Digital Media News

Eric Greener

Founding partner at ExactDrive and happily married father of four.

DSP’s

Advertisers typically use demand-side platforms (DSP’s) to help them decide which ad impressions to buy, and for how much. For the uninitiated, a DSP is a piece of software used to purchase display, video, mobile and search ads, in an automated fashion. As more and more marketers recognize the benefits of programmatic, the number of DSP’s on the market is also increasing; leading marketers to wonder which platform they should choose. Our advice? ExactDrive of course!

Feb 12, 2015 8:00:00 AM

Will Mobile Advertising Ever Rule The World?

Mobile ownership has now passed the point of critical mass in terms of global ownership: In the US alone, more than half of the American population now owns a smartphone. It is therefore unsurprising that mobile advertising has taken a place centerstage amid the advertising strategies of small and large businesses alike.

The driving force behind the growth of mobile advertising is the fact that it is a low cost strategy that yields high conversion rates.

New mobile-specific ad formats are being introducedevery day, enabling marketers to engage with potential customers in new and innovative ways. As native, programmatic and location-based ads continue to roll out, could mobile advertising be poised to overtake other media?

Jan 22, 2015 8:00:00 AM

5 Critical Signs You Need Help With Your Facebook Advertising Campaign

Are your Facebook advertising campaigns producing the ROI you want? If not it’s time to look at your advertising strategy. Some companies are rewarded with low-cost leads and healthy profits from their Facebook campaigns, while others simply fail.

There are some common mistakes made by facebook advertisers that are preventingthem from getting the results they want. Consider these five points before embarking on your next campaign:

1. Not having a Goal

When you create a Facebook ad, the first thing to ascertain is what your objective is.
Each Facebook ad should have a specific, measurable goal, and you need to know what metrics you will use to measure your success with that goal.

By focusing on “cost per” metrics, you can improve the effectiveness of you campaign without increasing the ad spend.

Jan 6, 2015 7:00:00 AM

Understand Psychology To Nail Your Advertising Campaigns

When it comes to advertising campaigns, marketing content and experiential marketing strategies, success lies in the planning. It’s not enough to simply be creative, and losing sight of what you’re trying to achieve will hinder your chances of attaining any goal.

Ideally, you need experience. That’s experience of what works and what doesn't. And most of the top marketing experts gather that experience by analyzing campaigns from the customer’s perspective, not from their own. Whether they know it or not, what they’re actually doing is analyzing human behavior.

Yes – to consistently deliver marketing that works, you need to be something of a psychologist. Here are 4 top tips to help you connect with your audience like never before.

1. Pick your words carefully.

Sounds obvious, so let’s be specific. People put a lot of emphasis on what they read first, so make sure any headlines or initial copy is working as hard as it possibly can be. Remember that visually, less is often more. Take Apple’s approach - when they’re in full ‘product launch’ state, their messaging is less about marketing and more about the product.

Dec 10, 2014 6:30:00 AM

Where Brands Are Going Wrong With YouTube

YouTube released its first Brand Channel Leader board earlier this year, featuring channels that have had the most success attracting repeat viewership, shares, and engaged fan bases. But how well are brands actually doing on the video-sharing platform?

According to Touchstorm’s Video Index, only 74 of the top 5,000 channels on YouTube belong to brands. This isa mind-blowing statistic, given the video platform’s millions of daily users and the size of marketing budgets for international brands. These 74 brandsare YouTube innovators, who enjoy one new view every two seconds, with their content being liked and shared by legions of loyal fans.

Dec 3, 2014 8:00:00 AM

More Experiential Marketing From Delites

You know you've created a winning advertising campaign when you can continue to use a theme over and over again. What this shows us is that it’s important to understand human psychology. We’re humans and we don’t like change. People love to see stories, characters and themes progress and develop - just think back to the Bisto family in the 80s.

On a crueler note, Delitesrecently showed how powerful advertising continuity can be. Back in 2012, they ran a very successful campaign that went viral, much to the envy of many a guerrilla marketer. The campaign was based around the theme: how far would you go for fantastic Delites? The premise was very simple – people had to do a variety of menial tasks to earn snacks.

Nov 21, 2014 8:00:00 AM

No Budget? No Excuse! Make Some Noise With Grassroots Marketing

For anyone starting a new business, marketing and advertising is essential. There’s no point having a fantastic product or service if no-one knows about it. And today’s obsession with social media means that simple marketing strategies have never been more effective and the number of people you can reach out to is endless.

Most big companies have their own marketing teams and often they have huge budgets to utilize,but with start-ups it’s a completely different ball game. So, what do you do when you don’t have the funds or a marketing guru to help you? Just put your creative hat on and push your message across using Grassroots Marketing techniques.

Grassroots Marketing is a cost-effective way to reach your target audience using simple techniques like word-of-mouth, door-to-door sales, competitions - with your product or service forming the prize - and even guerrilla marketing strategies.

Oct 30, 2014 8:00:00 AM

Augmented Reality: Get Creative With Your Marketing

We live in a busy, cluttered world where consumers are bombarded with messages from every business under the sun. Brands interrupt our social media news feeds, our TV programs, our podcasts, videos and our browsing. You can’t walk down the street, take a train or step in a taxi without seeing some kind of marketing.

The problem with this, for businesses, is that consumers start to tune out to the different forms of communication. When this happens, how do brands get heard? The answer is: they need to get creative.

What is ‘augmented reality’?

It’s an image of a real-world environment that has been supplemented by something computer-generated, such as sound, video or special graphics.

Oct 29, 2014 8:00:00 AM

Brands Go For Gold With Experiential Marketing

Major sporting events such as the World Cup, Wimbledon and the Commonwealth Games always dominate the media, and each throws up a wealth of sponsorship opportunities for brands across the world. Coca-Cola, Adidas, McDonalds and Sony are just a few of the companies that have benefited from the global exposure that the partnerships have bought.

With all the excitement over, we thought we’d take a look at how some of the key sponsors used experiential marketing activations toelevate their brands.

1. Virgin Media: Commonwealth Games

Virgin Media used its partnership with Usain Bolt to launch its interactive ‘RaceBolt’ activation at the Commonwealth Games. Participantswere given the opportunity to race against the world’s fastest man over 30 meters, on a professional athletics track. Usain was on hand in virtual form, on a 40m x 3m interactive LED screen.

Oct 16, 2014 7:30:00 AM

Highlighting Your Mission With Social Experiments

If you saw a rack of refreshing beverages on a street corner with a sign that said,‘drop $1 in the box for a drink’, would you pay? This is the sort of moral conundrum posed by‘social experiment’ marketing, in which brands carry out experiments in a social environment to investigate how people react to certain situations.

Social experiments provide an ideal framework for guerrilla advertising, as they are cheap to stage, require little in terms of resources and have the potential to reach a huge number of consumers, by nature of being digital and shareable. Often used by not-for-profit organizations to highlight a cause (Cause Related Marketing), this can be an extremely powerful way to communicate a message.