Welcome to the Digital Dish, where we dish on all things ad tech. Today, we’re talking about one of the industry’s hottest topics, creative. Creative has always been the first and one of the most important touch points in the advertising landscape. It’s the moment where brands interact with their customers, And truly communicate their messages.
Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript:
[00:00:00] Gabby Turyan, Director of Product Marketing: Welcome to the Digital Dish, where we dish on all things ad tech. Today, we’re talking about one of the industry’s hottest topics, creative. Creative has always been the first and one of the most important touch points in the advertising landscape. It’s the moment where brands interact with their customers, And truly communicate their messages.
Today, we’ll do a deep dive into the evolving role of creative and advertising, industry challenges, industry trends, and creative formats. And lastly, we’ll explore why working with an end to end partner is crucial for seamless activation, measurement, and reporting.
[00:00:54] Jamie Paro, Senior Director, Media Solutions: The role of creativity has changed significantly over time, driven by technology, consumer [00:01:00] behavior, and the media landscape. Here are some key ways in which this evolution has taken place. The shift from information to engagement. What we see in the industry is that initially, brands primarily focused on relaying information about their product or their services.
However, today, there’s definitely a greater emphasis on brands engaging and connecting emotionally with the consumers. Creative ads play a huge role in telling a stronger story, crafting narratives and experiences that resonate deeply with audiences. Integration of technology. The digital age has revolutionized advertising, allowing for interactive, personalized, and real time campaigns.
Creative teams now incorporate technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, and data analytics to create more immersive and targeted advertising experiences. More content and brand storytelling. Advertisers are now prioritizing storytelling and content marketing and have started to move away from interruptive creatives.
[00:02:00] Creative strategies now prioritize creating compelling narratives that not only promote products, but also entertain, educate, and inspire. A spotlight on authenticity and purpose. With more consumers attuned to authenticity and social responsibility, creative ads now often reflect the values and purpose driven messages that resonate with societal concerns and aspirations.
The multi channel approach. With the growth of digital channels and platforms, we’ve also seen advertisers adapt their strategies to to suit various formats and mediums. This includes deploying creative ads across social media, mobile devices, streaming platforms, and more. And finally, performance driven creative ads.
Analytics and insights have enabled advertisers to get smarter, more efficient, and better at understanding consumer behavior. With data driven creatives, advertisers can learn what touch points make the most impact. and how they can get smarter with their creative strategies. Overall, the essence [00:03:00] of creative ads and advertising remains about capturing attention and driving action.
One of the biggest changes we’ve seen in the industry is the importance of driving performance across the life cycle of a campaign.
[00:03:15] Matt Engstrom, Vice President of Marketing: Creatives were used to lure attention even in the early days of print. But in the age of digital, the advertising space has become increasingly saturated. The average consumer being exposed to not hundreds but thousands of ads daily, both online and offline. So let’s break down some of the challenges that the industry is facing today.
First of all, limited viewability. Ad blockers are reducing the visibility and effectiveness of traditional display and video ads, pushing marketers towards more engaging and less obtrusive ad formats. Also, viewability at scale. has become a challenge considering that ads are sometimes delivered outside the viewable screen.
So advertisers need to be thinking about partners and technology that can help them ensure that their ads are seen by real people. Oversaturation of ads is a [00:04:00] really big issue as well. Each one of us is exposed to. Thousands of images each and every day. So marketers really need to think about deploying a creative strategy that uses relevancy to break through the clutter and make sure that their ads are seen by the people that they want to reach.
Mirroring dynamic consumer behavior is also a concern for advertisers. Evolving consumer preferences, pose challenges in creating ads, resonate across diverse platforms. Personalization enhances relevance, but requires sophisticated data analytics and optimization to deploy. Fragmented creatives and cross channel consistency.
Many advertisers use separate agencies for creative production as well as execution, leading to inconsistent messaging across digital channels. A unified partner can ensure consistent branding and deployment across all channels and publishers. Measurement, attribution and performance is a big one.
Accurately measuring the impact of creative production. Advertising across channels and devices remains challenging. Advertisers need to seek partners that think about performance universally [00:05:00] and are able to tie performance analytics across creative strategies. Addressing these challenges requires a blend of creativity, human and technical intelligence, and data driven insights.
While these challenges exist, working with an end to end partner that can measure, optimize, and adapt strategies will ensure that your creatives are always driving the optimal performance.
[00:05:25] David Rosa, Lead Sales Designer: The industry has evolved and over the last few years we’ve seen the emergence of interactive and immersive ads. There’s a growing trend towards ads that offer interactive elements such as quizzes and games. The goals for these ads are to engage users more deeply than traditional static or video ads.
Personalization. Personalization has also grown and now creative ad units are increasingly personalized based on user data such as browsing behavior, location, or demographics. There are even specific formats like Dynamic creative optimization that allow for real time adjustments to optimize relevance and effectiveness.
