Competition Breeds Innovation, Even in Digital Advertising

A funny thing happens when the big budget brands start to tighten their wallets: Ad platforms compete for their business, which leads to innovations that give us all exciting new options to explore.

Through the finance-fuelled 2020-2022 economies, times were good for platforms like Google and Facebook. We all talked a lot about the dangers of the duopoly, but if we're being honest, we knew we were locked into those golden handcuffs because there weren't feasible alternatives. The big two made it so easy to drop huge buckets of cash onto ad campaigns that would return good-enough results.

The friction of trying out new or different platforms was just too great, so while newer ad platforms may have been able to shave a few points off our KPIs, they didn't scale for the big organizations, so they were left fighting over smaller budgets.

Today, as earnings reports are tightening and worries grow about what's in store for the markets in general, every VP of Marketing is experiencing a ton of pressure to find those few points of efficiency, so the idea of pivoting to a new platform is much more palatable.

For those us us with sub-million dollar budgets, this has always been our reality. We have favoured efficiency over ease of use, so new innovative ad options are music to our ears. Over the next few months, you're may start noticing a lot of those new features popping up in interesting places, so to get the party started, we've identified the three that we believe have the greatest potential upside, and the lowest general adoption:

WHATSAPP/SMS

Text message communication is not new as a marketing tactic, but the advent of AI and related tools are making the practice increasingly accessible for us all, and improving both the quality and personalization that
we're able to deliver. Don't believe they work? Here are a few stats to keep in mind:

38% of those surveyed report making a purchase because of a brand text message. 50% admit to being influenced to make a purchase. Those numbers are significant, because people hate to admit that any marketing tactic worked on them, so more than a third reporting an actual conversion is significant.

Of course there is the other side of the coin, where 96% of those surveyed said they have been annoyed by brand texts. That's why we need to dig a bit deeper to figure out what types of messages brands are sending, and why anyone would want to receive them.

The top 5 message types that people actually want to receive are (in descending order):

1. Shipping notifications (of course)
2. Sales and promotions
3. Special occasion announcements (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.)
4. Win-back messages (ie. abandoned shopping cart, lapsed customers)
5. New product announcements

Source: Businessofapps.com

There are a lot of different providers out there, and pretty much every one of them is starting to build in AI tools that are driving effectiveness up and required resources down. If you're interested in exploring SMS/WhatsApp for your brand, check out Hootsuite's beginner's guide here.

SPOTIFY

Here's the thing about audio ads that makes them so much different from just about every other ad format: It has your entire attention. There are no other pieces of content competing for your attention, it can't hide behind another pop-up or in one of 25+ open tabs. Spotify ads demand our attention, which is why each individual impression can be so much more valuable than a typical banner; yet the rates are about the same.

Right now targeted Spotify ads go for roughly $15-25 CPM, and can be purchased in much the same way that a Google or Facebook ad would. But are there enough people paying attention? Recently Spotify crossed a half Billion users, which places it right around Snapchat as the #5 or #6 audience in North America. They've also been rolling out all sorts of new tools and toys - here's a recent rundown straight from the source of everything that's available.

TIKTOK SEARCH ADS

This one's still on the horizon, but it's potentially explosive. TikTok is testing an ad platform that attempts to capture the massive trend towards searching on the app.

According to early info, the interface will allow us to buy ads specifically against search terms, then geo-target the results, the same way we do on Google.

If they deliver, and the units work, then TikTok could become a major player in the digital advertising space (until/unless they get banned, of course).

Want to know more? Check out this breakdown from Search Engine Land.

4 STORIES WORTH YOUR ATTENTION

PUT THESE ON YOUR RADAR

• Everybody's trying to be TikTok. Even Reddit has jumped on board, announcing a video feed that looks an awful lot like the For You Page
• Crypto has made a major comeback as a result of the uncertainly at some US banks
• Tech layofffs continue, including 9,000 at Amazon and 10,000 at Meta
• Remember Gowalla? The Foursquare competitor just relaunched 14 years later to see if this generation is interested in checking into their favourite spots around town

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting