The U.S. Search Awards short list was released on Friday and Acronym nabbed two wins as a Finalist for The Best Use of Local Search and The Best Integrated Campaign. Winners will be announced on July 29^th.

The recognized campaign for the Best Use of Local Search campaign spotlighted our work with a luxury hotel brand that sought to increase non-brand local Search rankings and traffic for 700 individual property websites, including hotel/resort, residences, spa, restaurant, and bar listings — all while driving measurable revenue through local, organic Search efforts.

Acronym developed and executed a framework of best practices for local listing optimizations, including each location’s most desired non-branded Search terms and gave the individual property listing managers clear and tailored processes for ongoing efforts to drive lasting results.

The average non-brand local rankings for individual properties increased by 29%.

The individual property website traffic increased by 8% and property revenue from local organic Search also increased by 8%.

Local property managers are continuing to implement Acronym’s processes, and we expect these results to continue to increase month-over-month as additional content is optimized through local search engines. 

Meanwhile, the recognized work for Best Integrated Campaign spotlights how Acronym helped Wharton Executive Education grow their audience, improve prospecting efficiency, and limit the barriers to entry for programmatic content while ensuring the brand’s presence across premium publishers to drive more online applications.

Acronym streamlined prospecting and awareness through seamless buying to dramatically improve efficiencies by creating strategic programmatic content alignment with publishers on premium websites including sites like Finance.Yahoo.com, USAToday.com, Newsweek.com, Forbes.com, SFGate.com, CNN.com, NewYorkTimes.com, NewYorkPost.com, HuffPost.com, CBSNews.com, WashingtonPost.com, BusinessInsider.com, and more.

This new approach to display and programmatic advertising reduced time spent on media buys, drove efficiencies, and increased performance, enabling Acronym to limit barriers to entry, buy directly on premium sites more efficiently, lower barriers to entry and develop a new process that performed the way you would through direct site buys, programmatically.

This is the third recognition for Acronym’s work with Wharton this year. Last month, U.S. Campaign named Acronym a Finalist for the Best Use of Digital/Programmatic and the social media campaign supporting Wharton’s Live Online Programs was named Agency Campaign of the Year by Sprout Social.

If you’d like help developing the right local Search, Programmatic or Social Media campaign for your brand, please let us know. Our media teams are ready to help!

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With that in mind, here are the programmatic advertising trends you need to know in time for the coming 2022 holiday season:

1. Slow death of the cookie

The depreciation of third-party cookies has been dragging on for some time, but it is coming. And, when it does, there will be alternatives for programmatic marketing.

Of course, Google will still allow first-party data, so regulated first-party cookies will remain a focus for programmatic. Harnessed with precise detail, first-party data can provide incredible value for advertisers – from browsing behavior to preferences. In fact, Digiday reports that 51% of marketing professionals are investing more in contextual targeting. We expect this trend to continue.

Three key methods to extract the most value out of first-party data are:

• Launching registration walls
• Widening your user data pool
• Segmenting your audience and the use of contextual targeting

2. Connected TV (CTV) growth

During the height of the pandemic in 2020, TV watching and online streaming soared. Nearly 40% of waking hours were spent in front of a screen, with the public spending double the amount of time per day watching streaming services compared to pre-pandemic numbers.

While these changes occurred over a short period of time, the opportunity for further growth within programmatic advertising, including the buying process, tactics, and measurement, all need to be reimagined.

Traditional practices within TV advertising will not apply to programmatic for CTV. The brands who are quick to act on these changing behaviors will win.

3. Growth of mobile gaming for programmatic display

In 2021, there were an estimated 3.24 billion gamers globally. Last year, we talked about the rise in G-Commerce and the advantages for early adopters. The bottom line: The gaming industry has transformed into a lucrative advertising platform.

Increasing competition in mobile gaming advertising means your creative campaigns must reach the right audience, at the right time and in the right place. Harnessing the power of programmatic marketing will be invaluable to scale the appropriate ads to the users you want to target and win.

4. Greater creativity is required to reach customers within display

As consumers see advertising increasing in their daily lives, ad fatigue or “banner blindness” is creating new obstacles for marketers. Brands need to find more creative ways to connect with audiences. As a result, we expect to see a greater need for:

• Personalization. The use of data feeds and dynamic creative can target your audiences on a wider scale and result in higher conversion rates.
• Video. Most programmatic video ad budgets go to mobile—65.2% in 2022. Ad spending against non-video formats on mobile will still account for more than half of mobile programmatic display ad spending through 2023. However, given recent growth of social video advertising and increasing interest in TikTok among advertisers, it’s likely that video will continue to gain share of mobile programmatic display.
• Testing and optimization. This will be especially important in a world without third-party cookies. Marketers must test and optimize for better CTR.

5. Next-level campaign management

Having a powerful campaign management and reporting tool will be invaluable to your marketing team’s ability to heighten CTR and maximize ROI. Being able to schedule ads, publish in real-time and utilize real-time data for key insights will be imperative to achieve your business goals.

Being agile and responsive is crucial to compete in today’s volatile business environment. Combining real-time insights with automated production ads and of-the-moment campaign management is now the winning trifecta. If you need assistance with your programmatic strategy, contact us today. Our teams are ready for you.

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The report also highlights how important digital channels have become from a marketing perspective, evidenced by significant increases in planned spending across search and social media.