[00:06:00] Video and rich media. As attention spans dwindle, video and rich media continues to dominate. There’s also a rise in rich media formats that combine video, animation, and interactive elements to create more engaging experiences. Native Advertising. The age of maximalism has also shed light on Native Advertising, which continues to be important as it seamlessly blends into the surrounding content, providing a less disruptive and more integrated user experience.
Examples can include sponsored articles, promoted listings, or social media native ads. The rise of programmatic creative. Automation in the creative production allows variations in ad messaging, visuals, and calls to action to be tested and optimized based on performance data. Sustainable and ethical advertising.
There is an increased emphasis on sustainability in creatives, reflecting broader societal trends towards eco consciousness and ethical advertising practices. So as technology progresses, what are we bound to see? Voice and audio ads. With the rise of voice assistants and smart speakers such as the Google Home.
There’s a growing interest in audio [00:07:00] based ads that will likely cause a rise in voice technology to engage users in new ways. Additionally, augmented reality and virtual reality. Emerging formats that will push boundaries and allow advertisers to tell immersive and experiential brand stories. Overall, the industry is evolving rapidly.
Driven by advancements in technology and changing consumer behaviors, creative leaders are becoming more sophisticated, personalized, and integrated across various digital platforms to enhance engagement and drive better marketing outcomes.
[00:07:37] Alyssa Hernandez, Account Manager: Advertisers should look for an agnostic partner that supports cross channel creatives and focuses on measurement and optimization to drive performance. An end to end partner is essential for smooth creative ad activation, measurement, and reporting. They handle everything from start to finish, ensuring that creative assets align with brand messaging and are strategically deployed across various [00:08:00] platforms.
This unified approach maintains consistency, enhances visibility, and maximizes audience reach. Additionally, they offer robust measurement and analytics to track performance. Set benchmarks and provide transparent reporting, helping brands optimize their advertising efforts, improve ROI, and make informed decisions for future strategies.
There are two ways advertisers can drive performance for creatives, optimization and measurement. Optimization is important because when creative media is run, there’s an opportunity to see in real time how ads are performing and continue to optimize. With an end to end partner, advertisers can measure the incremental effectiveness of creatives across different channels, providing valuable insights and improving overall performance.
With an end to end partner, measurement is integrated seamlessly. This allows advertisers to couple creatives with metrics like brandless studies and attention metrics to understand audience perceptions and enhance op [00:09:00] effectiveness. In today’s competitive advertising landscape, Partnering with an end to end provider is a game changer.
They ensure your creative assets are effectively developed, strategically deployed, and meticulously measured. By choosing a partner that offers optimization and comprehensive measurement, you can drive superior performance, achieve greater ROI, and make well informed decisions for future campaigns.
Investing in the right partner ultimately empowers your brand to reach its full advertising potential.
Interested in learning more about our best-in-class service and award-winning media technology? Speak to a team member today.
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Welcome to the sixth episode of Digital Dish, where we dish on all things adtech. Today we’re talking about one of the industry’s hottest topics, Converged TV. As the TV landscape continues to rapidly change, marketers and advertisers are re-evaluating CTV, linear, and what the future of their media strategies can look like. That’s where Converged TV comes in.
Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript:
[00:00:00] Caroline Morant, Product Marketing Manager: Welcome to Digital Dish, where we dish on all things ad tech. Today we’re talking about one of the industry’s hottest topics, Converged TV. As the TV landscape continues to rapidly change, marketers and advertisers are reevaluating CTV, Linear and what the future of their marketing strategies can look like.
That’s where Converged TV comes in. Today, we’ll deep dive into what is Converged TV, some industry challenges, linear versus CTV, Converged TV as a solution, and finally, Digital Remedy’s unique Converged TV approach.
[00:00:43] Stephanie Juhas, Sales Manager: At Digital Remedy, we see Converged TV as a holistic approach to activating and measuring marketing strategies across all TV. It takes a distinct media channel like CTV and linear [00:01:00] television out of silos, and it considers how these channels can complement each other to drive stronger performance across the board.
[00:01:08] Jeff DeSimone, Senior Director of Media Strategy: The key here for us is performance. Like with all our media, we take a performance driven approach and merge the lenses of linear and connected television. Measurement is a huge component that drives our Converged TV strategy, but we go beyond that with premium inventory and smarter strategies to drive true action from our insights.
[00:01:30] Matt Engstrom, Vice President of Marketing: So why do advertisers need a Converged TV strategy? A converged approach can help solve several important challenges. First of all, tighter budgets for media and data. Second, deprecation of third party cookies. Third, disconnected fragmented media plus no unified reporting and strategy. And lastly, consistent shifting across platform audience viewership.
