A fresh take on the short-post social media platform, Threads has been lauded as a welcome addition and a return to thought-initiating conversations online. While much of the media coverage has spoken about its take, head on, with rivals like Twitter, it’s yet to be seen how the platform will help marketers speak to their consumer base in a new way.

Let’s discuss how Meta’s diversification impacts the social media scene:

What is Threads?

A new social media platform and an extension of Meta’s social media network beyond Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram, Meta founder Mark Zuckerburg has looked at Threads to be a text-based extension of Instagram:

“Our vision is to take the best parts of Instagram, and create a new experience for text, ideas, and discussing what’s on your mind.”

At release, posts will be limited to 500 words (more than Twitter’s 280 words), and will allow a picture carousel of up to ten pictures, or video of up to five minutes. You will also be able to crosspost to your Instagram, Facebook, Stories, and Reels.

What are the benefits of Threads?

Much in the name itself, Meta’s new platform threads users together to actively participate in discussions, leading to increased engagement and a sense of community. Where Facebook is largely limited to building a network based on your human interactions (or keeping in contact with your parents or family members overseas), and Instagram focuses much on the visual self-promotion medium, Threads encourages topic based discussion, including threads posted by people you follow, and recommended content from new creators you haven’t discovered yet, but can engage with.

For anyone who has downloaded Threads, it’s main benefit lays in the ease of integrating your user name, profiles, and followers in one fell swoop.

Bench Senior Account Manager Nate Vella has become an early convert, finding the onboarding process fairly seamless, and a hark back to Facebook’s early roll out:

“It’s clear that Meta has thought through the impact of launching a new Social network into an already crowded marketplace. With the familiar ‘Sign in with Instagram’ CTA on launch, users are swept right into the madness of a platform reminiscent of the early Facebook days – organic reach at 100%.”

When can I get my ads onto Threads?

For now, it’s a wait and see. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri, has stated that the current focus of Threads is to ensure people enjoy and keep coming to the app rather than making money. For this year at least, Threads is focused on building the customer base and making the platform sticky for return visits.

No doubt this will spell an introduction into the advertising space in due course. And as part of Meta’s universe, we can expect Threads to feature as a placement on Meta Business Manager, so that ads can easily be integrated and managed across platforms Facebook and Instagram.

This will then open up opportunities to use Meta’s already existing audience targeting capabilities, across Thread placements. Upon sign up of the platform, you may have realised the the app may collect key signals from you including your location, your contacts, and even your fitness watches.

Much like your experience in Facebook, you can expect a more targeted user experience, meaning you will more likely to see content that aligns with your interests, increasing engagement and overall user satisfaction. Marketers will eventually benefit from this feature by delivering targeted advertisements to specific demographics, enhancing the effectiveness of their campaigns.

More to this, Threads has been flagged as working with other ‘fediverse platforms’. In short, the fediverse (a portmanteau of the words federation and universe), means that social networks on different servers operated by third parties can communicate and share data with each other. In practice, this means you can interact with someone through your Instagram account on other non-Meta platforms. Think of it as, for example, commenting on someone’s Tiktok, even though you only have Instagram. The more you think about it, we already do that via email – as an Outlook user can communicate with a Gmail user freely without having an account with the other.

While that makes a one-stop login easier for users, this also means data, behaviour, preferences and what Meta knows about you, will keep increasing – meaning more targeted advertising.

Where does Threads leave Twitter?

It goes without saying that Twitter – who has the monopoly on text-based social media, would be concerned of an erosion in market share.

While Threads has the potential to impact the marketing industry significantly, it is important to consider that Twitter has an established user base and a unique position in the social media landscape. Twitter’s real-time, text-based nature fosters fast-paced discussions, breaking news dissemination, and influencer interactions, which have become integral to its appeal.

While Threads may offer this in concept, initial usage indicates it as an extension of Instagram. For the meantime, Twitter’s distinct characteristics might continue to attract users and retain its relevance.

Not to mention – Twitter allows ads on their platform. In the meantime, this benefits advertisers wishing to capture users who prefer to social media through a text-based platform.

What’s next for Threads?

Meta’s release of Threads has introduced several features and advancements that hold promise for the marketing industry. Simply as part of Meta, Threads could pose a formidable challenge to Twitter’s dominance and become a natural extension of a user’s social media habits.

