Stephen Upstone – CEO and Founder of LoopMe
We live in a world of information-overload. On average we see 362 advertising messages per day but only 12 will make a significant impression. With brands like Coca Cola, Microsoft and Ford often spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising campaigns it is vital their ads cut through the clutter and make a lasting impact on their consumers. By harnessing the holy trinity of digital advertising, mobile video, data and artificial intelligence, brands can ensure their adverts are one of the select few that make a stand-out impression.
The first element to introduce is mobile video. Video advertising has proven its worth time and time again offline, and it’s just as effective in the digital space. Web psychologist Liraz Margalit put it perfectly ‘if you want them to fall in love, send them a video’. Video has the potential to engage with users emotionally in a way display simply cannot, which makes it the perfect vehicle for high impact branding. With 5.9 billion smartphone devices to be in circulation by 2020, mobile advertising offers huge reach, allowing brands to easily position their advertising in front of their audience. The power of video combined with massive scale makes mobile video advertising an extremely important component of a digital advertising campaign.
Identifying exactly who is relevant to a brand is one of the advantages of digital over traditional offline media. Brands do not have to make sweeping assumptions about who will be seeing their advert based on the environment the ad is placed in, instead they can make their targeting extremely precise. By overlaying data it’s possible to target users based on their demographic, past behavior and, perhaps most interestingly, by location. Location targeting uses longitudinal and latitudinal co-ordinates from a user’s mobile device to identify their location. This precise form of geo-location can be a particular driver of sales as it’s possible to identify behavior patterns which provide deeper insights into when a user is likely to interact with an advert.
Once the campaign is in motion it needs to be optimized to ensure no impressions are wasted, advertisers are obtaining the best engagement rates and publishers are achieving high eCPMs. Traditionally this would be done manually on a campaign by campaign basis by an ad-ops team, Monday-Friday, 9-5. This leaves large gaps over weekends and evenings – when mobile activity peaks. To truly optimize effectively brands should implement Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI algorithms analyze data in real time to identify which users, environments and devices are delivering the best performance, maximizing efficiency. Sophisticated AI Engines can optimize a range of campaign KPIs such as CTR, VCR and Engagement Rate, ensuring brands are getting the best possible value for money. By using a combination of data and AI advertisers can ensure their ads are being precisely targeted and only shown to users who are inclined to engage with the advertising, vastly improving the user experience.
The digital landscape is vast and complex, there are many formats and combinations which have merit and can drive effective results. But if a brand was to only run one digital campaign per year they’ll find high impact mobile video, data driven targeting and artificial intelligence optimization make a pretty unbeatable combination.
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