In addition to the industry challenges that marketers face, they also [00:02:00] need to be thinking about CTV and linear a little bit differently, as there’s pros and cons to each. So with linear you get unparalleled reach, premium creative, engaged audiences, and trustworthy placements that are guaranteed to be brand safe.
However, there’s some drawbacks as well. First and foremost, it’s very difficult to tie performance to linear exposure, and a lot of times, marketers linear strategy sits outside of its digital strategy.
[00:02:26] Gabby Turyan, Director of Product Marketing: With CTV/OTT, you’ll also reach highly engaged audiences, and you can better measure performance. and lower funnel outcomes.
In general, when it comes to CTV, there are more available insights and transparency. However, some of the challenges with CTV is that it’s disconnected from linear. It’s a fragmented marketplace, and there is more nuance when it comes to activating targeting strategies and deriving true measurement.
[00:02:57] Katie Cladis, Vice President of Product: Converged TV takes the best of both linear [00:03:00] and CTV and allows you to view these channels side by side to optimize the efficiency of both. For example, you can capitalize on widespread reach with linear, but at the same time also drive incremental reach with more targeted CTV campaigns.
[00:03:15] Jeff DeSimone, Senior Director of Media Strategy: A Converged TV approach really allows you to manage and achieve optimal frequency by seeing how often users are being hit on each channel and what is actually driving that needle for you.
Depending on the KPIs, you can also drive stronger, lower funnel performance by honing in on households seeing both linear and CTV ads, since they’re the group most likely to convert.
[00:03:39] Stephanie Reustle, Regional Vice President, Sales – East: At Digital Remedy, we look at Converged TV as an end to end performance approach. It starts with strategic planning and activation on premium inventory for both linear and CTV. Then, we use TV insights to marry the two together and evaluate cross platform measurement. Finally, we take those learnings to [00:04:00] optimize both in real time and for future campaigns.
[00:04:08] Caroline Morant, Product Marketing Manager: At the end of the day, Converged TV isn’t about one definition, one tool, or even one strategy that works best for TV. It’s about being able to see the bigger picture and visualize what CTV and linear are doing separately, but also what they can do together to drive real results. Our goal is to equip advertisers with those tools and empower them to make smarter and more efficient decisions with their TV dollars.
Interested in learning more about our best-in-class service and award-winning media technology? Speak to a team member today.
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Welcome to the fifth episode of The Digital Dish, where we dish on all things ad tech! In our latest episode, we examine what great service means in the AdTech industry. Tune in to hear testimonials from the performance experts across our Client and Optimization Services, Product, and Marketing teams. They’ll share our unique approach to relationship building and how we strategize across departments to overcome challenges and develop custom performance media solutions to go above and beyond for our agency and brand-direct clients.
Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript:
[00:00:00] Gabby Turyan, Director of Product Marketing: Welcome to the latest episode of The Digital Dish, where we talk about what good service looks like. You’ll hear from a couple of the folks at Digital Remedy talk about what good service looks like to them. Stay tuned.
[00:00:23] Richard Francone, Senior Director of Media Buying: Good service comes down to three basic things. Responsiveness, professionalism, and proactiveness. As long as you’re combining those three things and doing them effectively, I think you’re servicing the client really well.
[00:00:34] Caroline Morant, Product Marketing Manager: Good service is a blend of empathy and expertise. I think it’s about, you know, listening and understanding.
Really meeting clients where they are. And then using that expertise to get them where they want to be.
[00:00:48] Michael Juhas, SVP of Client Services: When you have a good symbiotic relationship between a client and partner, you’re able to accomplish so many more things in terms of actually delivering upon the objectives that clients are trying to achieve.
[00:01:02] Matt Engstrom, VP of Marketing: The most important thing is to be able to put yourself in your client’s shoes, to be able to understand their business, their role, their personal challenges and their business challenges well enough to be able to anticipate their needs and not just be available when something is not going right, but to be proactively ready to recommend new strategies or new opportunities to create value for that client.
[00:01:29] Sophie Kirk, VP of Client Services: Service and trust go hand in hand. To be able to provide quality service to your clients, they must trust you. They have to have that relationship with you to understand that they can rely on you, you are accountable and you will provide excellent service.
[00:01:41] Annie Skivington, Sr. Media Planner: Trust is a key component in every relationship and it’s important to have trust in every member of your team so that there’s an expert at every step of the way that can keep things running smoothly.
[00:01:50] Michael Juhas, SVP of Client Services: The best way to establish trust is time. Anyone that tells you that you can build trust right away is living in a different world. You really need to show results to build trust. And you do that by over investing in them, truly understanding what they’re trying to achieve, and then building solutions and offerings that help deliver upon what their objectives are.
