In a world with a 24hr news cycle and an infinite amount of content, cutting through the clutter and connecting with an audience is growing increasingly more difficult. In addition to a saturated marketplace and enhanced competition, marketers are also trying to solve for the ever-fluctuating changes in consumer preferences and behaviors. As such, audience development is crucial for marketers to grow their brand, build meaningful and lasting customer relationships, and maximize the value of their advertising dollars.

Defining Audience Development

Audience development consists of a number of activities that help marketers identify and correlate aspects from a larger audience to refine personalization for the purposes of enriching consumer connection, enhancing new customer acquisition, and increasing long term customer value. When done properly marketers can leverage their findings to inform marketing strategy and optimize campaign messaging to increase the effectiveness of their marketing objectives. 

The 4 C’s of Audience Development

Regardless of the type of business or audience being developed, the 4 C’s of audience development has been a proven blueprint in assisting marketers achieve their audience development goals. The 4 C’s consist of Connection, Collaboration, Community and Caring. These can be approached in a multitude of different ways but the idea behind them sets the foundation to building a better audience.

• Connections – Building and uniting contacts is a great start to developing an audience. This can range from in-person networking events to engaging with both business and personal connections through social media channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter.   
• Collaboration – Orchestrating partnerships and teaming up with others creates an opportunity to share and amplify your audience. This can be achieved by collaborating with other businesses or services that complement or offer added benefits to your audience and can even expose you to new markets.  
• Community – Forging relationships with other businesses that share specific characteristics such as a geographic location or particular interests can unlock new opportunities to further audience development. This is extremely important for small and medium size businesses but has proved beneficial for larger organizations as well.   
• Caring – Being empathetic and exhibiting understanding about the wants and needs of your target audience strengthens trust and extends relationships.  

Leveraging Data

Following through on the 4 C’s of audience development requires leveraging different kinds of data. Analyzing data from various sources provides marketers with a more holistic view of their audience. It can also make it easier to identify key insights and trends on how, when, and why audiences are consuming content. Among the myriad of different types of data, some of the most beneficial data sources include online, TV, and a brand’s own first-party data, to name a few.

Implement Technology to Verify

While accessing diverse data sources is advantageous, it is imperative that whatever data is being used is of the highest quality and compliant with current data regulations. While most marketers assume their data providers align with the most updated regulations, the reality is the pace of change is rapid and frequent. In today’s privacy-centric ecosystem, understanding the data being used and having a level of transparency into where and how it is obtained is imperative. Talking to partners and verifying moral data practices has become a must. Failure to do so can be detrimental to audience development and will have a negative impact on your business overall. 

Activate, Assess & Optimize.

Developing a better audience is not a one-time deal. People change. Circumstances change. Audiences evolve. Marketers that can understand the changes affecting their audience will be able to grow, refine, and better engage with their targets. While this can certainly seem like a full-time job, and in some cases it is, it doesn’t have to be. Depending on the business or service, most small and medium size businesses can benefit from devoting an hour or two a week to assessing and optimizing their audience. Identifying changes, patterns, trends, etc., helps marketers better understand their audience and where they are in their journey. This provides marketers a better opportunity to activate personalized advertising that speaks directly to a specific audience. These simple activities can make a world of difference not only to your business goals but to your audience as well. 

Audience development is crucial for any business and a well-developed audience will not only enable the success of your current business goals but can also help inform strategy and growth for the future. 

Can Amobee Help with Audience Development?

Leveraging its proprietary insights and research platform, Brand Intelligence, Amobee has been helping marketers develop audiences for 5+ years. With a unique market position, Amobee Brand Intelligence unifies data from disparate sources that include TV programmatic and social environments, enabling marketers to gain valuable insights into not only the content their audience is consuming but also their preferred channels and times in which to reach consumers. Marketers can easily activate their learnings into powerful targeting tactics to drive performance across multiple marketing objectives. In addition to unparalleled audience intelligence, marketers can also leverage Brand Intelligence to better understand the competition to inform conquesting strategies and convert the competition’s customers into their own.

