At Spaceback, we’ve long had the hypothesis that our product would be a game-changer for influencer marketing. Since we first started working with brands and agencies to enable social content ads we’ve observed first-hand that the best social content is often created with the help of influencers. The problem is that this great content is trapped in the walled-gardens of social and its potential reach is often limited to the followers of the social account that posts it. Spaceback’s core expertise is in programmatic, so naturally we saw a massive opportunity to connect influencer content to a distribution channel that would offer scale, transparency, and measurement capabilities beyond the social platforms.

Our new partners at Studio71 saw this problem from precisely the other end, and this blog post is all about how a serendipitous connection in Las Vegas led to our most exciting announcement of 2019!

First of all, I don’t love Las Vegas. In fact, I usually have a rule where I won’t stay for more than 48 hours. CES 2019 was an exception. Brand-Innovators was hosting 3 days of content, plus I had meetings and events spread out over the week. It was at one of these events that I had a chance encounter with Peter Leeb from Studio71. We were introduced through a mutual friend so the conversation started with jokes and good vibes (it was a happy hour, after all). At some point we gave each other the polite, 30-second, I’m-proud-of-what-I’m-working-on-but-not-really-pitching-you-at-the-moment overview of what each of us was working on and exchanged contact info before disappearing into separate clouds of indoor casino smoke (a big part of why I have my 48-hour rule). Meeting Peter was a relevant and memorable connection at a networking event, but like meeting your future-best-friend, the significance of the encounter was lost in the moment.

Of course, that didn’t stop me from following up, and a few weeks later my business partner and I sat down with Peter while he was on a business trip in San Francisco. We had both been thinking about how to bring greater distribution to influencer marketing and soon found ourselves finishing each other’s sentences. We may have had a different vocabulary, but we had been thinking about the same problem from opposite ends of the spectrum. This was when I realized we were going to do something big together, and that only became more obvious as our teams started working on a joint product offering. After a few weeks of daily engagement we were ready for our first trial; it would be the first time an influencer post was automatically distributed via programmatic.

Not only was our first campaign up and running in less time than my 48-hour Las Vegas rule, it also delivered a performance increase over 4x the benchmarks set by the brand! We’re calling the new product Studio71 Xpand (powered by Spaceback) and will be onstage with Peter at NewFronts today to introduce it to the industry.

Programmatic Distribution for Influencer Marketing was originally published in spaceback on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For all its promise, digital marketing remains an unfortunately siloed business.

Nearly every brand invests in both social media — teams of people who agonize about what content to place and promote on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms — as well as paid media — the ads you see across the “rest of the web.” Most brands have different strategies for how they approach marketing in these different environments, and at the surface this makes sense; they are very different channels.

The most glaring difference between social and paid media is the way users engage. It’s estimated that about 80% of users actively engage with brands via social. Compare this to the roughly 30% of users who leverage some kind of ad blocking software to avoid display ads and it’s obvious to conclude that users prefer to engage with brands via social media.

Brands have caught on and are investing more and more in their social content strategies. Exceptional content can drive great engagement as social validations (ie. likes, comments, pins, retweets, etc) support the authenticity of the post and increase the brands organic exposure and earned media presence.

Despite the advantages of social from a user engagement perspective, paid media is still an important part of most brands’ marketing strategies. Programmatic media buying offers significantly greater scale, price efficiencies, and measurement capabilities than social channels.

Why not bring the two together? Programmatic buys can and should leverage the power of great story-telling, user engagement, social validation, and unique signals (ie. hashtags, @ mentions, etc) on social. And social efforts can and should leverage the scale and transparency associated with programmatic buying. Social content ads enable the best of both worlds!

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Learn more at www.spaceback.me

Contact us at hello@spaceback.me

There is a better way to create banner ads for programmatic was originally published in spaceback on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For all its promise, digital marketing remains an unfortunately siloed business. Nearly every brand invests in both social media — teams of people who agonize about what content to place and promote on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms — as well as paid media — the ads you see across the “rest of the web.”

