Digital ad spending Archives

By Max Kalehoff

U.S. digital ad spending surpassed TV advertising several years ago. However, many of today’s brands still haven’t rebalanced their advertising strategies when it comes to creative optimization and audience understanding. Despite the continued ascent of digital ads as the workhorse of the advertising industry, an outsized investment is still pouring into crafting the long-revered 30-second spot.

Who are the leaders in embracing the workhorse ad format of the future? A good place to look is the Facebook Ad Library, where you can instantly view a single brand’s ads and find clues to their approach. A perusal of Facebook’s Ad Library can be a hugely enlightening glimpse into how the world’s most successful advertisers leverage consumer attention. For instance, one company might develop dozens of short-form video ads and memes to reflect the short attention and personalized preferences of their prospects and customers. While another company might serve made-for-TV ads directly onto Facebook, seemingly with little optimization for mobile or the Facebook context.

Attention is diminishing in the digital world. It is naive (if not arrogant) to assume that a 30-second spot will give you 30 seconds of audience attention. With multiple devices and numerous apps competing for attention, users are more likely to shift to a different screen or scroll to a new post before the 30 seconds are up.

The 30-second spot has long been the tentpole of advertising’s creative existence. For many brands, these ads — which shine brightest around major events like the Super Bowl — are treated like movie premieres. They are rigorously screened, vetted and refined prior to release, carefully launched and then distributed via paid media. The hope is to generate maximum buzz among consumers and within industry circles. How many marketing conferences have you been to where a chief marketing officer (CMO) celebrates and summarizes her company’s accomplishments by showcasing a 30-second spot?

When you take for granted audience attention, longer environments (like 30-second spots) offer more opportunity in which to tell stories and create emotional impact. Indeed, the emotional impact is what encodes branding into your consumers’ brains, so your advertising achieves impact, whether that’s acting in the moment or remembering and preferring to select your brand later on when shopping. Big ideas are foundational, and there is a place for tentpole creatives, even 30-second spots.

However, consider this: A Google-commissioned study by Ipsos determined that, while only “45% of TV advertising time actually receives attention,” paid YouTube mobile ads receive 83% viewer attention. Moreover, our own Realeyes attention data underscore that consumers rarely demonstrate attentive viewing behaviors with video ads beyond even 15 seconds, particularly in digital environments.

As brands embrace the reality of eyes on digital screens and increasing distraction — accelerated by a global pandemic — they face a creative challenge that no cookie-cutter playbook will solve: how to implement emotive storytelling that encodes your brand in the brain, without the prospect of 30 seconds of captive attention. What is the solution to that?

The massive effort that goes into today’s 30-second spots is often justified by the fact that flagship TV commercials provide the basis for countless iterations of digital ad creative within a campaign. The vast amount of impressions within a given campaign will not be on the full TV commercial, but rather the myriad trimmed-down and reformatted iterations that run across channels, platforms and devices. A standard 30-second spot becomes 15 seconds, 10 seconds, five seconds — you name it. That can be part of the strategy.

There’s more to be done, though. Understanding and leveraging consumer attention toward attention outcomes at the ad level represents one of the biggest challenges facing advertisers today. It’s not enough to ideate and execute a 30-second spot that tests well in focus groups and performs well on the annual awards circuit. Advertisers must understand how their storytelling translates across formats and be able to optimize, at a granular level, for maximum audience attention.

Advertisers need to rebalance their optimization efforts, and for smart ones, the project is ongoing. Understanding an audience’s attention, not to mention the emotional connection, becomes all the more important in today’s pandemic-impacted world, where budgets are tight and every media dollar is challenged to do more. A lean advertising landscape looks plausible in the future, and maximizing for the attention outcomes tied to the workhorse of ad inventory will surely be an essential part of the task ahead.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Max Kalehoff

Max Kalehoff is VP of Marketing and Growth at Realeyes. Read Max Kalehoff’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

By Todd Smith

Digital ad spending in the United States exceeded $100 billion for the first time last year, according to the latest Internet advertising report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Specifically, total domestic spending reached $107.5 billion, a 22 percent increase from 2017. Mobile advertising has become increasingly dominant, growing 40 percent year-over-year, to $69.9 billion. And video ad spending grew 37 percent to $16.3 billion.

In the past, mobile ad spend has lagged behind time spent on those devices. But now, “that parity is almost being reached. Eyeballs are being followed by dollars,” said Sue Hogan, the IAB’s senior vice president of research and measurement.”

PwC partner David Silverman acknowledged that this leads to an obvious follow-up: Once ad dollars catch up to consumer attention, will growth slow? In Silverman’s view, “the industry has found ways to evolve” in the past, and it will again.

“There’s other shifts that are occurring now,” he said, thanks to growth in digital audio advertising (up 23 percent to $2.3 billion), as well as other areas such as out-of-home advertising and designing ads for new devices.