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Here’s a primer on why contextual matters today, how it works, and why you should be adapting this alternative targeting tactic to stay competitive as the ad industry learns to live without cookies.

What is contextual targeting?

Contextual targeting is a way to target your audience using keywords and topics instead of cookies or mobile IDFAs. Contextual ads complement the environments in which consumers are surfing or shopping, and they can improve purchase intent by 63% because of their relevance to the overall consumer experience. They also increase brand favorability by engaging consumers with personalized ads.

How does it work?

Contextual solutions use real-time context-based signals to make bidding decisions. They analyze text, video, and imagery to create contextual targeting segments in real-time that are matched to advertiser goals. Web page content around ad inventory is evaluated based on multiple criteria, including safety, suitability, and context. This means that your ads appear only in the most appropriate environments. 

Why is contextual having a comeback?

Contextual was previously one of the dominant forms of advertising. Before the technology matured over the years, it was perceived as a purely upper-funnel tactic for extending reach. Its performance was also lower when compared to targeting with third-party cookies. This is because cookie-based targeting used specific user-level behaviors such as items left inside their shopping cart or a user’s specific location, which enabled brands to hyper-target and retarget users. Whereas contextual used keywords to find relevant pages to place ads on and find an audience. As the ad ecosystem gears up for a dramatic shift toward protecting consumer identity, contextual is once again the leading ad solution that can provide you with a brand-safe, privacy-compliant future. 

The contextual “comeback” is gaining so much momentum that investments are expected to surge to $447 billion by 2027. (eMarketer)

How is it different today?

Marketers have access to more data points than ever before to craft your audiences and reach campaign goals more effectively. Rich sources of privacy-compliant, cross-channel data allows you to have a better understanding of your targets’ interests and lifestyle. Sophisticated machine learning and A.I. provide a more granular understanding of where and how content is being consumed, what your audience sentiment is, and the specific insights you need to inform ad creative, ad formats, and the targeting channels that will drive performance scale.

Who benefits the most from leveraging contextual?

Advertisers and trading teams need access to non-ID based insights that can turn into actionable campaign strategies. Depending on the goals of your campaign, you can use contextual to capitalize off strong in-market brand awareness, or if you’re intent on stealing market share away from your competitors, competitive conquesting contextual is the way to go. Contextual is also a high performer when it comes to prospecting or reaching incremental users by aligning with broader, real-time industry trends.

What makes one solution better than another?

Many of today’s solutions give you 1:1 targeting visibility, but only on the networks of the publishers they’re integrated with. With a smarter, more holistic solution, you can reach past the blind spots and across a broader range of keywords, categories, and publishers. Many contextual providers are also only focused on the actionability of segments. But smarter contextual solutions enable you to go outside of the endemic content category and into a holistic view of the audience’s interests.

An Epsilon survey found that 80% of respondents were more likely to do business with a brand that offers personalized experiences, and 90% find personalization appealing.

Is there really such a thing as “smarter” contextual?

Yes. When it comes to reaching consumers with contextual relevance, competitive marketers need more than just conventional keyword targeting. You need access to a wide range of targeting solutions informed by real-time signals that enable you to keep pace and adapt with your targets interests. You need more options that include both extensive off the shelf and customizable targeting solutions that can enhance consumer connection across a spectrum of different strategies and use cases. And last but not least, you need a streamlined workflow that offers you and your team with seamless tools to create, manage, and instantly activate powerful targeting solutions so you can thrive in a cookieless environment.

How should I prepare for a future without cookies?

In preparation for the post-cookie world, Amobee has a 7-year history of building contextual targeting capabilities that leverage our own research and insights engine, Brand Intelligence. We use cross-channel data intelligence across the web, social, and TV, combined with real-time and historical analytics for immediate insights and instant targeting activation across all screens. As the industry looks for innovative contextual solutions, Amobee is ready to deliver with an increased focus on performance and streamlined efficiency.

