Month: May 2022

In 2022, the advertising ecosystem is inundated with identity solutions that include numerous tech vendors’ ID graphs and tools, data clean rooms and first-party data matching via walled gardens such as Google and Facebook. Marketing teams are testing many of these tactics while considering that there might not be an end-all-be-all identity solution that provides an unobstructed view of the first-party data they are using. 

Blaine Britten, senior vice president of data strategy at Stirista, a data-driven marketing cloud provider, said there’s an argument against using multiple vendor IDs or walled garden solutions as it can lead to unnecessary hurdles for advertisers. 

“Targeting solutions owned by technology vendors capture the spirit of what the industry is trying to achieve — a unified ID that marketers can build a solution around — but they can create complexities for publishers and advertisers,” said Britten. “Each vendor is vying for their solution to become the standard, and the approach requires multiple middlemen handling data and inevitable attrition due to increased ID sync complexity across channels. Publishers and brands simply want to match their user data where they find overlap, and there’s an opportunity to streamline the process through owning their data and having clear mechanisms for using it.”

Amid the complexities of testing new identity solutions, marketers are approaching a straightforward strategy of matching their first-party customer relationship management (CRM) data with hashed or encrypted email data to segment audiences and discover new targeted ad opportunities effectively. 

Putting email data into action in the digital targeting landscape

First-party, opt-in email data is a critical resource for marketers in reaching their most relevant audiences. Even if users eventually decide to opt out of receiving future campaigns, marketers are still required to retain the data in their system to honor opt-outs if the individual has multiple emails or other points of contact. 

“The advantage marketers have with using their email data in a universally-accepted encrypted form is that they can honor account updates and changes at the user level rather than just the individual PII variable,” said Britten. “Marketers collect explicit opt-ins from people who receive value exchange for that information. If they know who is and is not their current customer base, they can update more quickly, adding new insights or removing people from campaigns without having to send visitor information through multiple parties.”

Still, a key tactic (and challenge) for marketers is finding new and creative ways to incentivize people to share their emails or opt back into communications. Establishing trust among users — i.e., if they share their emails, brands will use them responsibly, and their email data won’t be resold — is also critical in maintaining users’ goodwill and permission to receive future ads. Solutions to the challenges in play include database tech partners that can help advertisers honor user opt-outs and provide a more comprehensive picture of who a customer is, with details such as demographics and household information based on public data. 

Brian Lin, senior vice president of product management and advanced advertising sales at TelevisaUnivision, taps into the company’s first-party data across all touchpoints and Stirista to support its privacy-first data strategy. “With the Hispanic market now representing 20% of the total population and growing, it’s imperative that marketers leverage data sets that are representative and of verified quality so that they can ensure they are reaching the full Hispanic community,” he said. 

Britten at Stirista said larger companies specializing in research and consulting are seeking to help advertisers across a variety of industries. These companies approach technology partners to help collate an authoritative base file of U.S. consumers and the ability to connect different data sets. 

“Say these companies are looking to reach people who have expressed interest in financial markets. That data might be available, but it relies on very specific identifiers, such as a business email,” Britten added. “A company can then use a technology solution to build a base audience and layer in interesting, but smaller data sets from niche data providers to build out an authoritative CRM database.”

For brands that have a customer file from an email but want to understand that customer better, they are working with technology partners to analyze their PII and develop a more persistent identity layer with alternate contacts for future targeting. From there, they can layer in more insights from different data providers, building in publicly available information such as social media handles and phone numbers. 

Building on first-party data and email targeting strategies

In the future, marketing teams can streamline their pursuit of privacy-friendly targeting tactics and audience addressability by activating email data with the support of technology partners. The following insights are helping teams propel their strategies forward:

• Having a single email for a consumer isn’t the end-all-be-all for brands to effectively activate that data. Marketers account for business emails, personal emails or emails used specifically to receive promotions to create a complete picture of a user. 
• Marketing teams are seeking database technology partners that can help them get more granular with their PII, providing reports that display demographics by age, gender and interests. These reports help prove to brands that their partners genuinely understand a brand’s audience and how to reach them. 
• Teams on the marketing and tech partner sides are working to improve how to handle user opt-outs, establishing strategies to remove emails from their system as quickly as possible to honor the wishes of their customers. 

