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Digital Media Planning and Buying
The Digital Revolution
In business, everything begins and ends with the consumer
Building a relationship with the customer is extremely important. In today’s world, the customer is a force that didn’t exist before. This situation is changing dynamically – not long ago, there were no digital customers. Their habits, expectations, behavior, and capabilities are changing. The consumer is very impatient, and consequently, their needs change – and it’s precisely to these needs that the entire digital industry adapts. After all, each of us has at least one such guilty pleasure of going to an electronics store, asking the salesperson about the pros and cons of a device, choosing the right one, and then walking out and buying it online. This illustrates the ubiquitous change – a continuous change that agencies and advertising campaigns must constantly adapt to. Just two years ago, desktop devices were the foundation of advertising. People used computers to browse the internet – searching, shopping, and surfing. There was simply no other way. Today it’s different. 80% of our clients reached us through mobile devices. This revolution is happening before our eyes. Until 2018, the vast majority of users (source: Genius) accessed content through desktop devices. The period of 2007-2016 was a time when television was by far the best medium. The end of 2021 marked the era of multiscreening. Users increasingly began combining media from different sources simultaneously. The most common combination is television with a phone. For advertisers, this represents a new method of reaching customers and generating conversions. What’s the takeaway? Advertising must constantly evolve and adapt. You can’t rely on having a budget and hoping for returns. Advertising needs to be optimized and constantly adjusted to today’s dynamic market realities.
Video
Analysis of major companies’ campaigns delivers one crucial rule:
the best advertising is video.
Video reigns supreme among advertising formats. The number of views, the conversion method, and its level are all significantly better with video. Regardless of the chosen conversion method, video is always the most effective. Creating video advertisements and promotional films is challenging and relatively expensive. It requires hiring actors, models, influencers, or working on graphic animation. Nevertheless, the results achieved through such solutions are by far the best. Video engages. It’s the last bastion of user attention. Given that we live in times of ubiquitous banner blindness, it’s difficult to capture a potential customer’s attention and convince them that your proposed solutions are good and worth choosing. YouTube offers two types of ads you can purchase. The first is a 6-second bumper that cannot be skipped. The second is a longer TrueView video that can be skipped after 5 seconds of viewing. Regardless of the chosen method of visual communication, we always recommend video to increase conversions and reach people interested in the promotional campaign.
The purchase path is not linear
There was a time when the purchase path was considered a linear phenomenon. The customer learns the brand exists, chooses it, buys, and that’s it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. The decision-making process and building opinions about a brand is a complex phenomenon created through the synergy of various content, methods, and awareness distribution channels. Every planner must anticipate what 21st-century challenges they need to overcome to reach someone interested in the brand. You can combine a blog (owned source – free knowledge), video content (brand awareness), and PPC advertising (targeting potential customers who are already aware of the brand’s existence). However, another brand might be very unsuitable for this technique because it has a lower level of social trust. Far fewer people will visit a yogurt brand’s website to read about their products than visit an IT company’s blog to learn about how websites work. In such cases, a different campaign approach must be used.
Methods of sharing knowledge and spreading opinions about a brand can be divided into three groups: PAID, EARNED, and OWNED.
- PAID – paid advertising whose purpose is to deliver the campaign to the customer,
- EARNED – earned channels. A brand with a good reputation has gained so-called “word of mouth.” This is a free and powerful marketing tool. You don’t need to convince a teenager that Apple’s iPhone is a good product. Young people talk, exchange observations, and praise the brand without receiving compensation,
- OWNED – your own conversion sources – a YouTube channel, blog, email marketing. The most valued source of customer acquisition, as we’ve reached a point where customers appreciate the free knowledge you share. You don’t have to pay to acquire customers. Having your own customer base allows you to become independent of paid methods of accessing personal data.
Omnichannel
As mentioned in the previous section, today’s consumer is omnipresent. They can watch television, follow social media, and iron clothes or cook simultaneously. Therefore, a consistent advertising and content policy must be maintained. What does this actually mean? It’s impossible to create beautiful social media communication without a proper website or YouTube channel. The consumer will notice, find out, and know. They’ll realize that a certain path is dead. The brand and its image must be consistent. The potential customer must be captivated by its perfect vision to feel confident and comfortable. It will often happen that a consumer seeing a TV advertisement becomes curious and immediately goes to Google to find the brand and the specific promotional campaign. This is where Google Ads comes in. Once they’re on the site, they must see a ready, attractive landing page prepared for that specific campaign. Finally, when they’re making their decision and check social media – we must be consistent and well-developed there too. Every channel available to customers must be clear, maintained, and developed. Unfortunately, in these times of rapidly advancing digital media, the thesis has become true: if you’re not on the internet, you don’t exist.