[00:02:19] Richard Francone, Senior Director of Media Buying: So what does customer service look like when things aren’t going well. That’s an important aspect of customer service. We want to make sure that we’re maintaining an open and honest conversation with our clients, including them in the problem solving process and using our industry knowledge to get all the important stakeholders involved.
And presenting legitimate solutions, not just band aids for a problem, but legitimate solutions.
[00:02:41] Sophie Kirk, VP of Client Services: There are going to be mistakes that happen, there are going to be challenges every single day, and the ability to be truthful with your client of exactly what happened, bring an action plan forward, and bring that resolution to them is always going to be the best case scenario to ensure they understand that you take this seriously and you’re here to help them forward through that mistake or roadblock that they might have.
[00:03:06] Annie Skivington, Sr. Media Planner: So throughout a campaign, there might be issues that come up, whether you’re not meeting your KPIs or your goals. And when that happens, it’s important to stay solution oriented and to stay calm so that the client doesn’t feel like you’re also stressed. Coming up with solutions off the bat that you can bring to the client is great.
One thing that we do with my clients is that every time a campaign finishes, we do a full audit of that campaign. And that way in the future, we can think about what worked and what didn’t.
[00:03:34] Richard Francone, Senior Director of Media Buying: Technology plays a really, really important role in providing good customer service. And it works on two fronts.
It works internally here at Digital Remedy. And it works externally for our clients as well. Clients are able to utilize our technology to maintain knowledge of their campaign and what’s going on on a day to day basis. And at the same time, technology internally helps promote efficiency so that we’re running as smoothly as possible, as efficiently as possible so that we can meet and beat any, any client needs that may come up.
So technology not only promotes participation, but it also promotes efficiency and transparency as well.
[00:04:11] Michael Juhas, SVP of Client Services: People are extremely important in delivering results, but when you’re able to leverage technology to get from point A to point B quicker, you have much more likelihood in delivering client objectives.
[00:04:22] Gabby Turyan, Director of Product Marketing: I don’t think that proprietary technology is the end all be all.
I think it’s the idea that you have great technology built to solve a specific challenge that is then leveraged by amazing people who know how the technology can work best and then optimize those two together. And you have above and beyond service. You have phenomenal service. So it’s really thinking about building proprietary tech.
For example, like a reporting and insights tool that’s unifying a pool of data streams. And then really having your account managers, your client service team, your, your commercial team, being able to, to look into that piece of technology and pull out those insights that the media and optimization team were working closely on.
So it’s really having a combination of both because tech alone can’t solve for all of those challenges.
[00:05:22] Sophie Kirk, VP of Client Services: You know, what really sets digital remedy apart is not only our tenure with our employees. A lot of the employees across our teams have been here five plus years. Within our industry, that’s unheard of.
Another piece is that our ability to own and innovate our own technology allows for our clients to efficiently access endpoints that they’re not able to elsewhere. Digital Remedy has focused on service from the beginning. We look at building our employees to be cross department functioning so that they have that background in the technical side.
Maybe they worked in media buying to begin with and now they’re account managers. This allows for them to have fully educated conversations with their clients to ensure there’s no middlemen or anything lost in communication. Our account managers are providing service because they are those topic experts.
[00:06:12] Gabby Turyan, Director of Product Marketing: Digital Remedy has been around for 23 plus years and what we can all attest to is that we hire really great talent and really great people. People that are driven, optimistic and really hungry for a challenge. And so you can see that being reflected departmentally. We’re consultative in the way that we address any specific client challenges.
We’re cognizant of the industry they’re in. So perhaps they’re, you know, in the travel sector or in the CPG sector. So we’re cognizant of the audiences that they’re trying to target. Sort of the overall economic landscape, any industry challenges that may be applicable towards them.
And keeping all of those specific points in mind, we can start to build plans that are really custom to solve for their challenges. And we go above and beyond because we’ve started to think about travel specific solutions, CPG specific solutions, and really building out custom strategies in order to meet the needs and the challenges of our clients without them being too general.
[00:07:23] Matt Engstrom, VP of Marketing: I think service at Digital Remedy is so strong for a particularly unique reason. And I think that it’s from day one, service is ingrained into every single employee. So even if you don’t necessarily work in a client facing role, you are very much focused on, on understanding how to provide value for clients.
And everybody in the organization is taught that and it’s ingrained in us from day one. And I think it’s also interesting that it translates into the culture itself, like we as a business are very much focused on people, taking care of people, making sure that everybody has a great experience working here at Digital Remedy and that empathetic approach and ethos can easily be translated into the way that we’re interacting with clients on a day to day basis.
Interested in learning more about our best-in-class service and award-winning media technology? Speak to a team member today.
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Welcome to the fourth episode of The Digital Dish, where we dish on all things ad tech! This episode focuses on Linear TV, including an overview of what we are seeing in the linear and streaming landscape, the industry challenges advertisers face, and the converged future of linear and CTV. Tune in to discover how combining these two strategies can effectively maximize your campaign impact.
