Digital ad buying Archives

FIFA World Cup 2018 Infographic Part 4: Behavior, Retail, and Location Targeting

Posted on 07/20/201804/12/2023 by Sierra Ducey

The 2018 Fifa World Cup has officially come to a close as France was crowned the champion in a very exciting championship game. Throughout the tournament many new records were set. The knockout round saw the most goals ever scored in history, Iceland became smallest country by population to participate in the tournament, and Cristiano Ronaldo became the oldest player to score a hattrick in the World Cup. These among many other statistics and records made for an extremely exciting month of soccer. The excitement didn’t stop at the games. Advertisers, media buyers and television networks saw fast shifts in viewing habits and purchasing power. This final post about the 2018 Fifa World Cup will cover all things Behavior, Retail & Purchasing Power, and Location & OOH Targeting.

Behavior

In Post 3 of the Fifa World Cup Infographic series, it was very clear that there is a captive audience very enthralled with the tournament, giving advertisers a great opportunity to engage and promote their offerings. Now that the games are done, we are able to see where fans were engaging in order to ensure that in future sporting and media events like this, that digital and programmatic advertising money is being spent and optimized to drive results.
In the infographic, it was projected that 48% of soccer fans planned to use their smartphone to follow the action. As reported by digiday, Telemundo saw that between 48 and 51 percent of its live digital viewers consistently watched the games on their smartphones. However, the most popular format for watching the games was still traditional television – although many chose to stream either on desktop or laptop. When comparing this tournament to other worldwide sports competitions such as the Summer Olympics, broadcast by Telemundo’s parent company NBCUniversal, people watched the events on their phones during the week and switched to television on the weekend. The World Cup saw stable numbers, despite the day of the week, mobile watchers stuck to mobile and TV viewers stuck to that platform.

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Regarding the type of advertisements and its content, despite fans saying that they were more concerned about the advertisements being entertaining and interesting than relevant to the World Cup, most advertisers still chose to use the tournament as the platform for their ads. Companies like Pepsi, Coca Cola, Budweiser and Adidas all aired ads that starred fan favorite players and action from soccer games. These ads were successful as many sites, such as Highsnobiety dubbed them the best of the tournament. Contextually relevant content is always a safe bet for digital advertisers when choosing ad content and placement. Whether viewers realize it or not, when the excitement from the games carries over in the commercial breaks, they are much more likely to stay engaged.

Retail & Purchasing Behavior

The Fifa World Cup ranks the fourth most valuable sporting event brand in the world, falling short of the Superbowl, Summer Olympics and Winter Olympics. Even at fourth place, a 2017 Forbes survey revealed that the tournament is worth $229 million. This high price tag doesn’t solely fall on the games. Many companies find that this event has a high impact on their brand and they have significant pressure to make sure they get the most out of this captive futbol-fanatic audience. Adidas, arguably the most famous soccer brand in the world, projected to sell 10 million official tournament balls, 14.9 million replica jerseys. The top five selling jerseys are for Brazil, Portugal, Argentina, Spain and France and people are most inclined to search for Ronaldo, Messi, Neymar Jr and Coutinho.

But, as was published in our infographic, advertisers need to be weary of changing emotions based on the outcomes of the games. After a loss, with lower morale, fans may be less inclined to make purchases unless prompted by a promotion or sale.

Monetary value didn’t stop at merchandise and fan apparel, this years ticket sales were tremendous. In May, it was already reported that 2.374 million tickets to the 64 matched had already been sold, accounting for 89% of all available tickets. The Moscow Times reported that there was a 98% attendance rate in the first 61 games of the tournament. Those attending paid high prices in order to see the action first hand. Newsweek reported that scalpers were selling tickets to fans for as much as $2,300 for one match!

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Location & OOH Targeting

The World Cup offered great opportunities for advertisers to run location and Out of Home Targeting (OHH). Location targeting uses programmatic advertising to deliver ads to users who have attended an event or set of events at specific locations, dates and times. In regard to the world cup, this offered advertisers a great opportunity to run ads in areas that they knew fans would congregate and around and during the times of games. This allows great opportunities, as discussed in the behavior section, for fans to continue to see content surrounding the excitement of the World Cup. After a big win, if a fan sees an ad on the metro with their favorite player promoting a certain product, the advertiser has targeted and reached that fan in an ideal setting.

