Strategic Advertising Forum
On last Friday, April 20th, 2018, I attended a conference, Strategic Advertising Forum, which organized by the Grassroots Professional Network at Condé Nast, One World Trade Center. This forum was sponsored by Google and MV Digital Group, discussing the best practices, strategy, engaging case studies, and overall thought leadership.
The forum was begun by Beth Heller, Google Partner Enablement Manager, talking the video views trend these days. She pointed out the extremely low view duration, which is less than nine seconds, and marketers should figure out a way to capture their audiences’ attention in such a short period. She also pointed out advertisers only pay if people read the ad through. If they skip, the advertisers don’t pay for it. On Youtube, it focuses more on target interest instead of demographics. The best way to get to your target is to reach the undecided, not the uninterested. Thus, marketers have to identify the warm leads and retarget them from the past ads the audience watched, the user search history, used Apps, as well as the mapped data. “People read about interest ad.” To reach and grab their attention with good storytelling.
Next, it was a panel discussion hosted by Eric Storey, Executive Vice President of the Grassroots Professional Network, discussing the agency perspectives on digital advertising strategy. One of the panelist in this session claimed that quality content behind ads and clear call to actions and get to the right audiences. In digital advertising, staging a campaign step-by-step can get more engagement. Create multiple touch-points and easy-to-do actions are better than asking the audiences to look at an ad and do something. Also, another panelist stated custom retargeting is essential to reach them again in the future. He also said that the most passionate targets would scroll through or go to the second page so marketers should save the cost from targeting on the top search.
When the discussion came to measurement, “Impression is garbage,” said one of the panelist. Another panelist suggested the best measurement is to read comments and responds on social media, blogs or sites. “Comments is where you measure the movement,” the panelist stated. “No one metric is going to give you whole measurement,” so marketers should define what success looks like and optimize the measurement that aligns with each other.
They also mentioned the benefit of the digital advertising is, the platform allows them to run AB test on social media before they really run them, and it is easy to change your message. Normally, people will run AB test on emails and ads, but forget to test their landing page.
Before the forum came to an end, it was a fireside chat on digital advocacy strategy with Joshua M. Habursky, Chairman of the Grassroots Professional Network and Aimee Bigham, Chief Strategy Officer MV Digital Group. They talked about the soft metrics, and sentimental analysis is becoming more and more important nowadays, as well as the geo-targeting. In digital advocacy, innovation and segmentation or individualize the message are the way to garner interest and attentions. The challenge in the marketplace is the understand how things or data change and the full customer journey, from introducing to educating and taking actions to go further. The process to give leads and retain loyalty. The key point is using the right tactics at the right times. How to turn the core message from Congress to the audiences? Aimee said, understand your audience, which matters to them, and change the message to which resonate the most with them.
In conclusion, my main takeaways from this conference are, a person’s attention span is extremely low and the front eight seconds of the video is the key to the result; step-to-step campaign gets more engagement rate; there is no perfect metrics for campaign measurements; AB test is vital in digital advertising; and lastly, sentimental analysis is the trend in the digital advocacy strategy.
