Innovative formats like vertical videos and Snap Ads are opening new avenues on social while live TV is competing with Over-The-Top and streaming services à la Netflix to monetise inventory. At the same time, multiscreen advertising is changing, leading to yet more confusion. Here are three ways to cut through the noise and make multiscreen campaigns successful.
1. Know your audience
Targeting has gone through the wringer in 2016. From talks of going back to the days of mass marketing to the rise of hyper-targeting and ad blockers, it is difficult to remember that the first step in any campaign is defining your target audience.
Without finding where and how a target audience interacts with your brand and its messages, you can’t design a winning strategy. Assumptions about how Millennials react to promoted tweets or whether old people really do use social media need to be balanced by facts. This is why data aggregation and analysis is more important now than ever before. Taking this one step further, brands can now evaluate their affinity with other topics, enabling them to find golden creative opportunities to deliver the best ad to the best audience in the best format. For example, we have recently found that fans of medical drama Grey’s Anatomy engage most with skin care product manufacturer Neutrogena, while Pokémon Go players have an uncanny relationship with the fast food chain Burger King.
2. Seize the moment
No one can deny that we are in the era of real-time advertising. However, you can take it up a notch by integrating key moments into your campaigns. Triggers like weather conditions, key sports moments (such as goals or player changes), and even political debates for the most adventurous, provide perfect opportunities to reach audiences beyond traditional methods.
It is also essential to combine channels effectively. For example, we have found that TV ads account for one in five social media engagements for brands in a report we recently produced with Turner. Live TV is particularly powerful: sports, news, politics, awards ceremonies and TV shows need to be watched live to avoid the much-dreaded spoilers, which can happen faster than ever. 87% of consumers use secondary devices while watching TV, according to Accenture.
In addition, the launch of new formats can help brands and agencies become even more creative, while seizing the moment to maximise the value of their ad spend. Countering your direct competitors’ TV campaigns and delivering a social ad every time a famous person with a strong affinity with your brand comes on-screen are two ways to increase brand recognition. Yet, real-time advertising doesn’t always equate to immediate purchases: keeping creative fresh and adapting it to the purchase funnel is essential in helping consumers move from one stage of the journey to the next – regardless of the channel.
3. Monetise your results
Brands and agencies can now use intuitive and accurate dashboards updating data in real-time, enabling them to reassess their KPIs at any time and optimise their campaign. These automated tools provide more advanced features like smart groups, auto-optimisation, and pre-optimised, custom audience segments that save time and improve effectiveness.
All these targeting and real-time tools are also simplifying reporting, enabling you to better measure how your creatives are faring on each channel. Platforms strongly tied to real-time events such as Twitter require regular changes, while longer-tail product placements like Pinterest require precise targeting and accurate inventory. By combining a creative designed for the right channel with conversion tracking, you can easily improve targeting and take consumers to the next stage of the journey. It also helps track how ads are performing on each channel, and focus on the creative with the best ROI.
Combined with better real-time targeting, these features provide a more transparent way to measure effectiveness, and see exactly where you are spending your advertising dollars. Since many brands are hesitant to venture into unchartered territories, these new measurement tools can provide a safety net when trying out a new approach or new formats. Ultimately this will allow for more creative and innovative forms of advertising.
We believe that ads are most effective when working across multiple channels. By keeping the three rules I detailed top of mind, you will be able to capitalise on new formats and improve the ROI of any campaign, whichever combination of tactics you decide to go for
By Kirsty Brice, EMEA marketing director at 4C
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