DIGITAL MEDIA DIGEST: APR ‘17
A monthly look at the world of digital from NORTH’s point of view
7 Things You Need To Know For Your First Snapchat Advertising Campaign
By Devon Brown, Performance Marketing Manager
When Snapchat announced they are building a self-service ad buying model our ears perked up. We immediately reached out to learn more and spent some long hours talking with them to understand the platform’s benefits, uses, and best practices. Here’s what we’ve learned:
They are a camera company, not a social company.
Snapchat’s focus isn’t to get users to connect and communicate as say a Facebook or a Twitter. Snapchat’s goal is to use your phone camera to manipulate space. They develop technology to detect your nose and mouth so they can turn you into a taco, or technology to find flat surfaces so they can put fairy grass on it and a halo on your head.
The camera’s rich capabilities allow for endless creative solutions.
Snapchat has 12 full time staffers. Let’s ignore the fact that they must be super hero’s given their IPO valuation, wild success, and innovative technology. These people live and breath the platform but they’ll be the first to tell you that the technological capabilities are so deep and so customizable that there are ways to use the platform no one has thought of yet. The team is always on board for a custom build out or to test a new idea; all you have to do is ask.
Snapchat user behavior is unique and unprecedented.
Users are incredibly engaged when they are on Snapchat. The sound is on, they’re paying attention, and they’re zoned it. Because of this behavior impressions are high quality and users don’t need a long time to “get” the message. A couple seconds does the trick. During our conversations Snapchat noted that some of their most successful campaigns in terms of awareness and brand recall used creative between 3 and 6 seconds.
An impression is counted instantly, so branding needs to happen fast.
This is not my favorite thing Snapchat does. The second users see an ad it’s counted as an impression and they can skip it. That said, branding needs to be upfront to make the most of the quick swipers. Luckily they do provide watch time and brand recall lift metrics so you have dependable ways to measure effectiveness.
There is a minimum spend of $100 per piece of creative.
A/B testing is the only way to “optimize” on Snapchat. So, if you have 3 pieces of creative you want to test against each other you actually need $300/ day. This can get steep if you have a tight budget or a particularly long flight. While you’re testing and seeing what works for your brand, shorter flight dates on key dates with multiple pieces of creative testing against each other is a better strategy than one piece of creative spread over a few weeks.
Frequency and impressions are the key to awareness.
Brand recall and awareness are gained on Snapchat not by video completions and engagements but by quick, high frequency messaging. Four separate three-second ads are much more effective than one long 10 second story, as explained to us by Snapchat themselves.
“Self-serve” is in its infancy and through a partner.
Snapchat is smart. They didn’t build an entire self-serve software interface. They just provided their API to select partners who already have their own interface. They’ll build one eventually, but they sure bought themselves some time. In any case, you’ll be buying from a partner. So far this has been a benefit as the partners do have some experience so they can provide technical advice beyond “spend more money.”
(Side note: Snapchat’s plan is to take learnings from all the partner interfaces and build one of their own with the best features of each. Smart.)
Snapchat is a revolutionary new piece of technology with never before seen usage and behavior. They’re blazing trails while at the same time learning what works and what doesn’t. It’s a learning experience on all ends and the self serve model puts you at the helm of your own testing and success. Jump on in, the digitally manufactured water full of unicorns feels great.
Instagram Makes a Push in Social Shopping
By Nathan Johnson, Media Planner
It’s no doubt that social commerce remains a great opportunity for brands to increase their bottom line. According to eMarketer, nearly two-thirds of US millennial internet users said that ads on social platforms influenced their purchase decisions at least on a few occasions. Despite the influence on consumer purchasing behavior, millennials seem resistant to direct-through-social purchasing.
Many mobile shopping experiences take users directly to the checkout page without giving them a chance to learn more about the product. In a Kantar produced survey, Facebook discovered that the majority of purchases take longer than a day. Knowing this, it would be a better user experience to continue providing information regarding the product to keep pushing consumer through the purchasing funnel.
That’s where Instagram stepped in. As a discovery platform, Instagram recently announced changes to streamline the social shopping process and overcome some of the current hurdles of social commerce. The changes include an easier way for users to discover more about the products they are looking at. When tapped, a tag will appear with a prices on products displayed within the post. Once the tag is selected a detailed view of the product will open, all without leaving the app. If a user wishes purchase the product they simply tap the Shop Now link, which will direct them to a checkout page.
While this change won’t catapult social commerce into the mainstream buying behaviors of social users, I predict that it will serve its purpose in moving consumers along the purchasing process. Eventually, consumers will become more comfortable buying directly through social platforms, and changes like this that create a better user experience represent key steps toward influencing that behavior. This is also priming the pump for Gen Z users who have already expressed a less resistant attitude toward social commerce. According to a study by Google, 53% of 13–17 year olds mostly use their smartphones to make online purchases. As Gen Z’s purchasing power increases, we can expect social commerce to increase as well.
Digital Publishers Invest In Influencer Marketing
By Caroline Desmond, Director of Media Strategy
The role of “social media influencer” first became a thing in late 2014/early 2015. Over the last two years, we’ve seen it go from a fringe “test” tactic to a tried and true part of annual social media strategies for clients. In fact, now even leading media publishers are recognizing the strength of the “everyday celebrity,” and the role of “influencer wrangler” is starting to crop up at leading media publishing houses such as Time, Inc.