And here’s the crazy part: In most marketing departments, the teams who run social rarely, if ever work, closely with the teams who create traditional paid media. If that sounds crazy, well, you’re right. It is.

Although the metrics can be quite different, the goals of these tactics are essentially the same: Creating awareness and conversions against targeted audiences, building relationships with current and new customers, and driving engagement for the brand overall. Put another way, social media and paid media teams have the same goal: engaging customers and driving interest in purchase.

Each team tends to over index on certain skill sets. Social media marketers, who focus mostly on large platforms, are experts at creating high quality, engaging content that draws consumers into a consistent brand universe, one that aligns with the context where those consumers live — a perfect Instagram post, for instance, or a clever pin on Pinterest. And paid marketers, who play across the nearly infinite world of the open internet, are masters of data, insights, audience segmentation, ROI, and other programmatic arts.

Here’s our question: Why not bring the two together?

Paid media campaigns can and should leverage the power of the engagement, social validation, and unique grammar of social media platforms. And social media efforts can and should leverage the scale and transparency of paid media across the open internet to better inform what types of messaging and imagery drive real results.

We thought this was such a good idea, we built a company around it. We call it Spaceback, and it’s the leader of an emerging digital marketing category we call Social Media Amplification (SMA).

WTF is SMA?

Social Media Amplification is the distribution of social media posts outside the walled gardens of social media platforms, often using existing media buying infrastructure. The user experience is similar to encountering social media posts “in the wild” rather than seeing a banner ad, and as a result audiences engage at significantly higher rates.

Why I haven’t I heard of SMA before?

SMA is a brand new category pioneered by Spaceback, so don’t feel bad that you haven’t heard of it yet! We first began testing with this in Q4 2017 and quickly found that SMA outperformed standard display buys in every single test we ran (across various brands and categories). These initial tests showed an increase in CTR between 20 percent to more than 2x! Spaceback’s platform is certainly first to market, but given the ease of adoption and widespread benefits, we expect this category to see significant growth in 2018 and beyond.

What are the benefits of SMA over standard paid media campaigns?

1. Superior Performance

Social media posts look and feel more like entertainment than traditional ads. It’s a clever way to combat ad blindness. Data consistently shows that users engage with social media posts at significantly higher rates than standard banners.

2. Better User Experience

Social media posts are more about building relationships than driving transactions. This approach encourages organic engagement and signifies to the user that what they are seeing is content rather than an ad. This goodwill extends to the brand and contributes to superior performance.

3. Increased Insights

Brands that leverage SMA have the unique ability to learn what types of social media posts best perform for driving more traditional KPIs. Brands can then use this data to inform which type of social media posts to create and reinvest in creating content that better drives engagement everywhere rather than looking at different media buys and content strategies in silos.

4. Cheaper and faster than traditional banner ads

SMA campaigns can automatically be live in tandem with new social media content making for a much more real-time experience than stale banner ads offer. This means no more lengthy and costly turnaround times to build banner ads. Automatically building creative also makes it much easier to test and optimize many different posts and executions.

5. Increased control and transparency beyond social buys

SMA allows brands to manage distribution of social media posts using their own media buying stack. This means that any and all attribution, tracking, targeting and bidding strategies, etc. can be used to easily compare performance of SMA with other media buying tactics. None of this is possible through traditional paid social campaigns where the social platform also acts as the media buying system.

How can I incorporate SMA into my media plans?

Whether managing in-house or through digital media agencies, most brands already have some kind of social media presence. SMA platforms sit on top of the social media platforms, and automatically sync to the post and access all the information and metadata required to authentically rebuild the post in other environments. Brands simply receive an ad tag that they (or their media buying agency) can leverage as a 3rd party creative within any DSP or media buying system. This enables brands to maintain complete control of the media buying process and experiment with SMA without the need to completely reallocate media spend.

How do I evaluate the success of SMA?

SMA represents a new tactic to better achieve traditional business KPIs. In other words, this means that you can use SMA to better achieve whatever business objectives are important to you. SMA has proven to be very effective at driving better CTRs, engagements, video completion rates, conversions, etc. — even directly measured ROAS goals!