With each world-wide sporting event, advertisers and media buyers learn new strategies and tips on how to best reach their audience. This World Cup saw a very captive, engaged audience both at the games and watching – whether online or on television. Fans also took to social media to interact with their favorite players and teams. They were also quick to purchase apparel and gear and fans lucky enough to be close to where the games were played, were willing to purchase high-priced tickets in order to see the action live.

The Fifa World Cup only comes around every four years, making it essential that advertisers are prepared to showcase the best content in the ideal setting. For 2018, we have broken down the audience, social, content, behavior, retail and location targeting for the tournament. Comparing this 2018 information to the 2014 tournament, noting any similarities and changes, advertisers and media buyers can note any trends and study up for the next few years to ensure that 2022 World Cup sees the best use of media and advertising.

Digilant’s FIFA 2018 Digital Advertising Infographic covers who the consumers are, social media trends, how the content is consumed and by who, and more!

Download the full infographic here and don’t forget to share #DigilantData.

Did you read all four parts or our FIFA World Cup 2018 Infographic series? Start with Part 1 learning about the facts and figures of the World Cup here.

How to Hire an Internet Ad Buying Agency

Posted on 10/25/201704/21/2023 by Mitchell Carey

Part of any successful brand’s digital marketing strategy involves the tactful implementation of an internet ad buying plan. Although mapping out an impactful internet ad buying plan is a crucial and necessary step to take when growing your business, it can be a daunting task for even the most experienced marketer. For this reason, it’s generally more effective to hire a professional internet ad buying agency that will meet your needs and maximize your ad dollars from start to finish of your campaign.

Rather than taking full advantage of internet ad buying, many marketers opt to forgo more advanced internet ad buying strategies, simply because they’re unfamiliar with or can’t afford the ramp up time needed to properly run campaigns in-house. Among the many forms of internet ad buying, the model proven to be the most beneficial for brands of all sizes and verticals is programmatic media buying. Maybe you’re asking yourself, “What is it that programmatic internet ad buying can do for my brand?” and the answer is rather simple: it reaches the right audience, at the right place and time, and at the lowest cost for the advertiser.

How are brands managing their internet ad buying today?

Programmatic internet ad buying is powered by RTB (Real Time Bidding), which has become the go-to investment for brands looking to get the most out of their internet ad buying, because the bidding process is constantly improved upon as DSP‘s (Demand Side Platform) identify the inventory spaces that yield the highest ROI. This powerful software can identify, purchase, and place an ad impression across the digital ecosystem in milliseconds, but if you slow things down, the RTB process can be broken into five stages:

A user accesses a web page.
Cookies on the page retrieve data on the user’s behavior and this data is used to create a profile.
Advertisers participate in auctions with the publisher for the page inventory if the user profiles align with their target audience.
Buyers set their CPM (cost per mil or cost per 1,000 display impressions) and the bidder with the highest CPM wins the auction.
The creative is delivered by the advertiser to the ad space on the web page that the user is visiting.

What are the benefits to having a programmatic internet ad buying partner?

As an advertiser, you want to assure that your products and services will be discovered by as many users within your target audience. Whether your brand is focused on selling sportswear to women between 40 and 55 years-old or life insurance to millennial newlyweds, buying internet ads on one channel alone won’t yield results. Just like the people we know in our everyday lives, internet users are multidimensional and your internet ad buying strategy should be too. Although programmatic technology leverages artificial intelligence and is capable of incredible, hiring a programmatic partner with an experienced team to implement omnichannel approaches to your internet ad buying will set up a people-first digital strategy, leading to higher conversions and even uncovering new users that you previously didn’t know were part of your target audience.

Before hiring an internet ad buying agency, consider the following factors:

1. Specialization

Every company is unique and the roadmap and buyer’s lifecycle of each vertical, market, and even product-type, can vary significantly. For example, if you’re a healthcare company with a highly niche user demographic, you’ll want to inquire about case studies and the experience that the agency’s team has within the healthcare industry. If the agency’s portfolio is primarily composed of consumer-packaged goods and retail clients, they probably aren’t yet suited to set up a high performing campaign for a B2B company that sells medical devices.

2. Creativity

Contrary to what many people might think, the programmatic buying of internet ad inventory isn’t a process completely void of creativity. It’s very important to determine whether or not the agency will be capable of coming up with innovative and creative strategies to reach the users in your target audience and uncover new ones. An agency’s ability to be agile and flexible to adjust its for your is very important.