For those less familiar with the rise of social media influencers, a little background is helpful. The fact that social media influencers took off when they did is perhaps not so surprising given the changes in the social media landscape at the time. It was around this time that Facebook made the pivotal decision to alter their newsfeed algorithm to de-prioritize posts from brands that felt too promotional. As a result, brands saw their organic reach plummet to between 2–6%. For years leading up to this, brands invested in growing their fan bases on Facebook to build up an audience of brand loyalists that could be reached for free in the future via organic posts. The dismal organic reach that resulted from Facebook’s drastic changes to their algorithm in January 2015 were a blow to these companies who invested heavily for years to build up fan bases.
Enter social influencers. As Facebook began to prioritize personal stories, average joes on the platform gave brands a way to game the system. Aptly named, social influencers were social power users who could influence opinion by giving a brand a shoutout that would reach a large social follower base where a brand’s organic posts could not. Now, we see 48% of brands expecting to increase budget toward social influencer marketing in 2017, and the reasons for this are varied. According to Linqia, some of the top reasons brands are investing in influencer marketing include: content creation, brand engagement, and driving traffic to a brand’s website. In fact, Facebook advises brands to invest more in boosting UGC and less on building page likes based on the knowledge that social influence is more effective at driving business results. A recent Hard Business Review article titled “What’s The Value of a Like” reports, “Facebook posts indicating that a Facebook friend is using a product — not just that he or she likes it — increase the chances that a member will use the product too.”
As more brands invest, the trick will be for social influencers to maintain credibility. Brand dollars will likely continue to attract more social power users to adopt the mantle of social influencer. Unfortunately, not all of these influencers will be genuine and inauthentic influencers could give the whole operation a bad name detracting from the power to actually exert influence. This is where careful curation comes into play. Recognizing the need to maintain credibility, media companies like Refinery29, Domino, and Time Inc. are investing in “social influencer wranglers” to better identify potential social influencers with a genuine connection to specific social communities. The job of the wrangler is then to play matchmaker and connect a curated list of appropriate social influencers with brands that make sense based on the interests of each social community.
The good news for media planners and brands is that this means another layer of quality control for social influencer selection. Up until now, much of the onus of selecting a qualified list of social influencers fell to media planners and social strategists. These roles will still be involved in developing clear audience parameters and vetting social influencer lists accordingly, particularly outside of partnerships with media publishers. However, where agencies or brands do partner with a media publisher, there is a greater opportunity to lean on the unique insights and internal resources of those media publishers to develop stronger social influencer outreach programs. Media publishers regularly commission custom research to better understand their audiences, and they are uniquely poised to recommend to agencies and brands a set of social influencers that exactly match their readers’ interests. This in turn stands to inject much needed credibility into the realm of social influencer outreach as it continues to mature.
Deep Learning: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neural Networks
By Flynn Robertson, Assistant Media Planner
When I was in college, “Deep Learning” is what I called the night before finals and midterms when I would retreat to the back corners of the subterranean book stacks and attempt to trick my brain into memorizing a semester’s worth of material in a single 12-hour marathon study session. I have fairly recently learned that this is not the standard definition. Rather, from a technical standpoint, Deep Learning relates to algorithms that attempt to recreate the processes of the human brain as it pertains to data analysis and pattern recognition for decision making purposes.
More importantly, from an advertising perspective, a recent article from ClickZ said it best: “[Deep Learning is] self-learning algorithms that react intelligently to unexpected situations.” If you dig into this topic on any level, you can find a variety of uses for this kind of technology, essentially all of them focused on increasing efficiency. Some of the most interesting applications of deep learning I’ve heard about are Tesla’s self-driving cars, ColorizeBot, and IBM’s speech recognition program.
Deep Learning is an important topic to those of us in the media world because it has the potential to help us achieve the most efficient and personalized placement of advertisements on a consumer-by-consumer basis. According to recent research from Adlucent, consumers desire a personalized advertising experience, with 71% of respondents stating that they, “prefer ads tailored to their interests and shopping habits.”
Standard algorithms can only help us get part of the way to achieving personalization, and the nature of organic human analysis of data is such that we will never be able to analyze data as efficiently or effectively as a program utilizing deep learning. While we can still effectively reach consumers through our current processes, Deep Learning will provide advantages like the ability to more reliability interpret an individual consumer’s buying potential and “single out one user in an online crowd, a person who may initially look like a user acting chaotically, but in fact has the biggest potential to finalize a purchase.” (Source: clickz.com)
In general, I am excited (both personally and professionally) to see the changes that arise as Deep Learning becomes more ubiquitous. However, I must admit that I do hold on to a small amount of concern that Deep Learning will increase the efficiency of media buying/placement to such a point that it decreases the need for human interaction, or eliminates it altogether. Even if/when Deep Learning gets to a point where it can automate many tasks involved in the media profession, I believe that the well-trained human mind provides an unique mix of creativity, strategic thinking, and communicative abilities that set it apart from any algorithm.
There may have been a disconnect between my original definition of Deep Learning and what it actually means, but now that I am more aware of the subject as a whole I can say that I am genuinely excited to watch how this technology develops and to see how it contributes to the personalization of advertising. Ultimately, I think Deep Learning will prove to be one of our most powerful tools when it comes to effectively reaching the consumer on an individual level.