Can I leverage SMA with influencer content?

Yes! SMA allows buyers to extend the reach of influencer posts beyond the limited number of individuals who follow on social media. This enables brands to get more value out of the content, while giving influencers a new way to increase share of wallet with their brand partners.

In conclusion, SMA carries the potential to break down the silos that marketers often lose sight of. Brands can use SMA to unify social and paid media strategies to improve communications within internal teams and better connect with new audiences alike.

To learn more about SMA and how to amplify your social media visit www.spaceback.me.

WTF is SMA?! was originally published in NewCo Shift on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The goal of display advertising is often to drive a transaction, but social media is all about building relationships; and it’s working. 80% of users actively engage with brands via social media. Compare this to display advertising where roughly 30% of users in the US leverage some kind of ad blocking software to actively avoid display ads. Put simply: users much prefer to engage with brands via social media. This really isn’t all that surprising given the dichotomy outlined below:

Brands are catching on to the user’s preference for social media and are investing more in creating high-quality content for channels like Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest. These platforms not only allow brands to engage with existing fans and followers, they also offer paid distribution to help brands build new relationships. Paid distribution is viewed as more authentic than display advertising because it delivers the same experience to new audiences and fans alike. Social validation (ie. likes, comments, etc.) supports the authenticity of the post as evidence that peers enjoy and identify with the content. It’s well understood that these elements increase the performance of paid distribution, so why aren’t they more commonly used via other paid media channels like display advertising? The answer is that, until now, these signals have been locked away within the walled gardens of the social platforms.

Enter Spaceback

Spaceback’s platform allows brands to convert any social media post into a dynamic ad unit that can be distributed anywhere brands buy media. Through integrations with the major social media platforms, Spaceback syncs all of the assets and metadata related to any post and rebuilds that post in standard ad units in a way that retains all of the elements that make it feel social in the first place. The user experience is more similar to encountering a social media post “in the wild” than seeing a display ad. As a result, users engage at significantly higher rates.

Brands have already started to repurpose social media assets for display advertising, but they do so in a very manual way. The process still involves human designers and as a result is slow and expensive. Spaceback is the only platform that programmatically builds display ads from social media posts without human intervention. This means that Spaceback can offer creative instantaneously and free of any development fees delivering significant cost savings in addition to performance gains. Take a look at the below Instagram post from Buick and compare the resulting ads using Spaceback vs a more traditional banner creative:

The best part about Spaceback is that it is risk free to test with any type of social media post. Get in touch with us to receive creative tags today!

Social Media > Banners Ads. was originally published in spaceback on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Seeking product market fit

A good PM knows how work with customers to test products in market before they are even built. This means having some idea of what problem(s) you are solving and approaching customers with the willingness to do manual work to validate your ideas. At this stage you should have a solid idea what your technology can accomplish, but likely need more validation for how customers want to use it. You may have a good idea of what your product is FOR at this stage, but your priory needs to be ensuring that you have enough functionality to properly test your hypothesis.

Building your product

Once you have validated that what you are going to build will be valuable, its time to build for that customer. This means designing workflows that make sense to them and demonstrating that you understand what is valuable about your product. As an early stage company, you probably don’t have time to build a robust feature set but with the proper focus you can do something specific very well. A good product team will always be thinking about where the product is going and designing for scalability, but at this stage you need happy customers who are going to help you figure out how to prioritize new features (when you are ready for that).

Scaling Customers

As you begin to scale customers (and revenue), you will have increased importance on maintenance, security, extensibility, etc. This will make it difficult to move as quickly (even with your massive engineering team), but it is very important to continue to innovate and see around corners. As a general rule of thumb, your product will need to do more the more customers you support. Now is the time that you need to think more about designing a platform that is for doing all of the things it is capable of doing. This is a luxury that most companies never get to.

From product to platform. was originally published in spaceback on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Within the next 5 years, things will look a lot different than today. Media experiences will become more self-directed as the pendulum swings back towards consumer empowerment.