3. Time Efficiency

Your marketing team member’s talent might be limitless, but their time certainly isn’t. Firstly, having access to a DSP (Demand Side Platform), allows you to bypass the timely process of negotiating with ad buyers and publishers involved in traditional media buying. Secondly, when you have a specialized internet ad buying agency managing your campaigns, there’s more time left for you and your team to focus on other marketing efforts that will enhance your strategy.

In the past, marketing managers and agencies could buy inventory directly from the publishers. A purchase decision that in many cases was based on the content. Depending on the target you would like to impact, you should choose a specific medium. However, the emergence of technologies such as DSPs, DMPs or SSPs have not only solved some of the inefficiencies of the traditional media buying process, but also, has made the process faster and easier to identify the target and the right moment to impact it.

4. Cost Efficiency

Very often advertisers will begin their campaign planning by setting a budget, a logical thing to do when planning a digital ad campaign. However, the question shouldn’t be, “How much money can we spend on this campaign?” but rather, “How much money do we need to spend on this campaign?” The entire goal of internet ad buying is to reach and convert users with scale and precision that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to with traditional media buying. Therefore, greater ad spend does not always translate into greater campaign results. Make sure that the agency you decide to hire is more focused on your company’s performance than their paycheck.

5. Transparency

It’s very important to evaluate the level of transparency that the agency can provide your brand. Not only does it give you peace of mind to know where your ad dollars are being spent, but it’s also one of the best ways to shape your strategy. A top tier internet ad buying agency should be able to offer you with aggregated KPI metrics along with real time reports displayed on a dashboard for your team to reference and monitor. With this information you can glean insights from the internet ad campaigns that the agency’s managing and improve your digital strategy moving forward.

When embarking on your search to hire an internet ad buying agency, coming across a partner with all of these factors are only within the reach of a few companies among which, of course includes Digilant. Do you want to know more about how our programmatic solutions can help you launch a great internet ad buying strategy?

10 Tips For Digital Advertising Best Practices

Posted on 08/09/201704/21/2023 by Karen Moked

Keeping up-to-date on digital ad buying best practices is essential for any marketer to successfully navigate today’s digital ecosystem. Given the sustained high-level growth of programmatic media buying in recent years, the way in which we leverage new technologies to bring together the main players of digital ad buying and selling is constantly evolving.

To understand this evolution, you have to familiarize yourself with the foundations of programmatic buying, an impressions-based buying system that relies on algorithms generated from DSPs (Demand Side Platforms).

What for? It’s simple. DSPs need to access global ad inventory with millions of advertising impressions in real time, with the ability to adjust to what every advertiser wants or needs.

The main draw of programmatic buying lies in its ability to automate the ad buying process in Ad Exchanges and on websites from a unified dashboard.

Differentiating between Programmatic and Direct Ad Buying

Before reviewing best practices for digital ad buying, it’s important to understand the difference between programmatic and direct ad buying.

Direct buying occurs when a marketer buys impressions in bulk, normally in a specific context on specified sites and from a specific publisher. This involves hours of researching which publishers’ impressions will be best to optimize campaign performance and then negotiating the purchase before launching the impressions.
Programmatic buying occurs when a DSP automatically and instantaneously places ads on publishers’ sites after evaluating the quality of individual impressions from the best bidder.

Both buying methods have pros and cons and undergo different processes with online publishers. For example, though real-time buying allows an advertiser to reach wider audiences, it doesn’t offer a guarantee on return.

Best Practices for Digital Ad Buying

Real Time Bidding (RTB) marketing alludes to a type of digital advertising in which a variety of ad spaces are auctioned off in real time. The system identifies the visitor’s user information and then each is shown ads that correlate to their tastes and interests determined by data tracked from their online behaviors.
For this process to work correctly, it’s vital to make use of technology and big data. RTB wouldn’t be possible without generating and evaluating millions of data points. This data contributes intelligence to the entire programmatic buying process.

Additionally, advertisers can attract users more effectively thanks to being able to use data for the personalization of ad delivery. This is very evident if one’s to compare the effectiveness of traditional display campaigns.

Today, the majority of marketing departments are employing real-time programmatic buying for retargeting purposes, for example. However, programmatic ad buying allows marketers to also fulfill many other different strategies, analyze the relationships between all media channels, both online and offline, and consider segmentation possibilities.

10 Digital Ad Buying Tips

1.) Start with a general focus

Programmatic technology uses audience data to target specific consumers across vast amounts of ad inventory by using audience data to target individuals dynamically, on a one-on-one basis — in real-time. It’s particularly useful for advertisers who are seeking the reach of a large bulk buy without sacrificing the accuracy of targeting users.