The end of cookies?
You saw it in the title and this is not clickbait (deliberately misleading the user to get a click). This is true! Different times are coming, and with them new ways to optimize, build, and analyze campaigns.
A few days ago, a conference was held announcing that starting in 2023, saving third-party cookies will be blocked by Google. This is a very big blow to marketing in its current form. It means that for the average user, advertising will become more anonymous. Due to the blocking of third-party cookie saving on our website, it will no longer be possible to use remarketing, analyze traffic, or personalize ad content. If media houses don’t create a new way to store consumer profiling data, advertising will return to levels of several years ago. Complete sets of personal data will become very valuable, look-alike packages (purchasing data packages from other entities with similar customer profiles) will be in demand, and in most cases, advertising will become neutral. Due to the inability to count, analyze, and track through third-party cookies, there are rumors that advertising in its current form will disappear for a while (until other methods of tracking and profiling are developed) and the internet will return to advertising as we know it from television or radio – general, non-profiled, and standard.
A new cure for all ills?
There’s been so much talk about how the invention and development of the internet solved advertising problems. There are more possibilities for analyzing, optimizing, and targeting advertising, so the average user can be profiled with very high accuracy. Unfortunately, not every ad we pay for online is actually visible. The viewability standard defines how much an ad must be visible for the client to pay for it. It has been established that a video ad shown for 2 seconds at 50% of its size is considered shown. For a standard graphic ad, it’s one second. These are parameters that mean the cost per impression or per view we know from campaign analysis doesn’t always convey true value. Unfortunately, there are problems that prevent ads from reaching audiences: AdBlockers, fraud, bots, and scams. Beyond these issues (which we can’t control), there are those arising from consumer behavior that make reaching a given person more difficult – namely banner blindness. Unfortunately, the internet is oversaturated with advertising. There’s a lot of it and it’s everywhere. The coming years are supposed to remove the worst types (pop-ups) from our sight, but even without them, portals represent serious real estate for advertisers. This has caused the human body to become desensitized to the impact and visibility of banners on websites. Our sight becomes selective, and capturing consumer attention becomes increasingly difficult. This is a challenge of digital marketing that we must face every day.
New celebrities
One solution that comes to the rescue is celebrities. The new era of advertising has also brought new celebrities – influencers! They can help overcome banner blindness and advertise our product or service. Depending on the type of influencer, the collaboration process looks different. If we’re looking for big players, we contact a specific person, and when targeting a specific market, numerous micro-influencers are gathered to deliver content to a specific audience. Smaller influencers usually have a more engaged audience. A celebrity with a large audience often has a slightly less dedicated following. They’re a group of people who follow or have saved a given account, but rarely devoted “devotees.”
EVERY CAMPAIGN STARTS WITH A BRIEF!
Before implementing any product campaign, a brief of what we want to achieve must be prepared. The goal of advertising can be increasing brand awareness or specific sales. Each campaign will be planned, implemented, and even optimized differently. For example, an ad that aims to encourage people to visit a website and sign up for a webinar works better on Facebook, which has better conversion rates for website visits.
The target audience must be defined – a group of people who may be interested in purchasing or using our offer. Different advertising platforms have different data about their audiences. On Facebook, we can target ads based on users’ interests and activities. Amazon and Allegro know what users buy, search for, and need, while Google knows what they’re searching for. The medium and distribution method depends on the knowledge we need to leverage. When buying programmatically, we adjust parameters that may be key, and their values and optimization scope remain flexible. Another parameter worth sharing is the available budget. It will determine the number of actions we can take or tell us how many elements we need to cut from the planned campaign.
The results of such advertising should be tracked and compared with the assumptions described in the brief. Numerous analytics tools serve this purpose – Google Analytics, Google DoubleClick. Based on the delivered data, conclusions should be drawn and input data improved to enhance results.
So that in the end, it’s the client who comes away satisfied, and the spent budget is an investment, not a cost!
