Changes in Online Advertising: Take-Aways from the Turner4D Seize the Conversation Forum

The Turner4D Seize the Conversation Forum Series kicked off to a great start with an all-star team of social media experts including our very own Dr. Alan Rosenblatt, Craig Johnson of Unfiltered Media, Peter Ludgin of a4Media and Chuck Westover of Next Level Media.
Our experts reviewed the opportunities and changes with Facebook and Google advertising and discussed tools like geofencing and data matching that can help you expand your base in a very targeted fashion.

Here are some of the takeaways from the discussion:

Facebook: (Chuck Westover)
* You need to be a confirmed organization if you want to run ads about social issues, elections or politics, on the platform.

* If you are trying to boost a post on Facebook, and it does not allow you, there are a couple of workarounds: change your browser, if that does not work, change the image or just wait a few hours and try again.

* Facebook will reject an ad if it includes an image of cigarettes or smoking or a gun. Also, housing references frequently get rejected, as they are trying to prevent discrimination. You can appeal a rejection. Chuck says to be nice! If you explain your ad you might be able to still get it approved. Especially if it is an advocacy or educational ad.

* Fact-Checking: Facebook has hired a number of news organizations to do fact-checking. You will get an alert from Facebook that they have identified “False News.” They will show you the violation and the fact check article. If you get two or three violations, Facebook will reduce your reach. There is an appeals process for this as well. You can also do a disclaimer on the post for sarcasm.

* Facebook does punish you if you have bad performing posts and you leave them on your page. If you have a bad post, take it down. If it is on an important issue, try to reframe it and repost it.

Buying Ads: (Peter Ludgin)
* Now you don’t have to advertise to the masses, you can identify the right customers, at the right time on the right device so your ads are relevant and targeted to people who will get value out of them.

* With a Demand Side Platform (DSP), you can place ads in milliseconds, making buying digital ads easy, all on one interface, and programmatic.

* It’s easy to test ads, to determine which ad performs best: the cat or the bear, the green or the red ad. You can take down the poor performer and replace it with the best performer in seconds.

* By showing you the same ad multiple times on different platforms, we can reinforce the impact of that ad on our audience.

* Ads can also be placed with videos. For instance, you are trying to watch a YouTube video, but you have to watch a portion of the GEICO commercial beforehand.

Advertising with a Limited Budget: (Craig Johnson)
* Even with relatively no money, you can still be effective.

* Don’t always target who you think you should target, think outside the box. Target people that are outside of your base with different ads to determine what message motivates each person.

* Facebook loves it when you spend money. His organization spent $10 on ads every day and racked up 50,000 likes in one year.

* The best ad content includes “anger, anxiety, and awe.” If you don’t have that, don’t do ads. Try like ads instead.

* Facebook is good for message testing. It’s important to remember that communications and online message testing are very different. Polling and message testing results will be very different than your online audience.

* The picture on an ad matters more than the message.

* Don’t bother advertising on Twitter in the United States. In other countries, where the tool might be newer, it can be very effective. Or if you are targeting journalists, it can be effective.

* Ads work better when the topic you are sharing is in the news.

* Social media is more than a communications channel: ask people to share your materials, build relationships and teams, email, and share items. Build communities.

Geofencing: (Alan Rosenblatt)
* Geofencing allows you to draw a circle around a location and identify the people who enter that location during a period of time through their cell phone’s mobile id.

* Once you have that list of people and their mobile devices, you can also capture their other devices when they connect to their home Wi-Fi. With those ids, you can start advertising to all of the devices these people use no matter where they are!
* This data is available from vendors for six months. So, if your organization decides within that time frame that data from an event or location would be valuable, you can still access that information.

* Mobile ids are just the start. Once you have that, you can append it with email data, voter file data, social media account data, and financial data sets that are matched to the mobile id.

* For more information on geofencing, check out my blog with Alan here.

Video: (Groupthink!)
* If you are using video, make sure your message is in the first 15 seconds. If your video is longer, repeat your message throughout the video.

* The quality of the video is not important on Facebook. If you have a high-priced video, you can take excerpts of the video and post them on Facebook.

Originally published at https://turner4d.com on April 29, 2020.