Advertisers are applying these insights to their email targeting strategies to navigate the complex landscape of privacy-compliant identity solutions more effectively and efficiently — a practice that will be key to reaching the right audiences in 2022 and beyond. 

Often brand leaders rely on insight from past campaigns to plan for future ones. According to Heather Kehrberg, director of global creative success at Amazon Ads, “While past campaign insights are helpful and they should be considered, they can also be quite limiting for advertisers in terms of preventing them from trying something different that may reach a new set of customers.” 

A more effective approach is to take a customer-centric view to develop campaign creative that resonates with the audience in the moment. Kehrberg explained the term and what it means to brands and customers: “A customer-centric approach to developing creative is one that goes beyond outcomes from past campaigns to also encompass scaled creative insights, specifically those related to particular creative elements. It then utilizes experimentation to determine what resonates and performs best.”

With this approach, marketers can understand how their audiences are likely to respond to different creative aspects before moving into asset production, allowing investments to be better informed and helping to make positive outcomes more likely. 

Customer-centric creative is informed by insights and experimentation

The concept of customer-centric creative challenges marketers to seek more insights than just what’s gathered from analyzing past campaign performance. 

A customer-centric approach brings a variety of audience insights into the process. “We need to understand everything from shopping behaviors, media consumption and trending topics, but we also need to go deeper and look at creative-specific insights,” explained Kehrberg. “These can help identify the best creative types to use for different goals, like awareness or purchase, and they inform decisions about creative elements like imagery, headlines and colors to use in order to really resonate with a specific audience.” 

A solid place to start is always with a clear goal or KPI. That goal then informs which scaled insights and past campaign learnings are most relevant and enables marketers to hypothesize what kind of creative and creative elements will perform best toward the goal.

“Then you have to produce those creative versions based on your hypothesis and conduct creative experimentation,” said Kehrberg. “Once you see what’s working best, you can shift more of the campaign budget into those creative versions.”   

A customer-centric approach drives outcomes

“There’s not only one type of creative that comes from this approach, which is the beauty of it,” said Kehrberg. “The creative should be very specific to your brand and to the objectives you’re hoping to achieve with your campaign. It shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all, but more so tailored to the specific audiences that you’re hoping to reach.”

For example, using this approach, Kehrberg’s team at Amazon Ads worked with an Amazon seller in 2021 to run a consideration and conversion-driven campaign for artificial Christmas trees. With many other advertisers featuring similar products during the holiday season, this seller wanted to show customers how their product and brand were unique. 

By consulting the brand’s past campaign learnings and scaled insights, the decision was made to include a tailored headline in the creative instead of the previous auto-generated headline, focusing on the product attributes customers indicated were most valuable to them in reviews. As a result, the seller saw a 75% uplift in detail page view rate, and a 140% uplift in return on ad spend.  

In another case last year, an advertiser in the beverage category had been running a conversion-driven, always-on campaign for coffee products for several months. The creative had an auto-generated headline for its dynamic ad product pulled directly from the Amazon product detail page.

To avoid ad fatigue, Kehrberg’s team used scaled creative insights, which suggested that the campaign would have better outcomes if it used the same ad product and included a brand logo and a tailored headline. The team then used past campaign learnings to inform the messaging of that headline. After making those changes, the advertiser saw a 250% increase in ROAS. 

“This was an example of leveraging insights to inform a hypothesis and then going bigger once you know what’s working for your brand,” said Kehrberg.     

Customer-centric creative focuses on determining what truly resonates with a particular audience, and it’s an approach from which all marketers can learn. 

“It requires embracing an approach that uses multiple insights instead of simply doing what the next best data point tells you to do,” Kehrberg added. “The combination of scaled creative insights with brand-level learnings from previous campaigns and creative experimentation will help brands achieve their campaign goals and deliver better creative.”

