Archives: Showcase

Still grappling with the evolution of TV and what it means for brands and consumers alike? Then this session is for you. We’ll be covering the evolving television landscape: bundling (and un-bundling), the future of on-demand, and how traditional broadcast TV is keeping up. You’ll leave with a clear view of how brands can take advantage of the best of both worlds – both streaming and linear.

With inflation, material shortages, and cost of living crises, people and businesses around the world are feeling the pinch. Nobody reasonable would look forward to downturn, but necessity is the mother of invention and history shows us that times of struggle can encourage leaps of creativity. How are advertisers and brands getting creative in this particular time of strife, and how will the industry weather the difficult times ahead? We asked 7 agency leaders from The Drum Network.

Allie Webb, marketing and innovation strategist at Coegi

When clients have a limited budget compared to competitors, we must strategically focus more on the research portion of the customer journey. Why? Because 30% of people go with a different brand once they start researching. This allows us to draft off of the broader awareness spend of major players in the space while capturing attention by highlighting key differentiators of our brands. From there, we test creative messaging and corresponding audience engagement.

Travel was hit hard by the pandemic. Lockdowns and other restrictions decimated business for airlines, accommodation providers and countless businesses downstream of the travel industry. Recovery has been slow in the pandemic’s long tail, with continued trepidation now exacerbated by inflation and cost-of-living crises. Many marketers have been closely involved in travel clients’ pivots, survival strategies and (now) regrowth plans.

We asked five experts from The Drum Network: what should marketers be thinking of during travel’s return voyage?

Thomas O’Malley, senior account manager, Coegi: use the right data in the right way

Travel brands have faced what have, at times, felt like insurmountable challenges during the pandemic. Our team had to be adaptable for our tourism clients, balancing creative ways to meet their goals while maintaining important public health considerations. We began using non-media data to assess consumer reception (and safety) to travel in certain areas.

What can the industry learn from the ways movies themselves are marketed – an area of the industry that sees some of its most creative cut-through work?

Savannah Westbrock, account strategy director at Coegi recommends: tailor assets to maximize excitement

All marketers can take cues from how the film industry has tweaked its standard playbook to bring digital and creative strategy together for the best customer experience and brand storytelling.

Consumer attention started to noticeably decline in the 2010s, and theater owners quickly caught on. They started pushing movie trailers to follow the same advice digital buyers give creative teams: shorten your videos. 2.5 minute trailers can be frustrating to sit through; and putting the same on various platforms can fatigue audiences. Thankfully, film marketers have started to improve their playbook and curate messaging for digital platforms.

Shorter ‘teaser’ trailers before the full trailer are becoming the norm; blockbusters now have multiple trailers introducing new footage to excite audiences over time. These strategies can be applied to any brand’s video strategy. For example, use six-second social media placements to tease standard ads. Or adapt your primary ad to digital video placements across social media and YouTube. Consider using sequential messaging to bring the audience through the full campaign story.

Things are moving at top speed, and clients’ 2022 goals are no exception. It can feel like a rat race as you re-evaluate budget, implement new tactics, reconstruct messages, tweak creative – doing ‘all the things.’

Being agile and pivoting for every single client whim will keep you on the roster today, but is that the partnership you anticipated when you first began? Coegi’s account strategy director Danielle Wesolowski has four tools to help you build the relationships you envisioned.

It’s time to challenge the status quo for audience targeting and measurement.

Many marketers have become highly dependent on the comfort of retargeting and the convenience of cookie-based ‘deterministic’ audiences. As a result, they readily accept the standard reports that claim that their ads are being served in the proper places (and not to bots).

But vanity metrics will be exposed, requiring marketers to abandon the ‘easy’ option and put in the work to determine what strategic changes must occur to drive growth for their brands.

Marketers need new ways to effectively reach audiences and drive results. That means testing new measurement partners, activating more private marketplaces and direct buys, and using technology to expand measurement capabilities beyond historical defaults. Brands must test and learn, benchmarking performance with cookies versus cookieless, to stay ahead of the competition.

In a cookieless world, the easy button is dead.

Long before acronyms like GDPR and CCPA, brands turned to the broad reach of ad networks and Facebook’s ever-knowing, ever-changing algorithm. Many gave it a blank check, seduced by the reach, click-through rates, and amassed conversions brought on by Wild, Wild West retargeting approaches.  Brand safety wasn’t discussed.

This mentality fed right into the programmatic narrative: Learn as you go, let the data make the decision.  Media planners, especially those who weren’t digital natives, were intrigued by the ease of it all.  Innovation meant testing new programmatic vendors against one another.  Success was measured by whatever metric was the easiest to track and achieve.  The battle for last click and last impression attribution was in full force, customer experience be damned. 

However, savvy programmatic practitioners have always understood there was no easy button.

So where do we go from here?

It’s time to redefine ROI as a way of remaining diligent in evaluating what’s working and what isn’t over time, because creating a highly profitable campaign takes time. Instead of thinking of ROI as return on investment, view ROI as a return on insight. Insights allow you to understand how media touchpoints are resulting affecting business outcomes and measuring the data points that matter at every step of the consumer journey.

So what steps do you need to take to build sustainable accountability into your marketing strategy?

The “cookieless future” has been much-discussed during the last few years, with plenty of opinions coming from marketers (like myself). However, the vast majority are not prepared to take action. 

It can be easy to fall into the trap of feeling that there’s plenty of time, especially with the just-made announcement that Google’s new target date for blocking third-party cookies has been delayed until 2024.

Sure, there’s always the possibility Google could delay once again, but the reality is inevitable. There will be a day when cookie-based targeting and tracking will be gone. Inaction today will result in failure in the future.

Here are three key ways marketers can set themselves and their brands up for success with the upcoming changes…

With changes in technology and capabilities evolving on what feels like a daily basis, it can be easy for you, as a marketer, to feel overwhelmed, behind, and concerned. You’ll ask yourself: Am I doing what’s best for my brand? Is my strategy outdated? Are my competitors’ strategies better?

With the influx of marketing trends and intelligence tools, we are entering what feels like the early social media age in digital. This means there’s a lot of comparison and self-doubt when flashy tactics gain more attention from onlookers. This leads to marketers chasing after the shiniest new trend without direction on how it will affect their business goals.

If this is you, it’s time to look in the mirror and ask: “Is my marketing strategy sound? Or am I experiencing FOMO?”