Strategic Advertising Forum
The first speaker, Beth, began by illustrating how scarce attention is nowadays. "A person's attention span used to be 12 seconds. Goldfish have nine seconds, we now have eight seconds." So how do you capture the attention of your audience within a short window of time with video content?
She went on to explain that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and that its users spend at least an hour a day on the mobile version alone. According to Beth, people are three times more likely to pay attention to an online ad than live TV ads. Why? Because humor or empathy helps gain attention and can be executed in 30, 15 and six-second spots.
Luckily, for advertisers, you only pay for an ad if people watch all of it or at least 30 seconds. Focusing on the trends of what people watch allows us to learn what their interests are so ads can be targeted better. As far as the best engagement of the audience is concerned, Beth recommended marketers to identify warm leads and retarget them. Reach them and grab their attention by focusing on storytelling.
Eric Story, vice president at the Grassroots Professional Network, lead one of the afternoon panels about walking your users through a journey. The speakers bantered back and forth about how online advertising has become an auction. Fortunately, it’s changing now and there is a quality score. Clear calls to action and quality content are now becoming relevant in the priority of ad placement.
When asked if there is a channel being underutilized, one of the panelists mentioned putting a geo fence around a billboard and have ads show up to passers by later. It combines online and offline factors and he made it a point not to underestimate offline executions. The panel went on to discuss how advertising used to be about interrupting people. Now, it’s become more about getting permission to talk to them again later to continue the conversation.
Another panelist mentioned the importance of retargeting the part of your audience that is genuinely interested in your content. People who are scrolling down are probably more interested in a subject, which can save you money in pay per click advertising so you can save your funds for retargeting them later. “Impressions are garbage,” said one of the panelists. "Look at whether they scrolled through a page or watched a video." It's important to know that the viewer is actually engaging your content.
Another panelist suggested reading comments on news articles or Facebook. If you see your audience repeating your messages, that’s how you know your campaign is working or not. If they don’t get it, that means your message is off.
In summary, they key points I gathered from this conference are as follows:
- Advertising should be less about intrusion and more about continuing a conversation.
- Consider multiple sources of truth to funnel into decision making.
- Digital and online is important, but offline considerations are important too.
- Remember to AB test you own website in addition to your advertising content.
- Fear agencies that say they do everything, because no one does everything well.