A new age of television has begun — one where linear and streaming CTV/OTT platforms coexist, compete, and create new possibilities for brands. Linear is a powerhouse channel for driving unprecedented reach and boosting top-funnel brand performance, but uncovering the true power of linear TV is at the convergence point of linear and digital. As shifts in audience viewership continue, the need for innovative strategy and a unified approach to cross-platform measurement has never been more important for advertisers.
Catch up on our previous Digital Dish episodes on our YouTube page, or speak to a team member to learn more and discover how Digital Remedy can support your converged TV strategy!
When you prioritize the combined power of a convergent TV strategy, you can:
Whether you’re new to TV buying or need a strategic partner to drive major cost efficiencies on your current linear spending, our team has you covered!
Be sure to follow Digital Remedy on LinkedIn and sign up for our Trends & Insights newsletter for the latest industry updates.
Welcome to the third episode of The Digital Dish, where we dish on all things ad tech! This episode focuses on attribution, including an overview of what it is, what the industry challenges are, the pros and cons of four different types of methodologies, and best practices for maximizing your media strategy.
Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript:
This series topic is attribution. The digital age has brought a wealth of opportunity for businesses of all sizes. With that opportunity comes a new set of challenges, among them attribution.
Attribution, or the process of determining which channels are driving customer behavior, has always been important for businesses, and in this age, it’s more important than ever. With so many channels and so much noise, it’s more difficult to determine which channels are actually driving sales and conversions.
In this episode of the Digital Dish, we’ll look at:
What we know is that all media strategies are tied to outcomes. Whether your brand is looking to measure engagement or actual direct response, you need to know whether you are getting a return on your investment. It’s likely that as a marketer, you are running a combination of media and need to track the sources of your traffic and leads to determine what is and isn’t working.
This is where attribution comes in. While attribution isn’t always easy to understand, it is crucial. It’s hard to track a customer’s journey:
But ultimately, you do need to know what the customer journey was (from start to finish) and understand which channels played a part in the consumer’s journey to buy or engage with your product or service.
There are a LOT of attribution models out there, so today, we are going to uncover some truths and simplify them for you.
So why measure? Why is attribution so important? Well, to start, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. By tracking the success (or lack thereof) of your marketing efforts, you can determine what’s working and what’s not. And that knowledge will help you allocate your resources more effectively in the future, working towards the goal of increasing overall ROI.
The most common methodology you’ll hear of is the last-touch model of attribution. The flaw here is that last touch refers to just that – the last touch point a customer had interacted with before making a purchase. This isn’t always accurate, however, since we are all subject to so many screens, shared screens, and innumerable distractions. The single-user journey just isn’t the case anymore.
For example, if a customer sees a social media ad, hears an audio ad, and then sees a display ad that they click on and finally make a purchase, the social and audio ad would not receive credit in the last touch attribution model.
That’s why it’s important to use more than one attribution model. By using multiple models, you can get a more accurate picture of how your marketing is performing and where you need to make adjustments.
Now we’re going to review four attribution methodologies, as well as their pros and cons, so you can be informed and ultimately choose the right one for your business. So, what are they?
Let’s first start with last touch methodology, which is the most commonly used. Last touch refers to the last touch point a customer had interacted with before making a purchase and therefore giving this last touch point the entire conversion credit.
The single-user journey just isn’t the case anymore. If you are working with a long buying cycle or want to understand how the consumer goes from the initial brand awareness stage through the funnel to becoming a customer or user, this methodology isn’t for you.
The next is first touch methodology, which is the opposite of last touch. With first touch, the first time that a customer interacts with your company that is determined the most important reason they ended up purchasing with you.
Next up, we have linear attribution, which is a multi-touch model–meaning it takes into account and attributes credit to multiple touchpoints along the customer journey. In fact, this model actually takes into account every single interaction that a prospect has had with your brand prior to purchasing. This method is incredibly easy to understand as every single touchpoint is given the same amount of credit, so the equation is as follows:
100% of the overall credit / the number of touchpoints in the conversion path = the amount of credit per touchpoint
For example, if your customer has four interactions with your brand before deciding to convert, each would, therefore, have 25% of the credit.
Finally, there’s time decay attribution. This is similar to linear in that it’s a multi-touch model that gives some credit to all channels that led to the conversion. However, this is different with that amount of credit being less (or “decaying”) the further back in time the channel was interacted with. This assumes that the first channel your customer interacted with merely planted the seed, and the customer’s interest in committing to a purchase grew over time with repeated exposure to various marketing channels. Think of this as a rising level of interest and commitment from the customer over time.
Now that we can understand what attribution is and the different methodologies you can consider, the next step is to review your current strategies to see which ones are working and which ones need improvement. Here are a few tips to help you master attribution in the digital age:
Use a consistent methodology across all channels and platforms. This involves creating benchmark goals and making sure that all channels are performing according to those standards.