For more information, download the Amobee Smart Contextual one-sheet or contact us to get started.

The post What is Contextual Targeting and is it Smart Enough for Today’s Advertisers? appeared first on Amobee.

To overcome some of the challenges you’re facing with changes in privacy policies and the phase-out of the third-party cookie, you need an efficient and less complicated way of understanding how to activate the right data sources—across all verticals—in a way that steadily grows and strengthens your customer base.

The data challenge of finding new customers

Look-alike modelling has been a commonly used audience-building tactic for a long time. Advertisers create a “seed” consumer audience and then identify key traits and characteristics among a target group that can then be used to identify and reach new audiences. 

The challenge with this type of modelling comes down to data. Prior to Google announcing plans to eliminate third-party cookie tracking in Chrome, which accounts for 70% of the desktop browser market, look-alike modelling enabled advertisers to build seed segments of their existing customers through a range of first-party and third-party data sources. But this tactic lacked transparency of data scale and accuracy. Data sets weren’t updated regularly enough to maximize new customer discovery, and activation and onboarding was costly and time-consuming. 

Why you should reconsider look-alike modelling

As the advertising community lessens our dependence on third-party data and shifts focus to first-party data sources, many advertisers are now revisiting this solution because it enables them to more efficiently onboard and activate their first-party data across a number of disparate sources and use that data pool to match behavioral attributes. They can more easily create seed audiences using a smaller sample size without affecting scalability, and they can optimize and amplify these audiences by choosing specific attributes with greater accuracy using real-time data that is dynamically updated.

Only converged solutions can solve first-party data challenges

Amobee’s Look-alike Audiences solution is a simple and streamlined way for marketers to access and activate their own first-party data, regardless of the source, and to use that data to discover new audiences based on the ideal traits and behaviors of their best customers. Look-alike Audiences removes the complexity of navigating the data marketplace and provides advertisers with a scalable alternative to standard, third-party look-alike solutions in-market, and it can be used across many different verticals, including social.

Who benefits most from Amobee Look-alike Audiences?

Amobee’s Look-alike solution is perfect for small to medium-size businesses wanting to activate their first-party data to increase the effectiveness of targeting tactics that complement upper funnel and prospecting strategies. For larger advertisers, Amobee provides the ability to efficiently onboard all of their first-party data, whether it’s from a third-party DMP, campaign-level data CRM, or any other source.

First steps to getting started with a more stable data solution 

• Take the time to understand the basic data marketplace and what you want to achieve by taking a more active role in leveraging first-party data. 
• Identify and evaluate all of your first-party data sources and the quality of this data. 
• Understand how you’re currently leveraging data to enrich audience extension. For example, have you onboarded this data before?   
• Review current prospecting and upper funnel strategies and the supporting tactics that are being deployed. 
• What does that growth look like month-over-month, year-over-year?

Aggregate rich, insightful data to grow your business

Amobee believes all advertisers should be able to access and activate all their first-party data to the fullest potential, regardless of the size of a business or the source where that data resides. Contact solutions@amobee.com for a walkthrough of how Amobee 1st Party Look-alike Audiences can help you in the creation and activation of powerful look-alike segments available directly in the Amobee Advertising Platform.

The post How to Get New Audience Performance From An Old Advertising Tactic appeared first on Amobee.

• Traditional TV is still the most effective when it comes to rapidly building reach.
• The challenges of TV quickly materialize when reach and scale plateau. 
• Marketers need to unify how they plan, activate, and measure their linear TV and digital investments together.

The future of advertising rests in the hands of harnessing the reach and scale of traditional TV with the addressability and control of digital. But to achieve this, marketers require the technology to measure TV and digital together for more precise planning and targeting. This will give them the assurance that all budget dollars across all their advertising efforts reach the right audiences, without overlap.

In today’s ad tech landscape, buzzwords like omnichannel are frequently used to suggest capabilities around connected TV (CTV) and digital, leaving linear TV absent. But the reality is that very few technology companies can effectively leverage TV and digital data to inform strategy, enrich audience targeting capabilities, and provide cross-channel TV-digital convergence.

