As Thanksgiving approaches, along with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the spirit of giving thanks is being spread throughout a variety of mediums. Holiday ads are up and people are slowly getting into the holiday vibe, starting with Thanksgiving. However tempting it is to lose ourselves in this crucial time in the world of advertising and marketing, I think we marketers shouldn’t lose our appreciation for what we have and gratitude for our blessings: our customers.
I’m a big Star Wars fan (and, I’m proud to admit, a Star Trek fan too) and with “The Force Awakens” starting in about a month, I thought it would be fun to see how advertisers are using the Force to create fun and engaging ads. On the one hand these are entertaining and, on the other, illustrate how some creative thinking and insight into your consumers can lead to unmissable ads. Here are some of my favorite Star Wars ads:
Programmatic Advertising has revolutionized online advertising with its speed and potential to present highly relevant ads to consumers just when they are more likely to pay attention. Unfortunately for publishers, the current option, known as “waterfalling”, has proven to be inefficient and can leave a lot of inventory unfilled. That means less revenue and indirectly contributes to the mess publishers and advertisers are in today with too many bad ads splattered across the web in an effort to keep businesses afloat.
Our marketing team is growing rapidly and we needed a service that enables us to plan our content and seamlessly post updates across multiple social media platforms and user profiles. After exploring a couple options, we turned to CoSchedule and started a trial with them. It didn’t take long for the team to take to the new service and incorporate it into our publishing and sharing workflows.
The military is commonly perceived as impersonal, intimidating and even inhuman. Modern militaries are increasingly using social media to win over the hearts and minds of the citizens they serve and, in the process, highlight strategies that smart brands can adopt to make more personal connections with consumers.
In our first part of our “Introduction to In-Image Ads for Ad Networks”, we explored the challenges facing traditional banner ads. We concluded by introducing a more dynamic and, potentially, lucrative ad product that you, as an ad network, can add to your portfolio of ads products to help your publishers earn better returns: in-image ads.
How do you ensure consumers see your ads? Create unmissable ads and they may even take them viral. That, at least, is what American insurer Geico did with its smartly designed pre-roll YouTube ads that address two challenges: a tendency to skip pre-roll ads on YouTube and persuading viewers to not only not skip the ads but share them widely and dramatically increase their exposure.