The headlines keep coming fast. Our industry keeps changing fast. Now, you can ramp up your knowledge fast without losing any momentum when you read our June 2019 expertly compiled digital marketing news then dig deeper into the articles that most intrigue you:
- The Hershey Company is shifting more of its advertising budget this year and next from traditional linear TV to over-the-top (OTT) and esports to go after audiences it can’t reach with linear TV, such as younger people and cord-cutters.
“The OTT space is fairly complicated because it’s still kind of emerging,” said Charlie Chappell, head of media at The Hershey Company. “We’re investigating all the different ways in. When I say investigating — we’re spending meaningful money to be able to understand how it works and what impact it has on our business to figure out which one’s going to work the best for us going forward.”
How much media spending The Hershey Company is going to move into OTT and esports remains to be seen. Chappell said they’re taking a wait-and-see approach: “There is no doubt that the consumer is going to OTT and moving to gaming and esports. We’re going to move at the rate the consumer moves. If they move faster, we’ll move faster. If not, we won’t.”
- What’s bigger now than Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Prime Day. Now in its fifth year, the event will kick off at midnight on July 15 and last 48 hours.
“In just a few years, Prime Day has become such an important online holiday it affects everyone,” says Alice Fournier, an ecommerce analyst at Kantar Retail. “It’s moved so quickly that it plays an important role in promotional planning for most brands.”
Amazon brick-and-mortar competitors are surely planning how to take advantage of Amazon’s holiday hoopla: how to connect with customers looking for deals and how to drive more traffic to their own sales and promotions in-store during this crucial time.
- With rising programming costs and the potential for billions in more revenue, competitors predict Netflix will soon be saying yes to commercials.
During a recent Cannes Lion panel, Linda Yaccarino, chairwoman of advertising sales and client partnerships at NBCUniversal, parent company of CNBC said, “When you have to make more programming that’s not guaranteed to be a hit, you have to spend more money, you have to build your brand, you have to help the consumer discover your stuff — the price will go up for the subscription, and it would be logical to mitigate those increases to take ads.”
If Netflix did decide to incorporate commercials, just how they would do it is anyone’s guess. It’s possible they would stick to the traditional tried-and-true structures and formats, but maybe they would choose to innovate.
Peter Naylor, head of ad sales at Hulu said during the panel, “The future of ad-supported media does not resemble what we’re doing today in terms of ad load or even ad shape. It can be interactive advertising or nonintrusive advertising. I think you’re going to see a lot of innovation from all these new OTT providers because we’re allowed to. We’re not married to the clock. Fifteen and 30-second ads were a product of linear TV. When everything’s on demand and served through an IP address, the ad experience is going to dramatically improve.”
- Spotify is trying to make its advertising more valuable and generate more money by offering advertisers a more specific and better way to reach consumers: through podcast-based targeting.
With only music targeting available before, advertisers got basic insight into desired customers: their general demographics, the music genre they consumed, the playlists they built. But, now podcast ad targeting may be more beneficial to advertisers since it can drill down to the podcast category people are interested in, revealing their interests and hobbies.
The focus on podcasts will continue to be a priority at Spotify. A Spotify spokeswoman recently told The Verge that the company will continue to improve advertising around podcasts: “We aspire to develop a more robust advertising solution for podcasts that will allow us to layer in the kind of targeting, measurement, and reporting capabilities we have for ads that run alongside other content experiences like music and video.”
- Out-of-home (OOH) media providers, such as Lamar, Clear Channel and others, are taking more static placements digital. As a result, programmatically enabled digital screens are becoming more available, and digital billboard ads and other OOH ads have become easier to buy over the past year.
“It’s dramatically different now than it was a year ago,” said Megan Halscheid, VP of media tech strategies at Publicis Media. “We’ve seen it in the interest from our clients and advertisers in terms of a shift. DSPs and SSPs are recognizing the new potential demand for buying this channel. The media owners are making that digital investment anyway. They see the advantages of buying that programmatically.”
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