize your media experiments? Keep these tips in mind to test with a purpose:
• Keep parameters tight. I.e. start with a smaller market, less creatives, etc.
• Bring a hypothesis and show the impact beyond the test.
For example, move from saying, “we should use X platform because our audience is there” to saying, “we should use X platform because our audience is there AND we think that X outcome will happen.”
Ramey LOVES this strategy! Test within reason – you can’t test or experiment on all platforms at one time. Testing in a smaller and controlled environment allows you to precisely pinpoint the optimizations that either produced a desired outcome or did not. Once the control has concluded and any potential tweaks are made, the test can be implemented at scale to maximize success.