Set up advanced tracking capabilities, such as key conversion pixels on high-traffic landing pages or mobile app tracking for detailed insights. Having multiple data points will help you pinpoint any weaknesses in your attribution model and make timely adjustments.
Be proactive in finding ways to increase return on investment from existing channels. You don’t want to track just performance; rather, you should continually seek out ways to improve results through optimization techniques such as A/B testing or identifying new audiences with demographic data. If you are a brand or agency with a goal to understand which touchpoint or variable along the consumer path is driving conversions and in the past have been directed to a single touch model, for example (like last or first touch), start thinking outside of that assumed-consumer path and consider a methodology that would best suit your specific set of challenges.
Leveraging these best practices and taking advantage of the latest technologies, as well as our custom attribution guidance, will help you master each methodology and create a more sophisticated strategy to drive best results.
As technology advances, so too does our ability to measure and optimize attribution. Thanks to powerful data visualization tools, machine learning algorithms, and the ever-growing volume of available customer data, marketers now have access to a wealth of insights when it comes to understanding where each consumer interaction is coming from.
Detail is key here, with the right technology, we can analyze granular data about each marketing initiative – including specific channels, campaigns, and even individual creatives – to understand how each variable impacts your customer journey and overall bottom line. Our full-funnel attribution methodologies help all advertisers across all verticals make better decisions about which tactics are most effective for driving results, wherever they may lie in the marketing funnel.
Take an example that we recently worked on with a DTC e-commerce brand. They had a digital strategy spanning multiple channels, from Performance CTV to Podcasts, Social, and Display Retargeting, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to equate purchases to any one variable and, thus, hard to dedicate specific spend to any one channel.
Both the first and last touch methodologies were not a suitable solution for this client, as they were new to market, had a higher price point of goods, and a longer sales cycle. It meant that typically, a customer interacted with media multiple times across multiple channels before making a purchase. Our team at Digital Remedy assessed every impression of this campaign and provided traceable data correlating each impression to a conversion, whether that was an online purchase, homepage visit, or email sign up. This full-funnel data allowed us to flag variables that were significant in the customer journey and therefore recommend the allocation of higher spend to these channels, and ultimately drive down the CPA for this client.
Attribution is a core digital marketing function, and it’s more complex than most people realize. It’s not just about correctly identifying the channels that drove a conversion but also understanding how each channel works together to influence conversions and from there, determining the most effective allocation of dollars and resources.
Getting attribution right is essential for optimizing your return on investment. With these data sets and insights, you can make more informed decisions about where to allocate your budget, and which channels are most likely to drive down cost per acquisition.
The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and it’s crucial that, as marketers, we stay ahead of the curve and master the art of attribution. With the right tools and knowledge, you can make sure your marketing efforts are always working as hard as they can to drive conversions and growth. Think of attribution as step one. Once we get that right, we can build upon its foundation with specialized optimization, incrementality, and halo effect methodologies.
Interested in learning more? Check out our Trends & Insights report—or speak to a team member! Be sure to follow Digital Remedy on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for the latest updates.
Welcome to the second episode of The Digital Dish, where we dish on all things ad tech. This episode focuses on Incrementality, including an overview of what it is, what the industry challenges are, and what solutions advertisers and agencies can tap into when utilizing incrementality methodology.
Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript:
Incrementality addresses two major concerns, especially when you’re trying to assess a single, possible experimental media type. Native demand for products/site visits/leads etc., and all the other media, especially walled-garden media. With proper incrementality testing, we can factor both out entirely, getting right to the heart of the media type we’re analyzing to assess a true, bottom-line impact.
In its simplest form, incrementality is the percentage of total conversions that otherwise would not have happened. When we measure incremental lift: that involves what percent more likely someone who is exposed to a campaign is to convert than someone who is not exposed to a campaign.
We now live in a world where measurement is growing more and more important, and we start to bootstrap spending and really assess where and how marketing dollars are impacting our bottom line. And Incrementality answers questions like:
In this video, we’ll look at:
What we’ve seen in the industry is that traditional marketing performance metrics have been around for many years and marketers still rely on them. Traditional marketing metrics such as CPA, CTR, and VCR, while important, can leave room for additional questions requiring custom analytics to answer. With limited media budgets and advertisers now experimenting with different channels and formats, understanding the true impact of your marketing is crucial in making budgeting decisions and being able to justify scale. Most marketers would (understandably) only want to spend money on channels that drive those bottom-line results and ensure a positive brand experience.