One of the recurring concerns about the digital ad industry is its dominance by Facebook and Google. While the IAB report doesn’t single out specific companies, it does measure concentration in terms of how much spending is going to the top 10 ad sellers. In 2018, those sellers collected 77 percent of total spending — the IAB says the percentage has fluctuated between 69 percent and 77 percent in the past decade.

As for the effect of GDPR and other privacy regulation, Silverman said, “It certainly will have a significant impact, particularly on the use of data and AI in making advertisements more relevant and more effective,” but he suggested it’s too early to say precisely what the financial impact will be.

Hogan suggested that the California Consumer Protection Act could be more influential on U.S. ad spend. The IAB (which is a trade group representing online advertisers and publishers) has been advocating for federal regulation, rather than a state-by-state approach.

“I hope that we don’t get to the point where it becomes a strain on the industry,” she said. “I think more and more education is needed around that.”

New Orleans Times-Picayune entire staff laid off

The entire staff of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans is being laid off after the paper was sold to The Advocate, a rival newspaper.

The layoffs will impact all 161 staff members at the Times-Picayune, including 65 editors and reporters, according to a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) filing with the Louisiana Workforce Commission as reported by the New York Post.

Advocate Publisher Dan Shea told the Post he planned to rehire an undetermined number of Times-Picayune staffers before combining the two publications in June as a daily paper and leveraging the nola.com website.

John and Dathel Georges, owners of the New Orleans Advocate, purchased the Times-Picayune and its nola.com website from Advance Publications for an undisclosed price.

The two newspapers have been strong competitors for nearly two centuries, with The Times-Picayune first publishing in 1837. The Advocate traces its roots back to 1842.

The Times-Picayune has experienced challenging times in the past few years. The Post reported its weekend circulation of 88,538 falling well below its circulation of 257,000 before Hurricane Katrina hit the city in 2005.

The layoffs reinforce the difficult positions of many giant media companies in today’s digital world. Media layoffs hit a 10-year high last year, with nearly 15,500 jobs being axed in 2019. Several other media outlets – Vice, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post – have all slashed job this year.

PR Pros Say Media Relations Still Very Important Skill

PR News and its Media Relations Working Group – composed of 23 media relations and communications folks, surveyed PR pros during March and April 2018 to gauge attitudes about media relations today and the future.

More than 400 responded to questions about the difficulty of obtaining media coverage, the importance (or not) of media relations and earned coverage in an age of social media influencers and brand-created content. The survey also allowed respondents to describe new tactics they have adopted to boost media relations efforts. Nearly 300 did.

A majority of PR pros (84 percent) are upbeat about the future of traditional media relations, where practitioners pitch stories and other ideas to media, hoping it results in coverage, according to PR News. By the way, 84 percent was by the far the largest response to any question in the survey.

Blockbuster Mic | Doris Day Was the Hollywood Brand in 1960s

Doris Day, the famous movie actress whose electric personality and golden voice made her America’s top box-office star – and Hollywood brand queen in the early 1960s – died earlier this week. She was 97 years-young!

Day began as a big band singer, and from the start had the Midas touch! One of her first records, “Sentimental Journey,” sold more than a million copies, and she had a string of other hits before her meteoric movie career took flight.

She starred in nearly 40 movies that began with “Romance on the High Seas” in 1948 through “With Six You Get Eggroll” in 1968. On the Silver Screen she transformed from cute girl roles in the 1950s to more sultry comedies that brought her four first-place rankings in the yearly popularity poll of theater owners, a feat equaled by no other except Shirley Temple.

Following “Pillow Talk,” which won Day her only Academy Award nomination, she was called on to defend her virtue for the rest of her career in similar but lesser movies, while Hollywood turned to more graphic sex movies.

By the time she retired in 1973, after starring for five years on the hit CBS comedy “The Doris Day Show,” Day had been dismissed as a goody-two-shoes, the leader of Hollywood’s chastity brigade,

Day, however, was a trailblazer, one of the few actresses of her era to play women who had a real profession, and her characters were often more passionate about their career than about their co-stars.

In 2011, three years after she received a lifetime achievement Grammy Award, Day surprised many by releasing her first album in nearly two decades, “My Heart,” which featured mostly songs she recorded for “Doris Day’s Best Friends” but never released commercially.

Day was a pioneer, trailblazer and Hollywood brand champion who brought bravery, pizzazz and luster to the Silver Screen!

By Todd Smith

TODD SMITH is president and chief communications officer of Deane, Smith & Partners, a full-service branding, PR, marketing and advertising firm with offices in Jackson. The firm — based in Nashville, Tenn. — is also affiliated with Mad Genius. Contact him at [email protected], and follow him @spinsurgeon.