Digital marketing channels are attractive because they drive sales in the current quarter, not the next and deliver real-time conversion metrics. Marketers surveyed by Nielsen believe search and social media are the most effective for their businesses.

Meanwhile, The Edelman Trust Barometer has shown that both trust and reputation are correlated with actual and intent to purchase, but that trust is in many ways the more powerful factor. For example, 61% of people globally say that a good reputation may get them to try a product; but unless they come to trust the company behind the product, they will soon stop buying it regardless of its reputation.

So, how can a brand improve its reputation and create the kinds of connections that convert?

According to Edelman, consumers most want Diversity, Authenticity, Transparency, Social Responsibility, Data Security, Valued Opinion and Purpose from brands.

Marketers can demonstrate these brand attributes through their message as well as the select channels and media outlets in which they place their programmatic ads. This can be amplified by additional content marketing through social media and search.

If you’d like assistance with your content strategy and how to best select the right channels in social, search and programmatic, give us a call. We are here to help.

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Data-informed programmatic ad targeting optimizes ad campaigns and ensures brands put their budget where it will deliver the greatest results by eliminating irrelevant segments and focusing spend on targets with predefined traits like demographics, age, gender, geolocations, browsing history, and online activities. 

Some other key findings include the use of video as a key driver of programmatic investment amongst agencies; 54% of agencies now buy more than 41% of their video inventory programmatically compared to 50% in 2019. And, with the rise in advertiser investment in programmatic, ads.txt inventory purchasing is increasing, as is awareness. 52% of Publishers meanwhile said they were selling more than 81% of their ads.txt inventory.

Today, the buy-side continues to evolve towards hybrid models. In 2019, 15% of advertisers stated that they had a hybrid model for programmatic trading. This has increased to 30% in 2020.

What Are the Best Practices in Programmatic Ad Targeting?

So, as more brands embrace programmatic, what are the best practices to improve your ROI?

1. Behavioral targeting: This is an important way to connect with customers by delivering relevant ads based on their behavior signals such as search history, browsing habits, social media interactions and purchase behaviors. 

2. Hyper-local targeting: Multi-location brands can leverage programmatic ROI by focusing on specific geographical locations. Google and Facebook, for examples, deliver hyperlocal targeting to serve specific users right down to their street addresses.

3. Ad-spend optimization: Marketers use predictive customer lifetime value (CLTV) to analyze future revenue generation by existing customers. This strategy optimizes downstream behavior like purchase decisions, app downloads and online engagements.

4. Relevant intent signals: Actionable data insights sourced from diverse touch points enable tighter ad targeting as brands can run – and adjust – campaigns based on real-time campaign performance. This is an important way to maximizes ROI and avoid wasteful spends.

5.  Frequency caps: We recommend brands differentiate cross-channel users and prevent them from viewing duplicate ads. Our Analytics teams help ensure you controls each users’ ad impressions on an hourly, weekly or monthly basis. This makes better use of programmatic media budget by avoiding repetitive ad displays to the same users.

6. Attractive brand visuals: As the Attitudes to Programmatic Advertising study showed, video remains the preferred visual media to drive the best ROI. Consistency breeds trust and brand relevancy. To make your ads more recognizable, make sure you follow your own brand guidelines and deliver not only a consistent message, but also a consistent look and feel.

If you’d like assistance in developing the right programmatic campaigns for your brand, contact us today.

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Programmatic advertising is simply campaign automation. It allows your team to focus their time on measuring campaign performance to ensure your budget is put to the best possible use with zero wasted time or money.

Programmatic also enables you to reach a larger audience. Nearly 60% of the global population is online. With precise targeting and programmatic experience, brands can find an approach to every potential customer.

With that in mind, here are the top tips for programmatic success:

• Be selective with platforms. Understand the platform’s reach – examine which ad exchanges are included and ensure they are relevant to your target audience. Ensure you – or your partners – know the platform’s pricing structure (dynamic vs. fixed CPMs) and make your selections based on specific campaign goals.

• Understand the Customer and their Journey. The more you understand you customer’s behaviors, the better you can connect with them throughout the journey and at key points in the funnel. Programmatic advertising allows you to tailor your branded content to each user’s interest at each stage of their experience. In fact, segmenting your customers based on their interests, preferences, and the specifics of their journey enables you to deliver the right message in the right way to each audience segment.

• Let performance drive optimization. There is a reason it’s called “performance marketing.” The best approach allows for flexibility and revisions as performance data is available. This means you need to give your campaigns enough time for machine learning to occur as each user response informs the algorithms on the types of people most likely to act on your ad. Every ad interaction creates an opportunity for learning and improvement. In other words, programmatic advertising enables brands to narrow campaign targeting with each measured result.

• Cast a wide net that’s based on stated goals. Programmatic success relies on multi-channel optimization. However, it’s important to select the channels that will deliver the desired call-to-action. This wide net also includes the content types you use in your programmatic campaigns. Because the algorithms continually test user response, delivering three-to-five different pieces of content gives you more performance data to connect with different buyers.

While it’s easy to think that programmatic advertising is entirely automated, you still need a clear strategy behind it. Machines are only as useful as the people operating them. Combining human experience and creativity with marketing automation delivers credible, actionable, successful campaigns. If you’d like assistance getting started in programmatic advertising, contact us today. We are happy to help.

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