Nate has considered himself a convert to the platform:

“Two days in my money is on longevity for Threads – you could say it seams they’re Threading in the right direction. However short-lived this could be, if you’re a brand and you’re not on Threads, you’re missing out on peak, multi-generational, consumer engagement – so get to it!”

The ultimate impact of Threads on the marketing industry (and on direct competitors like Twitter) remain to be seen, but it certainly signifies an exciting development that marketers should monitor closely.

The post How Threads will take the advertising world by storm appeared first on Bench Media.

These individuals are hard to reach, have unique brand expectations, consume media differently than older generations, and they spend money – making impulse purchases just like anyone before them.

Given they represent about 18% of the population, it’s important that brands move in the direction of developing customised strategies to speak to these unique audiences – we expect this personalised approach to be of increased focus for 2023. The way they consume media is much more fragmented than other generations and focusing on custom strategies in 2023 will be a key to success.

Influencer marketing is already big, and is only going to get bigger as new social platforms develop and content consumption evolves. For both influencers and brands, there’s an advantage that can be gained by leveraging influencer marketing trends to expand to new audiences, generate new leads and ultimately, drive revenue.

Relevently, TikTok continues to grow in this market and has become a hub for creating and sharing content, of which brands can develop unique strategies to speak to these audiences. We have seen a number of brands and campaigns throughout 2022 attempting to navigate the space, some developing bespoke TikTok campaigns with others folding it into a wider social strategy. The most success comes from customisation of messaging and creative to develop a native type experience and not disrupt the user experience. We expect these TikTok specific executions to grow throughout 2023.

Finally, gaming environments are a fantastic channel for speaking with these audiences. Gaming is now a mainstream media, with the majority of Australian households having at least 1 gaming console. Media owners and technology platforms have taken a keen interest in this as they build out their capabilities in this space and we expect the brand dollars to follow with interest.

TV fragmentation

Our consumption of all things TV has become more fragmented as the ecosystem has become more complex. There has been a genuine response from streaming platforms, data providers and innovative technology players that are striving for brands’ media budgets and developing some real solutions to navigate the space. As brands continue to test, learn, and assess what works for their individual needs, we expect this to remain a real focus throughout 2023.

The global streaming services are making big changes. After recording no tangible user growth over the past couple of quarters, Netflix have turned to ad-supported subscription tiers to engage a new audience, and to generate advertising revenue. Alongside Disney, this is 2 of the biggest streaming services in the world to explore ad-supported tiers and we expect others will follow. Locally, we’ve had announcements from the likes of Binge that they too will move towards these models in 2023.

The CTV space also continues to evolve. Audiences are continuing to grow which means that there are more data signals available to us digitally to target consumers with more accuracy and granularity. We expect this trend to continue throughout next year with more innovative creative formats being developed by media owners as well as shoppable ads or virtual product placement ads potentially becoming more of a norm.

Of course, with these evolutions and complexity come challenges – for brands that play in both the linear and digital space, there are challenges in regards to audience measurement, understanding incremental reach and attributing sales impacts. There are many businesses looking to crack each challenge within our industry, think the likes of VOZ, Samba, TTD, Yahoo, Amazon and many more. Throughout 2023 this will continue to be a major focus due to the sheer volume of investment and need for brands to understand the impact of that investment.

A spotlight on data

No matter the year someone writes a trends or predictions type article, data will always make its way on to the list. The topic is just so broad yet so important for all parts of the digital media ecosystem. What does change, is the specific industry focus on particular areas of the data landscape.

One thing is for certain, Google will depreciate the cookie on Chrome, but we’re none the wiser as to when. Given the drawn out process, there has been time, and continues to be time for brands to both test and adapt. Working on their first party data strategies, integrating CDPs, setting up technology stacks and identifying valuable identity solutions.

While they’ve been testing, technology has been innovating. Buying platforms with first party data such as Google (GoogleID), Yahoo (Next-Gen and cookieless), META (via Facebook) and Amazon are well placed to capitalise, other omnichannel technology players have been developing really robust and interoperable identity solutions such as The Trade Desk’s UID to help brands navigate the space. We expect that throughout 2023 this important topic will continue to evolve.

