Facebook To Sell TV Ads Via OTT Streaming Devices

What Happened
Facebook is set to bring video ads to your TV via OTT streaming devices such as Roku and Apple TV starting next week. Partnering with A+E and Tubi TV, Facebook will start delivering video ads to people who watch videos on the two media partners’ TV apps via its Audience Network ad network, similar to the way it delivers ads to publisher websites and mobile apps.

What Brands Should Do
Facebook’s venture into OTT streaming ads should come as a welcome expansion for brands, as the social network can use the same audience data that powers the rest of its ad network to the set-top boxes, offering brand advertisers more targeting capabilities to reach OTT viewers and cord-cutters. As more and more consumers choose time-shifted viewing over linear TV, brands should follow the viewers and work with content creators to explore new TV ad formats on connected TV devices and engage with the audience in their living rooms.

To read more on how brands can reach viewers on OTT platforms with ads and branded content, please check out the Appified TV section in our Outlook 2016.

 


Source: Re/Code

Yogurt Brand Actimel Targets People In “Miserable” Moments

What Happened
Yogurt brand Actimel is using context-based targeting to offer people a little pep talk when they need it the most. As part of its #StayStrong campaign, the company is using multiple ways to target users who express dissatisfaction and frustration in real time across social media, digital out-of-home, and TV. For example, the brand is serving people who are stuck in traffic with ads with positive messaging via popular navigation app Waze, targeting drivers who been stationary for a while.

What Brands Need To Do
This Actimel campaign serves as an example of how brands can leverage contextual targeting to reach customers at key moments to make an emotional connection with tailored messaging. More brands can benefit from this type of real-time micro-targeting and reach customers in moments that truly matter.

 


Source: Digiday

Twitter Allows Advertisers To Target Site Visitors That Are More Likely To Convert

What Happened
Twitter has rolled out a new targeting capability that enabling advertisers to target site visitors that are more likely to become customers based on their past behaviors. Aiming to give brand advertisers a way to run a more efficient campaign, the new targeting feature allows brands to only spend money on reaching customers who have not only visited a website but also performed a specific task, such as signing up for newsletters or making a purchase.

What Brands Should Do
It would be smart for brands and e-retailers that are running Twitter campaigns to take advantage of this behavioral-based targeting option and focus their budget on customers that are more likely to convert. As social platforms like Twitter continue to improve their targeting capability, brands should learn to effectively use the tools available to reach their target audience on social channels.

 


Source: Marketing Land

Facebook Updates App-Install Ads With Behavioral Targeting

What Happened
Facebook is making it easier for brands and developers to find the right audience for their apps by adding targeting options based on users’ past actions. With a new ad product named App Event Optimization, app advertisers can now target users based on the actions they have taken, such as adding an item to a shopping cart, making a purchase, viewing content, or unlocking an in-game achievement. This ad product is available across Facebook, Instagram, and on sites using the Facebook Audience Network.

What Brands Need To Do
This kind of behavioral targeting tool gives app advertisers a good way to hone in on their desired audience whose previous actions indicate their interests and preferences. While app install ads have traditionally been served to a broad audience with the goal of getting as many people to download as possible, this new option gives brands a chance to focus their campaign on certain consumer segments, such as mobile shoppers or mobile game enthusiasts, and spend their ad budgets more effectively on users that they are more likely to retain.

 


Source: AdAge

 

Facebook Adds Tagging For Organic Audience Optimization

What Happened
Earlier today Facebook introduced a new targeting tool named Audience Optimization for brand publishers to improve their organic reach. Now with each post, content creators will be able to tag the targeted audience by interests, demographics, or geography, and Facebook will prioritize the posts in their followers’ news feeds accordingly. They will also have the option to restrict the visibility of certain posts from audiences that would not find the content relevant, based on gender, location, and language. Facebook says it is gradually rolling out the tool to all English-language Pages over the next week.

What Brands Need To Do
This new tool gives brands a free and simple way to improve their content targeting on Facebook. Brands can use it to ensure that posts that resonate with niche Facebook communities, such as TV fans or sports fans, can seed into those communities to maximize the content reach and engagement. Therefore, brands publishing content on Facebook, especially those with a targeted audience in mind, should definitely start utilizing this new tool.

 


Source: Marketing Land

Header image courtesy of Facebook Media

Flipboard Launches New Ad Product To Let Advertisers Target By Interests

What Happened
Today, Flipboard launched a new ad product that allows advertisers to target based on topics using its Interest Graph, which maps the intricate connections between people, content, and interests on Flipboard. For example: an advertiser that chooses to target with coffee-related topics may also have their ads shown with craft beer topics, because Flipboard’s data shows that many of its users who read stories about coffee also care about stories on craft beer.  

