Advertising Week New York and Google Partner Summit 2017 – Key Takeaways

The Advertising Week 2017, held in the fast-paced city of New York, was as insightful event throwing light on the relevant, upcoming trends in the advertising and marketing world. Held in the heart of New York, the conference had a series of seminars, discussions and workshops hosted by the pioneers in marketing and advertising from around the globe. Read on to get a closer insight into the keynotes we took back home from the eventful week and how they can be utilized to build a successful brand.

Learning how to build the brands from the ones who already have

Howard Schulz of Starbucks, Jessica Alba of Honest Company, Neil from Warby Parker and more – there were so many amazing brand creators who shared their insights on how they conceptualized the brand and how they built it step by step into successful brands. These inspiring stories do instil confidence on how amazing product combined with honest and creative advertising can build brands.

Data combined with Creativity

One of the central themes that were discussed at the Ad Week was how creativity is enhanced with the power of data and analytics. Using consumer behaviour data and analytics from advertising campaigns it’s possible to create more powerful brand campaigns. For example, Dominoes presented how they listened to their consumers and realized that many of them were not happy with the way the pizza was reaching them because there was a huge discrepancy on how pizza brand videos were made and how it actually looked. So Dominoes did a series of video which shows how food photography and food videography can be deceptive. Then decided to crowdsource images from customers to see how they received their pizzas and about 25,000 customers submitted their pizzas to “Show Us Your Pizza”. While most of them were happy with their pizzas, some weren’t. So their CEO apologised to the customers and started implementing internal processes to avoid it again. Moreover, they gave a refund a free pizza to unsatisfied customers. Their honesty in advertising combined with the creative campaign helped them tremendously with growth in market share in the USA.

ChatBots & Artificial Intelligence

ChatBots have already begun creating a rage in the digital marketing space and Advertising Week 2017 left no stone unturned in letting us know that. The Facebook Messenger Bot leads the bot universe with advanced customer service that helps consumers reach the solution faster. This, in turn, helps in an enhanced lead generation. Furthermore, experts have also noticed an emerging trend of voice-based devices entering the digital market.

It is said that interacting with a bot is sometimes more effective than visiting a mobile site as it provides more customised and personalised engagement. For example, the bot designed by KLM Airlines can address numerous queries from travel information to a flight change. This makes the entire digital experience of the consumer more convenient and hassle-free. However, it is advisable to use existing apps, like the Facebook Messenger, to reach your target group instead of building native apps.

With Google Home, Alexa and others launching intelligent assistants it’s become an exciting space to watch out from an advertising perspective. With 40% of searches in the USA being voice searches, it is likely to change the fundamental business model of Google. While assistants still have slow adoption in India it’s a space to watch out for.

Smarter Attribution

With users accessing websites, apps and content from multiple devices and some devices with no screens (i.e. assistants like Google Home), attribution is getting harder. The initial days of Advertising Week 2017 introduced us to the concept of split funnel advertising to help measure attribution for enhanced sales and lead generation. The model helped us understand consumer behaviour and figure out which touch points of the consumer need attribution. To begin with, the seminars held on smart attribution made us familiar to the fact that most funnel models highlight which channel is the most useful to increase conversions but do not explain why the consumer converted in the first place. It also helped us understand that consumer behaviour is critical to attribution and the only way we can understand consumers is by adding a twist of creativity to the marketing funnel.

Additionally, the workshop focused on how the marketing funnel model can be made even more efficient by gathering data from different fields and adding in multiple channels that generate guaranteed results. To achieve this, it is important to figure out which channel generates long-term revenue. Channels that add a lifetime value to the marketing funnel have the potential to change the attribution piece completely, especially when complex channels like that of TV and other non-digital aspects are involved.

Google recently launched a new tool called Attribution, which allows for data-driven attribution powered by Google’s AI. It brings your marketing data together to give you a complete view of your performance and insights you can use to optimize your marketing across channels and across devices. It will allow you to:

• See the entire customer journey
• Measure the impact of each marketing touchpoint
• Get insights faster
• Take decisions and action

We just started testing it out and will share more insights shortly.

Digital Out of Home (OOH)

Digital out-of-home taps the concept of traditional advertising by adding a digital twist to it. It utilizes the conventional channel of outdoor banners, billboards and digital screens in public spaces to showcase a product to consumers. Since people are noted to be outside their homes 70% of the time, this mode of advertising helps in a more integrated targeting.

Viewers are not interrupted by digital ads on their personal screens but on the screens, they are exposed to on a daily basis. Additionally, digital out-of-home ads cannot be fast-forwarded, skipped or blocked, giving brands the added edge of reaching out to their audience. Apart from merely detecting the GPS location and retargeting consumers, these ads can also be triggered by other factors, like weather conditions, to showcase a refreshing product on the screens during a hot sunny day. Furthermore, digital out-of-home ads can also be customized for security cameras located up to 1000 feet away, making it a clear channel for providing data.

This digital OOH is still in a very nascent stage in India, the convergence of the physical and digital world is indeed exciting.

Google product updates at the Google Partner Summit 2017

The Advertising Week was coupled with the Google Partner Summit held on September 28th, 2017. The summit presented us with an array of interesting Google product updates to fuel the branding and advertising industry for the upcoming year, apart from the basic digital marketing trends to expect in 2017. Listed below are few of the key product updates that are guaranteed to create a huge positive impact on your firm’s digital marketing plans.

AMP for Adwords landing pages: Gone are the days when AMP was available only for content-heavy sites. Google has noticed the importance of an ad to load faster for higher lead generation and introduced AMP for landing pages. While AMP has already been an important SEO factor, we have now started leveraging it even for paid advertising.

In-market audiences for search: Google has introduced in-market audiences for the search engine so brands can now showcase their products to those who are actively searching for it.

Brand Planner: Though still in the development stage, Google is planning to introduce Brand Planner – a tool similar to Google Trends – to track audience insights and to give brands more actionable insights.

Location extensions for TrueView ads: Brands can now showcase their location in YouTube TrueView ads to increase traffic to their showrooms.

YouTube Ad Sequencing: Brands can also sequence their ads on YouTube as per the viewing of the visitors.

Consumer patterns and life events in Gmail ads: Gmail Ads can be customised based on consumer data like marriage, graduation and birth.

YouTube Insights for search: Viewers can now watch ads that are customized based on the content consumed by them.

Local inventory listed on Google: Brands can get their inventories listed on Google Maps for increased footfall. They can also retrieve the data of the number of people who have visited their stores through these listings from across 19 countries and get a better understanding of how mobile search can help offline retailers in India.

Cross-device data for analytics: Brands can study consumer behaviour through data from advanced social media analytics retrieved from all digital devices – from a handy smartphone to a smart TV.

After getting enlisted as a premier Google partner and attending the Google Partner Summit 2016 in San Francisco, Advertising Week 2017 was a much-anticipated event for us. It provided us with glorious insights and practices of the international digital marketing industry. It is time you start implying these practices in your marketing strategies to take your business to the next level. We know we are!

This article was originally published on Social Beat.