When it comes to digital marketing, media buyers face an ever-growing obstacle—clutter. It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle when a brand is one of many in a saturated ad market. By focusing on exclusivity, we’ve revamped the way we plan media in three key ways: layering exclusivity into contracts, shifting spending to more exclusive ad spaces and evaluating success by looking beyond standard performance metrics.
  1. Exclusivity in Contracts. When creating influencer marketing content, it’s important that competitive brands and products don’t muddy the message. Increasingly, we negotiate exclusive contracts that feature only one brand or minimal coverage of non-competing brands alongside it. In YouTube, this means a “Get Ready With Me” that is brand-focused with a full look. In Instagram, this is a one-brand look to get ready for spring. Ensuring an exclusivity window to eliminate clutter and overzealous #ads is essential to capturing the attention of our key audiences. In most cases, the standard is to allow no paid content within 24 hours and no paid competitive content with a week before and after the post. This provides a clean slate for consumption.
  2. Shifting Spend to Exclusive Space. Clutter carries over to other media as well, namely social. Instagram is beginning to eclipse Facebook, with its user base growing an expected 13 percent this year compared to only 2 percent for Facebook, according to eMarketer1. This translates into a strong shift in ad buying, with ad revenue growing 70.4 percent on Instagram this year.
Gone are the days of splitting focus among several ad placements across a page; in-feed, right-rail or in-stream videos. With Instagram, all the elements competing for attention are eliminated in a clean, easy-to-scroll format. This thought that Instagram is more attention-grabbing is represented in its performance. Engagement rates are growing on Instagram and are consistently outperforming those of Facebook at a staggering rate, according to Forbes.
  1. Looking Beyond Standard Metrics. The success of all ads needs to be measured on more than just viewability. Ad tech companies such as MOAT allow us to quantify how many users hover over an ad, the attention quality of the impression and the amount of time users interacted with an ad to provide more context than if it was just viewable. Programmatic display has to be held to a higher standard of exclusive messaging.
In all aspects of media, we see this trend toward exclusivity and dedicated, clutter-free ad placements. Taking a multifaceted approach to ensuring both allows our brands to rise above competition—and the clutter. Sources:
  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/business/dealbook/instagram-facebook-video.html
  2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholmes/2018/02/01/as-facebook-shifts-instagram-emerges-as-a-new-home-for-brands/#727958857834
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