Breaking through TV-digital silos

While many industry leaders have predicted shifts in the hierarchy of linear TV and subscription-based cable models, out of all the channels, traditional TV is still the most effective when it comes to rapidly building reach. 

“The ability to effectively understand, reach, and measure audiences across the TV and digital landscape is key for truly converged advertising, and, until now, has not been possible in the industry.”

Corey Tolbert, Vice President of Programmatic at Horizon Media

However, the persistent challenges of TV quickly materialize when reach and scale plateau. Around two-thirds of the way through a TV campaign, the ability to increase reach gives way to increased frequency, flooding heavy TV viewers with nearly 80% of a campaign’s TV impressions and only exposing around 70% of any given strategic audience to your content. 

Marketers need to deploy more effective cross-channel campaigns that identify and activate against these harder-to-reach audiences, making it easier to create CTV and digital media campaigns that complement their linear TV strategy and result in more meaningful business outcomes.

According to Corey Tolbert, Vice President of Programmatic at Horizon Media, the ability to effectively reach and measure audiences across the TV and digital landscape is key for truly converged advertising, and until now, it has not been possible in the industry.

Horizon and technology partner IRI worked with a national alcohol brand to achieve 65+ reach unique to digital by closing the gap between TV and digital audiences with Amobee’s TV Amplifier solution, which resulted in decreased waste and a greater volume of product moving off shelves. Amobee’s custom-curated TV Amplifier audiences increased frequency in younger targets that were lightly exposed to linear TV views and resulted in the highest overall ROI and volume among all the CPG brand’s digital tactics.

Making convergence simple and real

With a long history of digital experience and acquired knowledge of the linear TV landscape, Amobee has engineered one-of-a-kind solutions like TV Amplifier that enable marketers to confidently plan, activate, and measure TV and digital investments together. 

In one converged platform, understand and optimize against the networks and shows that consumers are watching, the commercials they’re exposed to, and the content viewed in CTV, social, and digital environments. Explore a multitude of converged solutions ranging from AlwaysOn available segments to customized targeting solutions for both managed and self-service clients.

Get in touch with us today at Solutions@amobee.com to learn more about TV Amplifier, and download our guide on “5 Ways to Combat Fragmenting TV Audiences.”

The post Connecting the Dots Between TV and Digital appeared first on Amobee.

• Contextual advertising is a popular form of web and mobile-based targeting that has been around for a long time.
• As an alternative to behavioral targeting, contextual uses automated technology to scan text and images for specific keywords.
• Contextual is one of the only forms of ad targeting that enables advertisers to respect consumer privacy by complying with GDPR and CCPA.

As marketers rethink their data and targeting strategies in the waning days of third-party cookie tracking, brands and agencies that have hinged a majority of their marketing strategies on behavioral targeting are now starting to explore viable alternatives. 

While some industry leaders are hedging their bets on more privacy-centric approaches that still offer personalization—such as current identity and digital fingerprinting solutions—many marketers are seeking more traditional and established targeting strategies involving first-party data and contextual targeting tactics that serve more relevant ads to relevant audiences at just the right time.

Proven targeting tactics that protect consumers 

Contextual advertising has been a commonly practiced form of web and mobile-based targeting for years that uses automated contextual ad technology to scan text and images for specific keywords that match advertising with web browsing behavior. 

Instead of basing ad targeting on consumer behavior, contextual focuses on the type of content the user is viewing so advertising can align with greater relevance. It’s also one of the only forms of ad targeting that enables advertisers to comply with privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Both of these heavy-hitting consumer privacy regulations were enacted separately—Europe’s GDPR in 2018 and CCPA in the U.S. in 2020—with more stringent standards for how companies collect, use, and sell cookie-based data. 

Contextual pro tips for greater relevance

To help marketers embrace other forms of ad targeting in an imminently cookieless world, here are five contextual advertising tactics to drive new strategy and engage audience targets with greater relevance and scale.