1. Content will follow people (not the other way around)

Today we follow things we like on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. In the future, the things we like will seamlessly fill our worlds. Individual preferences will not be owned by platforms — they will be ubiquitously used to personalize our experiences.

2. Arbitrary silos will go away

Data and media that we own will not be stuck in platforms like Amazon and Apple. Our digital content will be ours to easily take with us wherever we please. It will seem naive to design a product to be intentionally difficult or inconvenient to migrate away from.

3. Relationships will be valued over transactions

Brands will no longer use disruptive tactics to advertise on platforms like Facebook and Google. They will seek to build relationships and add value rather than distract and manipulate.

3 inevitable changes to mass media was originally published in spaceback on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Spaceback can now be used by everyone! With the launch of takespaceback.com, visitors no longer need to register for an account to follow channels and see their favorite content all over the web.

Now that the Spaceback follow button can be activated with just one click — it is the easiest possible method for improving the browsing experience! People have lots of options for how to deal with ads; from simply ignoring them to using an ad blocker, but these methods take effort and aren’t always effective. Spaceback takes considerably less effort and is a lot more FUN too!

From sports and entertainment to art and nature, Spaceback has content for everyone. It’s a great way to fill your world with more of what you love while also displacing annoying ad experiences.

Spaceback is the EASIEST way to improve the browsing experience was originally published in spaceback on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here at Spaceback, we often reference the wise words of Howard Luck: “People don’t read ads. People read what interest’s them. Sometimes it’s an ad.” When Howard Luck said this, the only way to deal with uninteresting ads was simply to ignore them. As such, marketers began to incorporate flashy design, catchy jingles and disruptive experiences ad nauseam to make it more difficult for people to ignore. For the most part, these techniques worked: it’s hard to ignore something that is distracting. Most of us can’t even think the phrase “I’m loving it” without the accompanied melodic flare coming to mind. The jingle isn’t all that interesting, but it was effective marketing (no matter how annoying).

Today, people have an option that didn’t exist in the mad men era: to block ads entirely! Undesirable ad experiences better drive the adoption of ad blockers than marketer ROI. One bad experience has the potential to break the value exchange forever. Given the risk, you’d think marketers would take more care.

In the age of ad blocking, people have a choice to see ads or not see ads. Advertising can only remain a valid revenue stream if audiences choose to see ads, and audiences will only choose to see ads when there is value in it for them.

The good news is that it’s much easier to create ads that deliver value than to convince people that they should put up with annoying ads so that they fulfill their roll in a flawed but necessary value exchange to access free content… huh? Exactly…

What makes an ad valuable?

Ads deliver value when they provide entertainment, useful information, or illicit an emotional response. The fundamental problem is that what is useful/entertaining/inspirational to one person can be annoying/distracting/frustrating to another. There is no way for a marketer to know in advance how an individual will respond. Advertisers invest heavily in market research and targeting data in an attempt to reach the right audiences, but the individual is far removed from this transactional process.

The best indicator of whether or not someone will be interested, is whether or not that person thinks they will be interested.

Instagram users can see anything they want in their Instagram feed, yet still over 80% of them follow brands! Should a brand post content that is more distracting than valuable, users can easily unfollow. To avoid this, brands take great care in delivering curated experiences to their Instagram followers.

Instagram has built a massive advertising platform based on the premise that no ad is delivered without a pre-existing relationship, but there is no reason that this strategy must be siloed to the social experience: Spaceback makes it easy for marketers to directly own this relationship and deliver valuable ads anywhere audiences might be. Building and respecting relationships is the key to making ads more valuable.

Ads Must Deliver Value to be Successful was originally published in spaceback on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Navigate to spaceback.me and follow your favorite team to enjoy a uniquely personal and engaging content experience. Best of all, it’s free!

How it works

Once you navigate to your favorite team’s Spaceback page, you will see something that looks like this:

Spaceback will distribute SF Giants content to users who click the follow button, creating experiences like this:

That’s it! Taking your space back only takes one click. Try it for yourself!

Your favorite baseball team everywhere was originally published in spaceback on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.