LiveIntent’s Caroline Schimmenti and Christine Lee share what they learned from this year’s Advertising Week – New York.
1. Continuity Is Key
Seamless cross-device content used to be a nice perk, but is quickly becoming de rigueur. Audiences want to be able to interact with your brand whenever and wherever it is convenient.
Phones and tablets are quickly outgrowing their role as the ‘second screen’ and becoming the main attraction as the majority of Internet usage is done on mobile devices (60% according to ComScore). Not only must brands leverage technology to meet their customers’ needs, but they also need to make the experience fluid. No one wants to load up their shopping cart in an app only to find they didn’t carry over when trying to check out from a laptop.
A big part of the cross-device conversation is the universal identifier – specifically, how do we build one? Cookies fail on mobile, and brands desperately need a functioning alternative. Facebook has taken steps with Atlas now allowing for advertisers to target users off their Facebook log in. Of course, your Facebook login is also your email address, which is LiveIntent’s proposed solution to the crumbling cookie. With email’s ubiquity on mobile – 91% of people check their email at least once a day on their mobile device, outranking the 75% who use their mobile devices to check social media daily- it is a sure way to connect and identify users cross-device.
2. Storytelling Is Here To Stay
Ogilvy & Mather’s Tham Khai Meng began by reminding his audience that while storytelling started during cavemen years, it’s not going away. Storytelling is all about relevancy, connecting with your consumers, and telling the right story to the right person, at the right time.
Now, how do brands tell a beautiful story? Through video storytelling!
Video storytelling coincides with Facebook’s LiveRail purchase, and Coca-Cola and Audi are among the first few brands to test out branding through video on Facebook’s platform with success. Much of this is also ensuring that the right consumer sees the right video at the right time. Leveraging the Facebook login as an identifier ensures accurate delivery, but it is limited to the platform. Alternatively, LiveIntent facilitates uses the email hash to directly match a brand’s most valuable audience, its subscribers, with a relevant message.
3. #EmailLove
We might be in the age of apps, but that doesn’t mean we’re leaving stalwart internet technologies to flounder!
The VP of Marketing at My FitnessPal saw a void that could only be filled by email. A mere four emails were sent to the app’s 15 million-long email list in 2013. Today, regularly scheduled email drops — which link content to a blog that leads back to the app — have helped re-engage 500,000 inactive users. This point reiterates that, from email-to blog-to app, the experience is continuous and direct.
Rather than bombarding the web hoping to find their users and maybe some look-a-likes, MyFitnessPal leveraged their email list to market to hand-raisers who have already demonstrated their value.
And, if we had to surmise Advertising Week in a single word? It would be…
4. Relevancy
Regardless of device, channel or day of the week, one theme rang true during AdWeek: you have to know your consumer. Regardless of session or speaker, we kept hearing that it was key to focus on relevancy.
The reason why? Consumers only think advertising is intrusive if it is not relevant to them, and brands must focus on the increasing demand to target consumers seamlessly across devices.
At LiveIntent, we know how important it is to ensure relevancy – which we target the person, not cookies.