In addition, more and more media is becoming accessible in a digital environment and leading to further audience fragmentation. 2023 will likely be a year for us to all further attempt to understand the relationship between media and the impact that has on consumer’s response. Think of the likes of DOOH (which will also continue to evolve throughout 2023) – it is fantastic that we can access digital screens, but what impact does that have on other media? And ultimately a business’s bottom line? We expect the evolution of data throughout 2023 to play a key role in the process of determining value, and helping to better plan and measure media.

Finally, clean rooms are gaining more traction within our industry and we expect this to continue to grow in 2023. There are many solutions out there already, such as one’s developed by LiveRamp (not limited to) that provide a safe and privacy compliant environment for brand’s to onboard data, onboard data from other partners, and develop insights and segments that can be used digitally. When you wrap that up with measurement capabilities you’re starting to look at advanced and valuable solutions for use within media.

Social responsibility

In Kantar’s 2022 Sustainability Sector Index, 97% of consumers across 32 countries report they want to live a sustainable lifestyle, and almost half say they have stopped buying certain products/services because of their impact on the environment or society.

Safe to say, it’s about time our industry started looking at our carbon footprint with more scrutiny. With the rise of technology and the vast amount of data we process in almost every digital media transaction, environmental impacts have spiralled out of control.

The knock on effect is a real trend in the market of brands attempting to show more social responsibility through their creation and distribution of products, alongside measuring the social and environmental impacts of their campaigns. This puts pressure on both the agencies and technology partners they choose to work with to follow suit and create meaningful change.

Companies such as Scope 3 are leading the charge here in Australia and we expect them to continue to work with more brands, publishers, agencies and technology partners as this trend grows throughout 2023. Their aim? To help companies factor carbon emissions into every business decision, be a source of truth for supply chain emissions data, and decarbonise media and advertising.

Supply partners such as Index Exchange have also begun to develop ‘green site lists’. Effectively curating site lists of media owners that have a lower carbon footprint and offsetting emissions. It’s a great foundational piece to a fully sustainable solution, and a trend that will continue to grow throughout 2023.

Attention!

Remember the industry from about 7 years back? Viewability was such an important topic. As programmatic became more mainstream, a vast number of impressions served in positions on web pages that never even had an opportunity to be seen. This of course was a complete waste of advertiser’s money and something the industry worked hard to improve. Media owners spent time really cleaning up their ad positions, verification providers developed solutions and technology developed viewability targeting capabilities. The quality of the media being bought really improved.

Now, viewability is getting a facelift. The need for brands to move beyond viewability and reach is becoming more important and a light is being shined on the amount of user attention our ads are receiving in a digital environment. It is becoming increasingly important for advertisers to understand what is being paid attention to – content or ads? And what impact is this having on sales?

The reality is, consumer attention will sit somewhere in the middle so we expect the industry to continue the trend towards more attention based planning, metrics, and measurement of digital advertising. While not yet having an industry standard (also something that we believe will happen next year) there are some real tangible inroads being made, by some very innovative Australian companies.

Playground XYZ has been leading the way in this market from a digital perspective, using a combination of variables such as eye tracking data, viewability and scroll speed to determine the amount of consumer attention that ads receive. This allows brands to plan, report and optimise towards high levels of attention. With their recent GumGum acquisition, we expect this to evolve next year to combine attention, context and creative to continually improve a brand’s media investment.

Amplified Intelligence is another company, headed up by prominent professor and researcher, Karen Nelson-Field, which uses a combination of machine learning and eye gaze data to determine attention across a range of environments such as DOOH, TV and mobile. While not having as much depth just yet digitally, we expect the solutions coming out of this business to continue to grow and evolve throughout next year to become a very valuable and scalable solution.

In summary

In summary, there’s never a dull moment in our industry. Different brands and agencies have vastly different needs and therefore, different focuses. There’s no one size fits all approach. While taking a look at what the media industry will be up to throughout 2023, find what works for you and business and prioritise accordingly. You might just find that the above trends fit nicely into the direction of your business. Feel free to give us a call to discuss further.

The post 2023 Digital Media Trends & Predictions appeared first on Bench Media.

It’s often the case that when businesses begin to see a drop in revenue, they look inward at where they are spending and try to streamline their expenses. It’s not uncommon to see staff counts dwindle, offices downsized, or product roadmaps and future investment pulled back.

But perhaps the ‘easiest’ cost that many businesses slash is the one that can most help to mitigate the damage, marketing and advertising budgets. As long as you know how.

