February 17, 2016

Mind the Gap: Adapt Your Marketing Expenditures to Match Changing Consumer Behavior

There’s a phrase that aptly describes the disconnect between where today’s consumers spend their time and where marketers spend their money: it’s called the “eyeball-to-spend gap.” And it could mean the difference between effectively and efficiently reaching your audience with ad dollars or wasting those dollars on channels that aren’t getting enough eyeballs on them.

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February 4, 2016

Building Audience Models in Digital Advertising

As a digital media buyer and planner, you are faced with a new challenge every time you receive a media requisition in your inbox. Twenty-plus years ago, buyers and planners were limited to media mixes that included TV, radio, print, and out-of-home. Along came the internet and with it a whole new approach to advertising. The internet has made it more important than ever to know your audience before you plan a campaign. The slightest bit of information can mean the difference in reaching exactly who you need to… or not.

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November 4, 2015

The #1 YouTube Mistake Advertisers Make

I’m constantly amazed at the number of established brands that treat YouTube as an on-demand form of broadcast television. Spend any time browsing YouTube, and you’ll see their mistake repeatedly.

Your TV ad may be killer: beautifully shot, with witty copy and great music. But on YouTube, that matters only if your first five seconds are effective. Experienced YouTubers know why.

After the first five seconds, the link to “skip” becomes active. More often than not, I, and the majority of YouTubers, do exactly that and never give second thought to the ad we just left behind.

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July 30, 2015

The Medium and the Message Are Connected

Buying media is not quantum physics. You have your message, your demographic, and your medium. As long as you can match them up efficiently, voila, your message is heard and your work is done.

Hypothetical example: your furniture client is having a huge two-day sale on futons. The target audience is women 25 to 54. We know they are most likely listening to WMEE-FM and WQHK-FM and watching the six p.m. local news and Wheel of Fortune. That’s what our trusted sources at Arbitron and Nielsen tell us. They’re driving by the same billboard every day on their commute into work. They’re checking Facebook throughout the day. If we’re lucky, they’re googling “futon sales” to find the best deal in town. In a perfect world with unlimited budgets, we can buy all media that this demo consumes and achieve a reach of 100% with a frequency that is sure to bring them into your client’s store. But it’s not a perfect world. With a limited budget, our job becomes more complex. Not as complex as quantum physics, more like rocket science.
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