What Brands Need To Do
With this new ad product, Flipboard, which boasts 80 million monthly active users, is now opening up its user behavioral data to advertisers and brands to help them expand the reach of their messages beyond their initially intended demo. This represents one of the newest examples in the on-going shift from the traditional age-and-gender-based demographic targeting towards a more data-driven, interest-based post-demographic targeting. It is a trend that brands of all verticals can tap into for a more personalized and effective targeting. We detailed this shift and some ensuing tactics that brands can use in our recent POV on Tribal Marketing, which you can read here.

 


Source: TechCrunch

MediaBrix Updates Mobile Ad Platform For Better Timing

What Happened
MediaBrix, a New York-based ad tech startup that specializes in connecting with gamers at key moments of gameplay, debuted the third version of its Breakthrough Moments mobile ad platform, which combines biometric data, consumer interests and other behavior data to determine the right moments for delivering mobile ads. A handful of big-name brands including Coca-Cola, BMW, Nestlé, and CoverGirl, are already using the system, which MediaBrix says will become programmatic within a few months.

What Brands Should Do
For brands looking to send out personalized offers with real-time value, choosing the right ad platform would be imperative to the goal. “The future of mobile advertising needs to focus on user receptivity,” Ari Brandt, CEO & co-founder of MediaBrix says. “In order for users to be receptive to brand messages on mobile devices, the brands must identify and understand the important moments during the user journey, then contextualize and be additive to the moment.”

With the increasing usage of mobile apps, as well as the rising popularity of ad-blockers and their potential influence on mobile, it is becoming crucial for brands that wish to reach potential consumers to step up their mobile ad game. Leveraging the updated ad platform by MediaBrix to capture the attention of audiences at the most effective moments would be a good way to do so.

 

Image courtesy of www.mediabrix.com

Twitter Debuts Live Event-Based Targeting

What Happened
Earlier this week, Twitter unveiled event targeting, a new ad tool that aims to help brands and marketers reach users tweeting about major live events like the Super Bowl, Grammys, or the FIFA World Cup in real time. Previously, brands interested in targeting those audiences would have to manually set up the targeting metrics with specific hashtags, keywords and accounts that vary from event to event, a tedious process that this new tool promises to simplify and automate.

What Brands Should Do
Twitter has long dominated the social chatter on live events, and this new tool just made it a lot easier for brands to capitalize on the intense buzz around major events to reach the most engaged audience. Different events also reflect various user interests in sports and entertainment, which brands can also leverage into their targeting efforts.

Source: Marketing Land

Twitter Would Like To Exchange Virtual Balloons For Your Birthdate

Read the original story on: TechCrunch

Twitter’s minimalistic sign-up process may have helped its user acquisition in the beginning, but it also caused a deficiency in basic user info that the social microblogging service is now trying to fix as it starts to promise advertisers stronger targeting capabilities. For the new “persona-based” ad targeting tools introduced earlier this week, for example, Twitter is reportedly getting some of the biographic info it needs from consumer data companies Acxiom and Datalogix. But why buy it if you can get users to voluntarily offer it?

And that is exactly the logic behind Twitter’s newest addition. The social network launched a new feature today that lets users to put in their birthdates in exchange for animated balloons floating around user profiles on their birthdays. If this serves as any indication, more data-grabbing initiatives like this could be expected from Twitter in the near future.

Twitter Launches Persona-Based Targeting Tools

Read original article on: AdWeek

Twitter has been undergoing a “reinvention” phase, and today it launched a new ad tool that will make it easier for brands to target specific groups of consumers based on not only traditional demographic info like age and gender, but also includes some newer, “people-based” metrics. Among the “personas” outlined by Twitter, groups such as college grads, parents, and business decision-makers stand out with their specificity and potential for targeting.

Previously, marketers could piece together similar targeting parameters on Twitter, but the social microblogging service is clearly looking to simplify the process, leveraging its ongoing partnerships with data companies Acxiom and Datalogix to enable such targeting options. Obviously, Twitter knows a lot more about their users than mere demographics – the people one follows indicates individual interests, for example. Privacy issues aside, we we expect twitter to build out this feature to fit their strengths in the future.

With vast amount of data available, digital technology has opened a lot of new ways of targeting and attribution. And it is crucial that brands can choose the right channel and tools to ensure their messages get through to the right audience. To learn more about using behavioral data to target consumer groups, click here to our newest POV on targeting tribes through tech.

 

Header image taken from Twitter Blog