The decision to slash advertising can’t be begrudged. On face value, there’s a method to it. The past has shown that consumers keep their wallets in their pockets and businesses therefore deprioritise advertising.

But is it the right decision?

Throughout the business decision making process, it’s easy to look past the advertising opportunity that presents itself:

• Your competitors are likely to cut back on spending, creating a less cluttered market and the opportunity for greater exposure
• You’ll stand out and receive greater consumer attention
• More advertising space will become available leading to an opportunity to cut deals that benefit your brand
• You can project stability and growth while your competitors weather the storm

Step back in time and take a look at some of the examples and brands that seized such an opportunity ended up dominating the market:

• In the 1920s, Post was the category leader for dry cereals. During the Great Depression, Post cut ad spend down significantly while Kellogg’s doubled down. Kellogg’s became the category leader with 30% profit growth. It has maintained high market share since.
• The recession of 1973-1975 was triggered by the energy crisis mainly due to petrol shortage. U.S government issued the first miles-per-gallon report in which Toyota Corolla was second to Honda Civic. Toyota resisted cutting ad spend as opposed to other car brands including Honda and became the top imported car maker by 1976.
• Here in Australia, there have also been a number of leading companies that have launched in a recession – JB HIFI (1974), Billabong (1973), Harvey Norman and Priceline (1982)

In short, brands that held back their advertising spends saw little to no market share gains while brands that continued with their marketing strategies benefitted.

We live in a different world now and with that in mind there are unknowns, but a lot to gain if marketing dollars are used well. We consume media much differently than we did back then – we are much more connected digitally, data is more readily available for targeted advertising, and media is much more trackable and accountable than ever before.

The natural advice is to follow the consumers and take advantage of the technology and data available to us to run digital campaigns. They offer great targeting to minimise budget wastage on people unlikely to engage with your brand, flexibility to flick campaigns on and off or switch creative copy, and offer the ability to test, learn, and measure success.

Put your brand building budget behind targeted prospecting

Only data-driven digital advertising provides this opportunity. Consumers are much more likely to spend time consuming media at home. Their general internet and connected TV usage will increase as they minimise spending. By running broadcast video on demand, online video and digital out of home campaigns programmatically you’ll be able to take advantage of the tech and data to build brand and run targeted prospecting campaigns before converting those prospects.

Convert and retain the customers you already have

The simplest way to drive more top-line revenue is to convert the customers in your sales funnel, and retain the ones you already have. Focus on search, social, and programmatic for audience segmentation that targets current customers with upsell or cross-sell promotions, re-engage customers that have interacted with your website and really take advantage of your first party data to minimise recession damage.

While the recession will impact all businesses in a number of different ways, there’s a high chance you’ll weather the storm and recover by remaining in the market with targeted digital strategies. On average, recessions last about 10 months while periods of economic growth last 3 years so there is a lot to gain if approached in the right way. Get in touch if you’d like to have a deeper discussion about what this can mean for your business and how we can help to grow your brand.

Footnotes:

McGraw-Hill Research. Laboratory of Advertising Performance Report 5262, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986.
Greenburg, Eric Rolfe. “Fortune Follows the Brave,” Management Review, January 1993

The post Recession-proof programmatic: growing your brand in an economic downturn appeared first on Bench Media.

It might seem soon, but there’s no better time than the present to prepare your brand for the present-giving season.

How will Q4 be different this year?

According to research conducted by Monash University, most Australians get in on their Christmas shopping early, with 55% of Aussies starting their shopping one or more months in advance.

It’s not just limited to Christmas – according to NAB, Australians spent more than an estimated $8 billion across the four days from Black Friday to Cyber Monday in November 2021, and it’s only expected to grow this year.

With inflation tipped to peak in December at 7.75% – the highest since 1989 – consumers are getting less bang for their buck. Combined with supply chain snarls, pandemic hangovers, war and post-lockdown behaviour, the average consumer will want their dollars to go further over this Christmas period.

This year, the silly season will become the savvy season. Brands will need to play their advertising strategy smarter in order to penetrate the market.

What opportunities can your brand unlock over the Q4 period?

This end of year, more than ever, media inventory will be in high demand.