The outcomes and results described in this article may not reflect typical results. For average uplifts per locale and KPI, please refer to the creative type insights interactive guide. 

“Ideally, CTV is facing the same privacy, data and identity challenges as any other digital channel; the only difference is the television,” said Chris Innes, Chief Operating Officer at MNTN. “The television needs more controls and transparency around opt-outs. There’s so much control around what data is shared on desktop and mobile, but there needs to be the same level of control with TV.”

Even with privacy-specific legislation in three U.S. states and in-process regulations across 18 more, CTV is, so far, largely unaffected by these regulations. However, there are many moving parts, and while federal guidelines are not looming yet, there are details of which advertisers should be aware.

Privacy regulations haven’t become CTV-specific yet

The CTV ecosystem has never relied on cookies for tracking or targeting, which has many in the space feeling like they’re mainly in the clear as far as privacy regulations are concerned. 

With Google announcing a proposal called Gnatcatcher earlier this year — it would allow users to veil their IP addresses to prevent advertisers from using that information to track them — CTV advertisers are realizing that there is a chance some changes may be headed their way.

Although, that’s certainly not set in stone. And with Google currently refining and taking feedback on the proposal, any changes are likely to take time and effort to implement. In the meantime, advertisers have an opportunity to learn more.

“Education is the most important tool,” said Innes. “This is a new market with a lot of misinformation about how IP addresses are used, data targeting, cookies, etc., within the streaming TV space. Brands should read up on this information within the IAB, the NAI and their own research.”

According to a survey of nearly 80 brand and agency executives recently conducted by Digiday and MNTN, most respondents indicated they were confident that their companies could adapt to whatever consumer privacy restrictions came their way regarding the CTV space. To that end, 52% said they were very confident, and 31% indicated they were moderately confident. 

It’s important to note that most of the current regulations weren’t designed to cover CTV and therefore don’t account for the unique nature of the medium. For some marketers, this is a bit of a double-edged sword — it offers more freedom and flexibility in some ways. Still, there aren’t any guidelines to help streamline and create any uniformity within the industry.

The TV space lacks needed elements of standardization, leaving many CTV marketers without clear approaches to uniform measurement and opt-out methods. 

“CTV is already ahead of the curve because TVs don’t support cookies, and a television specifically is a one-to-many tool,” said Innes. “In either case, end consumers deserve control over opt-outs, over how their data is used and monetized. I welcome solutions in these areas specific to television.”

How these regulations are affecting audience targeting and measurement within CTV

According to the same Digiday and MNTN survey, in addition to utilizing first- and third-party data to reach target audiences on CTV, respondents are finding the most success when using more than one tactic at a time to reach audiences — adding retargeting, contextual and geolocation targeting, among others, into their mix. This is also a helpful strategy as more and more advertisers look to become more specific in their audience targeting. 

“Television is the best performing channel there is in terms of ROAS,” said Innes. “Families structure their living rooms and lives around a television. Brands that have never used TV before can now use it as a performance channel driving positive ROAS, and brands that have been on TV for decades can now tie a direct ROAS off of television.” 

While it’s clear TV is a performance channel, it’s evident there are some gaps to be filled, as 52% of respondents said they were measuring CTV campaigns with only a medium level of accuracy. When looking forward one year, 39% indicate they’ll be measuring with high accuracy, with 45% still at the medium level. 

While those who indicated their measurement would be more accurate cited more advanced targeting and analytics, stronger reporting and tech integrations, those in the less accurate camp predicted ongoing privacy guidelines would make tracking users across the web more difficult, and the lack of the ability to use cookies would make it challenging to reach an effective industry solution for measurement. 

Even though there’s a lack of industry standardization around measurement methods, user opt-outs and the like, most of the current privacy regulations don’t affect CTV at the moment. For now, CTV advertisers are mostly in the clear.

Sponsored By: MNTN