Marketers are facing a looming cookieless future, evolving privacy regulations, fragmented customer data, and the accelerating complexities of identity management. They’re seeking an alternative approach to evaluating the effectiveness of their campaigns. In response to new privacy rules requiring mobile apps to get things like explicit user consent and access to an IDFA device. eMarketer states that 64% of marketing executives plan to invest more in other measurement solutions like incrementality and media mix modeling. When implemented correctly, incrementality can boost a brand’s revenue and help marketers prove their value.
An increasing share of the industry is looking to move away from last-touch attribution. The majority of marketers really do still depend on it because of its ease of use. While last-touch is a simple way to assign credit, it’s not the most accurate. Incrementality is really there to identify the causal event of a conversion, and it’s allowing businesses to properly allocate their budget and reduce wasted ad spend.
Based on the conversations I’ve had, it’s pretty critical for advertisers to understand how their digital marketing efforts are impacting their sales. Incrementality offers deeper insights and more accuracy when measuring metrics like attribution, lift, and return on investment. Incrementality done correctly, and in comparison to the other methodologies, it’s reinforcing the need for marketers to have the right tools in place to drive a brand’s growth and their marketing efforts forward.
The industry challenge for many different advertisers is to make the most out of their dollars. And that means maximizing their media budgets. Advertisers are always experimenting with different channels and formats, and they want to understand the true impact of their efforts. This is really crucial in making budgeting decisions, as well as justifying scale.
In today’s ad landscape, brands run across many different media channels—this can be from paid search to CTV, display, and direct mail, and customers are often exposed to several different media types—as well as several different ads within each media type—before making a purchase or whatever their conversion point might be. And so, therein lies the challenge: How do marketers know which specific ads, or which specific campaigns actually drove the conversion, when so many other campaigns and ads are running concurrently? And how do they separate an individual channel from the rest, or from their own organic or native demand? This is where incrementality comes into play.
One of the examples that I’m about to share will allow you to understand that incremental lift can be measured across numerous variables:
Our team was working with a very well-known QSR advertiser. One of the ways that we wanted to involve incrementality was through the measurement of their creative and publisher lists. We wanted to look at these two pieces and provide them with insights they would not have been able to derive on their own. When we launched incrementality with this QSR advertiser, we could get really granular and look at these different variables. We were able to see which publishers were showing the highest incremental lift as well as which creatives were driving the highest incremental lift, and then also which ones weren’t.
From there, looking at this data, we were able to make optimizations toward these findings. And not only that, but we were able to provide the client with more insights to enable them to make informed decisions around their creative strategy, and this client actually ran a handful of different creative messaging throughout the campaign. Incrementality allowed us to show them which creative messaging drove the highest incremental lift in 2022. And from those results, they’re actually currently shooting to provide us with additional videos that align with this same messaging so that we can have more variety within this creative batch, and then additionally, on the publisher side, we really saw that sports inventory was a top performer for them, so we’re keeping that in mind as we go into 2023 and really maximizing the inventory that is sports related for their 2023 campaign. That’s just one real-life example of how incrementality is allowing us to see the lift across these different variables and find those points of success and then make pushes in those specific areas for continued improvement.
When discussing incrementality, we’re talking about measuring conversions that otherwise would not have happened. The reason why this is important is because we wanna make sure that any conversions that we’re driving with our OTT or our CTV spend are actually driving conversions that are not duplicative with the marketer’s other channels.
Marketers are running search and social and maybe affiliate marketing, and those are doing a great job driving conversions. And there’s a middle of that diagram with the conversions that we will also drive. The way that we do this is we set up a test and what we want to do is we want to analyze the difference in behaviors between two groups.
The first group is an exposed group, that’s people who have seen the campaign that we’re running for a client. The second group is a control group, and these are people who are actively prohibited from seeing an advertisement from this campaign.
And what we’re doing is we’re measuring the lift of that exposed group over that control group, or we’re seeing how those ads impact the behaviors of the people who actually saw them. We do this by looking at conversion rates between the two groups. And the reason we look at conversion rates and not just the number of conversions is that the group size is different.
And the way that we actually create that holdout group is through a process called ghost bidding. What Ghost bidding is, is if you imagine we’re set to serve five ads to individuals, all the targeting that’s applied, goes, behaviors, devices, all of that targeting is applied.
And then, instead of serving one of those five ads, we actually end up holding that person who is eligible for that ad out of the campaign. In other words, four ads get served, one ad gets held out. And then we’re creating a holdout group that mimics the exposed group exactly from a behavioral-, from a targeting-, from a demographic perspective.
All of the targeting that is applied to the exposed group is also applied to the control group because those individuals are actually eligible for bits. There’s no skew this way. So we avoid any skew that would’ve happened with a random sample. And instead, we’re making sure the two groups look exactly alike.
And then the second benefit is, because we’re not actually serving the ad, we don’t have to pay for the impression. So we can run this analysis free of charge. After we, have created that holdout group, what we’re able to do is measure the conversion rate lift of the exposed group over that holdout group.
