digital advertising Archives - CRAFT Media | Digital

Can You Hear Me Now?

Vanity = lack of real value; hollowness; worthlessness.

Vanity Metrics = See above.

Unfortunately, Vanity Metrics—Likes, Opens, and Follows—are exactly what associations, campaigns and companies use to determine success with regard to social and email campaigns.

Make no mistake, building these communities is incredibly important, but that is only the beginning of the process. You must make sure you are reaching these audiences and they are engaging with your content. This is becoming increasingly difficult as recent changes to Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail have the potential to marginalize a Like, Follow, or Open, at least with regard to messaging and direct response campaigns.

The changing landscape began with Facebook adjusting their algorithm that reduced organic reach from 15% to 1% or less. Now simply producing and sharing content does not ensure you will reach even a minimal amount of your supporters.

Next, Gmail announced it would cache images—including pixels used to track opens—making it harder to accurately track the total amount of opens for each of your emails. Even before this change, the value of an opened email was already artificially inflated. Emails are a delivery platform, not a destination. Opening an email is valuable, only if the user is then compelled to click-through to your site to learn more and take a specific action.

Finally, Twitter announced the addition of a “mute” button to its platform. Now users can elect to follow a brand/campaign, but can mute their tweets, which means the brand/campaign has a new follower, but one who does not receive any tweets and therefore unable to help spread your message.

These changes reinforce the need for email and social media managers to shift their focus to stats that measure actual engagement such as shares, email click-throughs, and retweets when determining the success of campaigns.

CRAFT always has put a premium on engagement, and we’ve refocused our clients’ efforts on shares, retweets and email click-throughs in anticipation of these changes by Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail.  We work with clients to target qualified audiences with digital advertising to build online communities, with success determined by engaging these communities.

Our clients are building large online communities with engaged audiences where message drives actions such as purchase, donation, retweet, or share.

Focus your efforts on driving up engagement rates and you will know for sure if your communities can hear you.

There is a growing practice in the digital space called “programmatic advertising.” It’s all the rage and more companies are doing it everyday. But few people know exactly what it is. Much like the latest celebrity diets, people are subscribing to the practice of programmatic advertising but don’t entirely understand what it is or how it works. Unlike the latest celebrity diet though, programmatic advertising is here to stay and it will change the way we advertise online.

Simply put, programmatic advertising is the automation of ad buying. Now ads can be purchased in real time, the same way hotel reservations can be made online instead of going through a concierge or travel agent. The streamlined process increases efficiency and reduces the cost of ads.

This allows advertisers to focus on more specifically tailored audiences, instead of simply trying to reach as many people as possible for the least cost. Agency resources can then be directed to facilitating creativity and personalized interaction. Therefore, businesses can seamlessly integrate their message into their target audiences’ online behavior.

CRAFT embraced programmatic buying early, launching our own agency trading desk, CRAFT Levers. Now CRAFT bypasses traditional ad networks and directly accesses the inventory, data, transparency, and insights available through industry-leading Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), including Google’s Bid Manager, AOL’s AOP, BrightRoll, MediaMath, AdRoll, and others.

Buying directly has two key benefits; first, it increases transparency, knowing when and where our ads run reduces potential fraud; second, a greater percentage of the budget goes to actual ad placement and not ad network overhead, giving our clients more bang for their buck. Thus, CRAFT advertising specialists can use a larger percentage of our clients’ budgets to leverage more accurate real-time data to improve results, ensuring the right ads reach the right people, at the right time.

We are excited to announce that CRAFT | Media/Digital has been named a 2013 Google Engage All-Star.  Digital Advertising and Marketing Specialist, Andrew Burk, managed the online advertising campaigns during the length of the contest. This win represents CRAFT’s ability to achieve growth for our clients by both meeting and exceeding specific online advertising and marketing goals.

The Google Engage program helps to enhance companies that offer online planning and strategy, website design and development, digital engagement and search engine marketing. Once a year, Google gives 14,000 leading agencies worldwide the chance to compete to show the most growth for their clients using the search engine’s marketing platform, of which only 200 agencies are invited to attend. In order to be selected as a winner, CRAFT had to reach specific pay-per-click goals across all active marketing and advertising campaigns.

Partner Matthew Dybwad and Andrew Burk, will represent CRAFT at the summit in Google’s California headquarters August 12th. At the Engage event, the pair will receive insights about market trends, one-on-one consultations with Google managers, a tour of Googleplex and more.

Expect the two to share what they learn and their experience right here on CRAFT Framework and for live updates be sure to follow them on Twitter: @mdybwad and @AndrewABurk