On-Demand Targeting: This contextual tactic enables advertisers to maximize scale and efficiency without sacrificing performance. Advertisers can connect with targets across a vast array of topics and categories derived from technology developed to track and analyze website content. These insights are then used to bundle privacy-compliant target groups around common interests, topics, and categories readily available for instant activation.  

• Pro Tip: Most contextual providers offer dynamic versions for a nominal fee, enabling real-time updates that give marketers the ability to build scale throughout a campaign’s lifecycle. 

Custom Keyword/Topic Targeting: This tactic provides a more granular “niche” approach to on-demand targeting that offers marketers the ability to customize keywords, topics, and phrases that define a specific target group. This can complement a refined contextual advertising strategy that optimizes quality over quantity.

• Pro Tip: Instead of building targets of synonymous contextual keywords that will inevitably serve ads to the same sites, concentrate efforts on keywords that help extend your reach to similar audiences and maximize your presence across different sites.  

Website Targeting: The most cost-efficient method of contextual advertising because of the lack of technology required, website targeting offers multiple options to effectively reach targets on the websites that they frequent. While this type of targeting tactic is dependent on the advertiser, marketers have the ability to curate custom site lists where targets are most receptive to engage with ad content. 

• Pro Tip: When planning to deploy website targeting tactics, think marathon, not sprint. Take the time to work through the process, utilizing every piece of relevant data you have on your target audience to help inform decisioning. 

Brand Safety: This add-on tactic can safeguard brands from being shown on certain web pages or next to content that can be detrimental to their identity.

• Pro Tip: Deployment can be handled in a number of different ways, but in most cases it is usually handled by manually excluding keywords and topics that a brand does not want to be associated with.

Viewability: This is another add-on tactic that enables marketers to measure the impact of a campaign’s ad impressions to inform allocation of media investments. This is achieved with technology that scans the page where an advertiser’s ad is served and provides insight into whether the user has seen the impression or watched their video and for how long. 

• Pro Tip: With multiple threshold standards ranging from 70-100%, it’s important to remember that just because an ad is viewable doesn’t mean it’s effective. This is a good supporting tactic for Private Marketplace deals. 

Preparing for a future in which context is king

With the dramatic transition away from third-party cookies just two years away and GDPR and CCPA safeguards in place that protect consumer privacy, not everyone in the ad industry is prepared to replace the behavioral targeting and measurement practices that have been essential to digital advertising for decades. 

Amobee understands marketers and the pain points they’re faced with when it comes to industry changes, especially ones that have been relied on for decades, and we’re working on multiple strategies and innovations with key industry partners.

Our extensive investments in cross-channel targeting capabilities enable our clients to branch away from a behavioral targeting perspective to tactics that focus instead on the contextual relevance of consumer interests without mapping back to a single person’s identity.

Amobee has consolidated all our contextual solutions into one minimized suite on the Amobee Advertising Platform to help marketers diversify their targeting practices with an intuitive, streamlined workflow interface.

Regardless of contextual experience, Amobee Contextual offers versatility and performance for marketers testing contextual targeting for the first time, or for those who have already leveraged its capabilities and benefits.

Our real-time intelligence engine ingests data from both digital and TV sources and powers rich market and audience insights that have provided marketers with proven and scalable contextual advertising solutions for years.

Marketers can manage all their contextual target lists regardless of the type, provider, and data contract, all in one unified dashboard. They can create customized contextual targeting groups and gain access to a generous taxonomy of dynamic, AlwaysOn tactics that surface and correlate topics, trends, audiences, brands, sentiment, events, content, and associations from across digital and TV environments for the highest-level of audience connection.

Harness the power of contextual today

Contact Amobee today at Solutions@amobee.com to harness the power of contextual targeting as we transition from a cookieless world to the future.

The post Respecting Consumer Privacy: New Innovations in Contextual Targeting appeared first on Amobee.