Rather than pay for large inventory, advertisers hoping to reach consumers’ interest can bid for the right audience and the right time. Programmatic not only makes ads more relevant to consumers it also helps publishers to sell inventory in a more valuable way for advertisers.

Additionally, Demand Side Platforms, or DSPs are able to buy ad inventory across all sources with the use of computer programs called algorithms. An algorithm is a computer application that performs sophisticated calculations based on specific rules. For DSPs, these algorithms determine which impressions a specific customer should buy.

2.) Identify your target

As with any advertising strategy, digital or otherwise, marketers need to establish clear objectives and a well-defined target audience.

If you have a specific product or service to promote, or if you’re simply trying to amplify brand awareness on social media, you need to make sure that you’re reaching the audiences that are most apt to listen to your message. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time.

Start by determining demographic data, such as the gender, age, and location of your audience. After gathering that information, you can begin planning how and where to allocate your ad spend.

3.) Prioritize transparency

According to Smart AdServer, a third of digital media buyers don’t bid on blind inventories. For that reason, it’s important to segment your audience and provide buyers with as much data as possible.

4.) Think Mobile

The behavioral capabilities of programmatic buying technologies are strongly linked to cookies. Which is a problem when it comes to mobile, since there are no cookies on mobile devices.

In the past, mobile marketing was used to view products before completing a purchase in a physical store or from your desktop. However, according to eMarketer, 75.7% of U.S. buyers are willing to make purchases directly from their phones and over the coming years that figure is expected to grow significantly.

Additionally, 9 out of 10 smartphone users have used their phone at some point in the buying process, according to the IAB. This is why it’s important to adapt all creatives to mobile devices before starting your next digital ad campaign.

5.) Monitor minimum bids and block lists

Another digital media buying best practice is the consistent monitoring of your minimum bids. If you’re aware of where your ads will get the most value for their traffic and track minimum bids once or twice a week, you can multiply your return in the short term.

6.) Identify what ad formats are growing

Consider the following data from ComScore: After viewing an online video ad, 64% of users are more predisposed to the purchasing a product online. According to Unruly, online video ads increase purchase intent by 97% and brand recognition by 139%. Still wondering what format to use?

Video generates double the engagement that traditional banner ads generate. Even interstitial ads (advertisements that temporarily take up an entire device’s screen) have average bidding prices that are 60% higher than those of banner ads.

In addition to their creative capabilities, new and more captivating ad formats like dynamic creatives, can be programmatically delivered to the user in real time.

7.) Find Similar Users – Lookalike Modeling

Leveraging the data collected from your cookies, DSPs can find new and undiscovered users that look like your customers to whom you can target your ads and optimize conversion rates as your campaigns progress. Lookalike modeling involves defining the attributes and behaviors of your most valuable customers and then using these profiles to target matching prospects. Since these new audience segments are similar to your current customers, you’ll enjoy a higher likelihood of conversions.

8.) Implement Dynamic Creative Optimization

If you combine the power of a DSP with the audience management from a Data Management Platform (DMP), your campaign’s performance will improve significantly.

This lift is attributed to the sorting and classifying of customers based on diverse criteria makes it easier to deliver more personalized ads in which creatives are launched based on where in the sales funnel a user is located.

**9.) Brands go for in-house management**

With the emergence of new programmatic software platforms, companies are increasingly willing to control the advertising spend by keeping programmatic buying internal, facilitated by brand marketers. This is the area of programmatic spending that has grown most in recent years.

CMOs that directly manage their digital ad buying build internal competencies in the execution, measurement and optimization of programmatic campaigns

10.) Use attribution models to properly measure campaign performance

The efficiency of programmatic campaigns is calculated by tracking post view and post click conversions. Therefore, client acquisition strategies should be data oriented, steadily measuring and predicting the media channels that willyield optimal results based on the brand’s campaign goals.

Finally, the ultimate best practice for programmatic ad buying is to constantly improve upon the above practices and strategies. At Digilant, we don’t simply follow best practices for programmatic ad buying, we create them as the needs of our buyers and the technology to serve them evolve. Programmatic ad buying doesn’t just help reach new clients; it uncovers new and more valuable audiences.

Interested in unlocking data and uncovering your brand’s full potential? Learn more about Digilant’s solutions here.