If advertisers weren’t already demanding bang for their buck, COVID-19 economic pressures are prompting them to do so.
Time and again, out of the pandemic, we have been hearing executives talk about the importance of guaranteed results and return on investment, in a year when investment in the absence of proven results may seem like folly.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kerry Bianchi, Global President of APEX within Publicis Groupe’s PMX, says COVID-19 is re-shaping the economics of ad outcomes.
The pandemic reboot
Bianchi has identified three main trends spurred by the coronavirus:
- Consumer behavior has been reset: “Everything’s changed in terms of how you commute, the way you shop, the way that you go about your daily activities has completely changed.”
- Buyer agility: “I think that flexibility, agility, to be able to go in and out of markets start and stop media when they needed to was really something they had to think about a lot more discreetly over the course of this year.”
- Heightened focus on measurability: “(You) really need to know that your marketing dollars are performing well and which things are performing well in this whole new environment.”
Relocating geo-targeting
Bianchi says the profound change to consumer behaviour is forcing ad buyers to think differently about geo-targeting.
“If you were targeting a zip code where a bunch of office buildings were and that’s how you were targeting your key audiences, now they’re diffuse,” she says. “Now they’re all over. They’re back at their homes. They’re like me in an apartment somewhere out in the suburbs. The traffic patterns have been completely disrupted. The purchasing habits have been completely disrupted.
“So to be able to still find me, you might’ve been doing it through a geographic net or maybe some kind of zip code net maybe before from where I work.
“Now you have to find me in a whole different way. I think that idea of knowing me at a personal level, at an individual level, and then being able to market to me with any of my new behaviours however I’m going about those, has become really, really important. So that first-party data, knowing your customer, I think is really of critical importance.”
Outcomes across the funnel
The industry trend toward outcomes in advertising is not new, of course.
Before COVID-19 reared started spreading, many ad buyers were started to get excited about the idea of buying only ads that can demonstrate measurable, attributed results.
But the pandemic has acted as an accelerant. Bianchi says clients are now more likely to want to de-risk their spending by targeting to known audiences or buying with performance guarantees.
“That could be not just lower-funnel outcomes,” however, she says. “It could be something in terms of reaching a certain target audience, having them come in and interact with you on a landing page.
“Knowing your audiences, having that analytics suite to be able to close that loop and give you true performance data at the end of the day to know if your media’s really performing.”
You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page.
