By Marc Johnson, CMO
It is coming, they said. Brand advertising will migrate to digital when time spent online and audience size reached the scale major brands require, when inventory could be assured as brand safe, when video ad units and formats were more engaging, and when valid measurement comparisons could be made with TV. Well, these roadblocks have largely been overcome. Yet brand advertising is still a smaller and slower growing piece of the online advertising pie.
Why? Because until now, there has been no way to directly tie the qualitative, human aspects of brand strategy and the nuances of creative content to the delivery of online video advertising.
eMarketer defines branding ads as having “the objective of building awareness, familiarity, opinion, consideration or engagement with a brand.” Historically, this has meant trying to convince the largest amount of demographically homogeneous (and therefore supposedly like-minded) people to accept a brand’s singular point of difference — essentially exposing ads to everyone in the hope that an element of the brand, product or service connected with something inside a large number of those people.
Data and technology have changed the dynamics of branding for both consumers and marketers. Consumers are now in full control of their experiences. They have so many more choices about brands that they lack the time to choose them. Anything that is not immediately relevant is dismissed. For marketers, assumptions about what is relevant to generic audiences like moms, millennials or white males are no longer enough to engage these overwhelmed consumers.
Resonate insures brands against this irrelevance by determining message receptivity in advance — effectively pre-optimizing video campaigns. This is accomplished by matching the attributes that a brand or campaign is built on to the people who are motivated by those very same attributes.
For example, a beauty brand that’s creative speaks to happiness can deliver online video advertising to only the 11% of female beauty buyers who are actually motivated by happiness, self-image and fulfillment. This method makes the video experience inherently more personal and the brand campaign more effective: when delivering online video advertising using motivations-based targeting, pre-roll completion rates are 40% higher than the national average. And overall motivations-based campaigns provide 20% lift in brand persuasion.
In the end, people don’t really want relationships with brands; they want the higher order states that brands promise. These states are based on values (e.g. financial security, self-esteem, concern for the future, peace of mind) and fulfilling the brand promise depends on finding and activating on those values that consumers hold in common with the brand.
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