1. Yahoo has launched their most recent study on Native advertising, which found that mobile provides the most emotionally engaging screen for marketers. Click here to access the research.
2. Yahoo added to their free online digital training academy, with the release of a new Native module. To access the module, click here.
3. Yahoo won at the IAB Europe Research Awards 2016, with their study Return on Inspiration in the ‘Brand Advertising Effectiveness’ category. To read more about the award, click here.
4. Tumblr really is the home of gifs. This month Tumblr introduced a new feature, making the platform even more gif-friendly. Check it out for yourself!
5. The latest comScore results show there are 31.8m unique users in the UK, with 55% accessing Yahoo on their mobile.
Towards the end of last year, we launched our very own online training platform, with the aim of educating the industry about all things digital!
On our platform, you can test your knowledge through quizzes as you progress through different levels of learning and the best part- it is totally free to use! Hundreds of you have already taken advantage of this, with social, data and mobile proving to be the most popular modules.
Today, we are pleased to announced we have just launched a brand new module: Native. Native is a huge part of the digital landscape and according to recent studies, is due to increase by 186% by 2020. So there really is no better time to learn about native, than right now.
If you don’t feel confident about all things digital or you want to check out the content, sign up for free here: https://yahoo.coorpacademy.com/
We all know that Tumblr loves GIFs, Tumblr users love GIFs, everything about Tumblr just screams GIF, GIF, GIF. Which is why it’s no surprise that the platform has made it even easier for GIF fanatics to both create and post GIFs.
This week Tumblr has launched a new feature in its iOS app called GIF posts. It’s essentially a new type of post that’s been created around its GIF creation tools, which were rolled out to users last year. It means that Tumblr searches through your videos and your burst photos to see if they’d work well as GIFs. It also borrows a few editing options from Snapchat, allowing users to draw on their GIFs and attach emoji to them.
The GIF posts feature has been rolled out to Tumblr’s iOS app already and is on the way to Android over the next few weeks.
Emotional engagement with consumers has become an increasingly difficult endeavor as a result of second and third screens, however new research from Yahoo has found the most effective means is across mobile, and specifically, at a time when consumers are relaxing.
Yahoo’s study into the world of consumer screen engagement explored how screens can be used to deliver contextually relevant emotive experiences at times when consumers are most receptive to them.
The research drew on findings from UK, Germany, Italy, and France, as well as qualitative analysis and biometric testing and revealed that people are actively open to and want engagement from brands when shopping, traveling, and in particular, relaxing.
Cross-device technology provides the ability to target a customer with reliable accuracy across all their devices, shares insights into your customer’s true conversion path, and allows you to manage ad exposure to keep impact high while minimizing waste. We covered the topic well in our recent e-book, Finding Success in a Cross-Device World.
Many of our clients are already putting this targeting into practice. Here are some pointers from the clients who are doing it right:
Expand Your Audience Criteria
Start by minimizing the constraints you place on your target audience criteria. That way, you can maximize the unique insights you’ll find out of each channel. Every device and media channel has an innate set of users who will react differently to your product and message, and opening your targeting parameters will provide better data on those differences among users. Cross-device targeting will give you the insight to tease out those differences, so long as your initial audience isn’t too limited. As far as you can allow, let your data tell you how an android user reacts compared to an iPhone user, or a desktop video user versus a mobile video user.
Plan to Shift Budgets
Plan your budget around a goal and an intended audience, and don’t let your budget get siloed. In a traditional online buy, a client or agency divides their buying teams and spends by channel. In the world of platform buying with cross-device targeting, this kind of division can limit your performance and insights. It’s a chicken and egg problem – we never budgeted by audiences across devices because we couldn’t find the same person on different devices. Now that we can, the way we separate out budgets needs to focus back on the intended user and not on the channel. Cross-device targeting gives you the unique ability to look at your person as a whole person through all their devices. To capture the full benefits of your plan, your teams and budgets have to be fluid enough to follow your customers wherever they will be.
Leverage Different Creatives
Cross-device targeting will finally give you a level playing field for evaluating your creative equally across devices, for better or worse. On one hand, you finally have a method to ensure you are talking to the same person on all their devices, on the other hand, banner blindness and ad burnout is going to happen much quicker if you duplicate your creative (TV ads as online ads, display ads shrunk down to be mobile ads). Different devices offer unique opportunities to custom-tailor experiences. Consider the unique creative opportunities that come from multiple channels, and plan your campaign accordingly.
User Experience Comes First
Make sure your users love every moment of their experience on your sites and with your creatives. Positive user experiences often have a stronger impact than the best cross-device targeting in the world, so make sure you’re working with both. Is your mobile site and app experience engaging, simple, and intuitive? Or is it difficult for a customer to move through your buying funnel? A great targeting and creative plan can fall flat on a bad site or app experience. Like the creative issues described above, a well-designed user experience will also show up in your analytics as people flow through the process and convert to loyal customers.
Be Adaptable
Expect to be surprised by the cross-device conversion data, and be ready to adapt. You’ve already done a great job improving your creative, site, and targeting and you have released your campaign into the wild. The data might push you to make changes, along with a wide variety of factors. A brokerage advertiser may be at the mercy of the stock market, and have to speed up new customer spending during volatile times. Auto shoppers may always be better targeted on their mobile devices while they are on a competitor’s lot than in front of their computers. Cross-device targeting can give you the comfort that you are making decisions based on analytics, looking at the most complete picture of your customers.
We’re delighted to announce that Yahoo won the Brand Advertising Effectiveness at the IAB Europe Research Awards 2016. The accolade was in recognition of our Return on Inspiration content marketing study, the largest content marketing study of its kind ever conducted.
If you’re anything like me, your smartphone is always by your side. It’s the first thing I interact with in the morning, it sticks with me throughout my day, and it’s the last thing I look at before going to sleep. I watch a ton of video on my phone; when I’m on the bus, when I need a short break, or when my friends and family share. A recent study from Yahoo shows I am not alone, and that more and more people are consuming video on their smartphones. And, for advertisers, that’s a great time to reach me and the millions of people watching video on their mobile devices.
So what’s the best way to start with mobile video advertising? Many of our advertisers have found success in connecting existing desktop campaigns across devices to mobile. Advertisers are seeing brand favorability increased by 250%, according to a recent Yahoo research study:
So if we know cross-device video campaigns are able to drive success for advertisers, the next step is determining the best ways to reach this captive mobile audience.
If you are already running desktop video pre-roll with a DSP, look into extending your digital video campaign with mobile pre-roll ads. Adding mobile pre-roll as a simple addition to your campaign moves you into a cross-device campaign, but that campaign becomes even more powerful when you use your DSP to layer on advanced data to speak to your target audience.
Your DSP can be a valuable asset in your digital marketing campaigns. The BrightRoll DSP can segment mobile audiences by time of day, and leverage content interest and demographic data from Yahoo’s 1 billion users and more than 165 billion daily data events. In this example, you can use the BrightRoll DSP to target audiences in the afternoon during commute times and during primetime TV hours. Then layer on interest data on the types of digital videos and content your target audience is consuming, and your target demographics, let’s say age and gender, to reach the right audience at the right time. All of this is accomplished through advanced data and targeting.
Match a targeted campaign with the proven performance of cross-device campaigns, and you have a winning combination for your digital advertising (if you need a refresher on pre-roll video check out the first post in this series).