With one in two shoppers returning back to in-store retail purchasing post-COVID, we’ll see a dramatic increase in the already growing programmatic Digital-Out-of-Home space. An evolution from traditional out-of-home, brands are able to use better targeting capabilities and better audience tracking capitalise on premium, high-traffic physical locations to cut through advertising noise.

With the World Cup on in November, there’s still opportunities to have your brands appear on World Cup content programmatically through display, video and broadcast video on demand – so long as you book soon, as inventory gets booked quickly.

Towards the end of the year, studies confirm that social media influences 58% of respondents’ buying decisions, with YouTube, Instagram and TikTok as the platforms shoppers will turn to for guidance on their Christmas wish list. Advertisers can capitalise on social media by starting their branding work months earlier.

Typically, display and video CPMs increase approximately 45% in the 2 months to Christmas. At Bench, we strongly recommend to strategise and plan your Q4 media now, well in advance, to take advantage of locked-in preferential rates that will give advertisers an edge in the game.

How do you start planning your Q4 activity now?

1. Create that creative ‘journey’- much like Santa’s travels from the North Pole, it’s important to focus on your customer’s journey to your brand. Use multiple creative touch points within the same advertising action, personalise your messaging, and follow your user through a multi-channel strategy between display, search and social channels.
2. Effectively measure your branding activity over the Christmas period – by integrating digital branding activity as part of your marketing funnel, our study has shown an uplift in conversion rate by up to 3000% and improved performance at the bottom of a brand’s funnel. Combined with a brand lift survey, you can understand the impact your brand has had on the market, and change strategies on the fly.
3. Retarget early, and often – in order to reach your audience in the lead up to Christmas, create a highly targeted ad campaign reaching your first-party audience, with messaging to reflect familiarity and time-sensitivity. Starting your campaign early and using a 4-8 week runway period also allows you to build your remarketing list early on and get highly-targeted as the campaign nears Christmas.

By planning your activity early, you can cut through with a strong share of voice early on, and lock in your media rates – otherwise you will be left with coal in your stockings.

Want to improve your brand’s sales this Christmas? Speak to one of our experts today.

The post Silly season, savvy strategy: 3 ways advertisers can maximise ROI this Christmas appeared first on Bench Media.

Learnings/Takeaways:                                                                                                                                                                            

1. Where and when to invest your marketing dollars to maximise sales this holiday season.
2. The importance of digital branding channels and how they can impact paid search campaigns.
3. How and why to secure your media buys early – accessing the best contexts for your brands and products 
4. How to scale campaigns
5. How Sheet Society uses a multi-channel strategy including audio, DOOH, video and display to drive customer acquisition and sales.

Watch the recording

The post NORA Webinar: Key ad strategies to skyrocket sales this Christmas appeared first on Bench Media.

Paid search and social advertising are stalwarts of the advertising playbook boosting conversion. Yet with media spends on the rise, increasing fragmentation of audiences, and competition across every channel, marketers face the challenge of creating new strategies to support their growth targets. Relying only on search and social campaigns can result in diminishing returns as competition and noise in these channels continue to increase. Hence, adopting  digital branding is a powerful tool to source new customers and maximise budget efficiency.

Utilising The Trade Desk platform, Bench Media ran a targeted study with a range of  brand channels across digital, audio and video, and the advertisers were drawn from retail, health and medical, education, gaming, electronics, travel, and software industries. The conversion types were not limited to one or two events and covered a range of actions, such as purchase, form submission, engagement and quotation submission.

Specifically, the uplift goals included: uplift in rate of qualified traffic engaging with website (engaged visitors), uplift in conversion rate of lead form submission (lead form or form), uplift in sales conversion rate (purchase).

The study looked at audiences that were exposed to two conversion paths and assessed their conversion rate uplift:

• search/social ad > conversion;
• programmatic ads across audio, display, video and BVOD > search /social ad > conversion.

The result showed that advertisers saw an uplift in conversion rate by up to 3000% and improved  performance at the bottom of the funnel. It unequivocally demonstrated the merit and impact of combining the forces of branding channels and paid social and search.

In 2021, programmatic investment continued to climb, according to IAB’s annual industry study, and this spend is expected to continue across this year. It indicates marketers are increasingly seeing how programmatic provides an effective use of data and access to premium inventory at scale. The flexibility enables all brands to respond to market changes or results from new data, with cost-efficient, optimised ad spend.

The post New Bench Media study reveals how targeted digital branding can lift search and social conversion appeared first on Bench Media.

Q1. What does the delay of the cookies mean for the adtech industry?

It means that the industry has more time to prepare. The industry can continue to use cookies to drive targeted advertising but we now have more time to focus on building and enhancing first party data and other non-cookie based advertising solutions, including contextual.

Marketers have used cookies to collect groups of potential customers, personalise ads, track user behaviour, and measure the performance of digital marketing campaigns for years. While it may be challenging for some to rethink and execute the granular targeting that you have become accustomed to, this change is a huge opportunity to rethink how you execute, target and optimise campaigns.

As cross-site measurement may be impacted, older, panel-based measurement techniques may become valuable once again. The long-term impacts on marketing campaigns and measurement are still fairly unclear, but there are several ways to stay on top of these changes.

While the deprecation of the cookie presents a challenge to the ad tech industry and the way campaigns are run, it’s also an exciting opportunity for change.

Q2. How will marketers use this extra time to prepare?

If the deprecation of the 3rd party cookie was to go ahead according to plan, many marketers would be unprepared, meaning they would likely see a drop in performance in their digital advertising activities. This announcement will give marketers more time to understand and prepare for solutions like:

1. Activating audiences from platforms with first-party data (Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Meta, etc)
2. Working with platforms leading the market in open source ID frameworks (The Trade Desk)
3. Utilising channels (e.g. BVOD, DOOH) and measurement solutions (e.g. Brand lift, Search and Social uplift) that don’t heavily rely on cookies
4. Using more secure data handling systems for data distribution (LiveRamp)
5. Data collection through other means than 3rd party cookies (other 3rd party signals, publisher data)
6. Contextual targeting (IAS, Grapeshot, Teads, targeted allow-lists)

We would recommend that marketers keep an eye on the Google Privacy Sandbox for future updates and proposed timings while making the most of the pushback by testing and trialling non-cookie based audiences, media channels and measurement solutions to find what works for their brand and to remain future-proofed in their approach to digital marketing.

Sam Thompson, Head of Digital Media & Solutions

The post Google delays its cookie-cutting until 2024 appeared first on Bench Media.

All the above phrases are those which have trended on Tiktok recently. And while you may be processing how you used to be “with it”, the reality is, the world has changed what “it” was. 

Therein lies the power of Tiktok’s exponential growth – the addictive short-form video-sharing app that allows users to create and share 15-second videos, on any topic. By sandwiching your ads between hyper-relevant and trending topics, we’ll endeavor to break down the need for Tiktok as part of your marketing strategy, one bite-sized fact at a time:

Audiences are becoming more diverse, yet unique from Facebook

While you may still be scratching your heads about what on earth the above trends detail, the good news is that trends are starting to skew older. “Running Up That Hill” is a reference to the re-viralised hit by Kate Bush in the 1980s, and it’s currently doing the rounds on TikTok. 

While Tiktok initially skewed towards a younger target market, 78% of Australia’s 8 million users are between 18 and 44 years old – and the trend is skewing older. Further to that, 44% of Tiktok users do not use Facebook. As users migrate away from Facebook’s dominance, Tiktok presents an increased branding opportunity as your ideal customer most likely is already active on Tiktok.

Ads drive consumer advocacy, rather than cheap engagement

Unlike other social media platforms, Tiktok fosters a discovery mindset – and for hours on end. 

More than 160 million hours of video are watched on Tiktok in any given minute of the day, and, unlike other social media platforms, users are there to explore new trends, rather than to see content from their friends and family.

Doing the rounds recently is the trending topic, “He/she’s a ten, but”, in which TikTokers score their imaginary partner’s beauty based on their fatal flaw – for example, “He’s a ten, but he can’t read an analog clock”. Such content is designed to create conversation amongst the TikTok community and fun shared experiences, of which ads can be sandwiched in between. User engagement on Tiktok is super high, but users feel more connected to the content’s non-invasive style of advertising. 

User discovery can mean user loyalty

While Tiktok is a video content platform, it offers great variety to be seen, heard and drive business results. Each Tiktoker’s inherent need to discover means brands can ride the coattails of this platform to initially boost their branding, bring in a new customer base, and eventually create loyalty. In-feed ads campaigns to offer high-impact, sound on videos that grab your audience’s attention as they scroll their feed of videos, sandwiched between their favourite content. Combining this with the TikTok tracking pixel means down-funnel interactions (such as form fills or add to cart events) can build out an end-to-end conversion loop to retarget and, depending on tailored creative content, create user loyalty.

What next?

Remember that when creating a TikTok ads campaign – don’t create ads, create TikToks. Even get Horace involved. Bench Media is excited to incorporate TikTok into your marketing strategy. 

Get in touch today to hear about how we can help you run your TikTok Ads campaign, including a limited time bonus media offering.

OFFER
Bench is offering $1,000 ad credit for every $10,000 media budget invested in TikTok or DOOH. Please contact us before 30  July, 2022 to take advantage of this offer.

The post Get trending and incorporate TikTok into your digital strategy appeared first on Bench Media.

Up until 2020 the Australian OOH industry had seen impressive growth. This had been largely driven by consolidation and rapid digital acceleration. This digitisation of the industry/sector now means that eleven million Australians aged 14yrs+ are exposed to Digital Out- Of- Home (DOOH) advertising in an average week.

While the OOH market was disproportionately affected by COVID, as lockdowns have lifted and Australians have resumed their regular routines and commutes, OOH has started to recover in earnest. The OOH industry is back on track to reach pre-pandemic results, with the Outdoor Media Association (OMA) reporting a 24 percent increase on net media revenue for 2021, at $812.7 million, up from $655.2 million in 2020.

The digitisation of the industry means that as it recovers it is now able to provide greater flexibility, transparency, and targeting than ever before. And with more than a 90 percent+ reach of all Australians, digital OOH, and more specifically programmatic digital OOH (pDOOH), has become ever more important to e-commerce marketers.

According to the IAB report which was released last year, Australian advertising agencies have embraced pDOOH, with almost one-quarter of Australian agencies trading DOOH inventory programmatically for the first time during 2020 and a further 10 percent of agencies increasing their programmatic investment. These numbers reflect the increasing popularity of pDOOH advertising, especially in the retail industry.

For more efficient and effective campaigns and greater brand control

Essentially, pDOOH is more than just billboards. It includes billboards, bus shelters, doctors’ offices, gas stations, grocery stores, gyms, malls, pharmacies, sports entertainment venues, urban panels, convenience stores, movie theatre lobbies, etc. The concept of pDOOH and DOOH is fundamentally the same. However, how the ad is delivered -bought or sold- makes them different. pDOOH automates the process of buying, selling and delivering inventory across digital screens. It offers enhanced capabilities to traditional OOH and DOOH. So what is all the fuss about and why is pDOOH quickly becoming a channel that retail marketers should be aware of and consider within their marketing plans?

For retail marketers, pDOOH delivers many benefits. It simplifies the ad buying process and enables retailers to have more control over the planning, targeting, optimisation and measurement of their campaigns. pDOOH allows for quick and flexible campaign activation, as well as transparency of delivery. It provides retailers improved brand control over traditional DOOH by allowing them to stop, start and optimise campaigns, in real-time. Retailers have flexibility to set what audience they want to reach, as well as the environments and other conditions that matter to their campaign, such as time of day, weather, and location, in which their ads should play. pDOOH allows retailers to create automated rule-based targeting options that trigger both buying and scheduling workflows.

In addition, pDOOH enables more thinking and insight around downstream measurements of the impact of showing the ads. Whether it’s an increase in footfall traffic to a certain store, or a change in patterns of behaviour, retailers can track that through the data from DOOH campaigns delivered programmatically. Another benefit of pDOOH for retailers is that it lowers the barriers to entry, which means new and small brands are able to include pDOOH advertising within their campaigns with a reasonable cost of entry.

A big opportunity for retail marketers

This post-pandemic year is an exciting time for the OOH industry, given recovery is in full swing and the industry is starting to bounce back. The work that went into the digitisation of the space, in the lead-up to the pandemic, was not wasted. This digitisation creates enormous opportunities for retailers. The use of pDOOH has become a key point in the recovery of the  OOH industry. It will mean it can recover quicker, faster and smarter than before. pDOOH will not only help to accelerate the industry growth – but the increased targeting and measurement will also be a win for all retail marketers.

Read the full article which appeared on Power Retail in June, 2022.

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