And not only can we do this at the overall level, we can do this below the aggregate, which means that we can measure which publishers, which creatives, which times of day, which audiences are over-indexing or or have a higher incremental lift, than other times of day or other audiences or, other creatives or publishers, whatever that variable set might be.
Because we’re able to get below the aggregate, we can actually apply this analysis into the way that we optimize. So as opposed to just optimizing toward a standard ROAS goal or a standard CPA goal, we’re able to actually optimize toward an incremental CPA or an incremental ROAS. Adding another touchpoint and making sure that the creatives and the publishers and the day parts and the audiences that we’re targeting and ultimately moving money toward are actually driving bottom-line results, not just an in-platform low CPA reporting result.
This is all part of an effort to unsilo OTT. We wanna make sure that whatever we’re doing for our clients is actually in the best benefit from a bottom-line perspective, not just that we’re looking good from a reporting perspective in-platform.
Interested in learning more? Check out our Intro to Incrementality series or our Trends & Insights report—or speak to a team member! Be sure to follow Digital Remedy on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for the latest updates.
The Digital Remedy Team is excited to announce the launch of our “Digital Dish” series, where we’ll tap into industry experts to share the latest news on all things ad tech, plus actionable insights for advertisers and agencies! We’re kicking things off with the team discussing #PerformanceTV, including why it’s such a hot topic, industry challenges, and some of the solutions that can be considered when it comes to getting the most from Performance TV.
Prefer to read? Here’s the transcript: We dish on all things ad tech. We’re kicking off with performance TV as this is a hot topic in the industry. Performance has traditionally been associated with search, display and social. However, these media are producing diminishing returns as consumer attention becomes more divided and advertisers continue to saturate those channels, we now live in a world where performance traditionally associated with pure play digital channels can now actually be achieved on TV. This is accomplished through the right data, insights that can tell you how your partners are performing, and real-time optimization opportunities. Performance TV answers questions like what is resonating best with what audiences, what creatives work best, what event would cause a customer to convert. And in this video, we’ll look at what we’ve seen in the industry, what the industry challenges, and some of the solutions a brand or agency can consider when it comes to getting the most from performance TV. What we’ve seen in traditional TV advertising has been focused on casting a wide net to capture audience for advertisers. As a result, advertisers have traditionally looked to reach and frequency as the key metrics for campaign success. But with the growth in digital advertising, advertisers saw an opportunity to use a new medium to deliver advertising that could be closely tied to performance. So, over the last few years, we’ve seen a significant growth in CTV and the need to tie that exposure to an actual response. With linear, we have an inability in real time to evaluate, perform. Performance can be defined as being able to measure an outcome, whether that be website visits, online purchases, app downloads, and more. That’s how performance marketing for TV was born. And as performance TV has a solution that evolves, so will the industry and marketers now have the opportunity to boost KPIs and drive their media investment efficiently. The industry challenge that a lot of advertisers have right now is twofold. You have the linear side of the house that’s all about premium, nonskippable, 100% in-view inventory, but they’re lacking the data metrics coming back to be able to validate, yes or no, if this is the right medium mix for them. On the digital side of the house, you’re getting all those validating metrics back, but on the front side, you’re getting a lot of low-impact advertising that may or may not have a true impact on the bottom line. So where performance TV comes into play is it’s blending the two of those worlds together and eliminating those cons. You still get your non-skippable premium 100% in-view TV inventory, and you’re getting those attributable data metrics down funnel to validate, yes or no, if this is the right place for you. So that’s really where we see performance TV being the best of both worlds. So as this whole streaming ecosystem has emerged so too has the ad space surrounding it. What we’re talking about here is combining the best things about digital with the best things about linear television. Digitally we’re used to being able to target granular audiences, target certain geographies in market segments, particular types of inventory. All of that stuff is also available within the streaming advertising ecosystem. With linear, we’re talking about really high-impact placements on, you know, TV on your wall full screen, full episode player. And again, with streaming, all of that is available too. That’s the default format. So with the two of these things combined, we have really enhanced targeting, really enhanced formats, and then the last part of this ecosystem is measurement. What we’re talking about here is the instance where you’re watching a show on Hulu, you see an advertisement for a brand, and then you take some real-world action that’s relevant to that brand. So you go to the brand’s website, you check out, or you go to a store. These are the types of things that performance CTV vendors and advertisers are starting to be able to do and accomplish as they’re starting to explore the streaming ecosystem. So you get really enhanced measurement capabilities on this ecosystem as well as the ability to do things like incrementality analysis, the ability to wrap in brand lift, the ability to get insights below the aggregate, so seeing which streamers, which times of day which audiences, which creatives are really driving those actions that matter the most to you and your brand. Interested in learning more? Read our recent Trends & Insights report or speak to a team member! Stay updated on more insights by following us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
