But new digital platforms are collapsing the marketing funnel as we witness the emergence of ad units which tick both boxes.
That is the view of Twitter’s VP of global client services Sarah Personette, who says brands can have the best of both.
“We’re seeing this migration from a siloed world of ‘performance’ on one side and ‘branding’ on the other … to a collapsing of a world that’s really focused on performance branding,” she says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
That’s how it looks from where Personette sits. Twitter says it can help drive both branding and performance goals.
“A lot of our ad solutions actually allow you to, in one unit, experience the storytelling power of video from advertisers, and then actually drive down to understand more about that product, be able to buy that product directly, or be directed to a site where you’re able to do some sort of direct-to-consumer buy,” Personette adds.
She tells Beet.TV Twitter has made over 950 content deals with publishers around the world over the last year, and explains that the platform’s modus operandi is helping brands connect to conversations that “move at the speed of culture”.
For its latest quarter, Q3 last year, Twitter reported advertising revenue of $650 million (up 29% year-over-year), whilst ad engagements increased 50% year-over-year and cost per engagement (CPE) decreased 14% year-over-year.
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>“What I’m psyched about in terms of Channel29 is that we’re going to take the best of what it means to do native advertising inside of the digital space and we are going to bring that model into the TV space.”
In the short term, plans call for a “full, native integration of content in live programming” and over the course of time “we will look at doing more consumer-friendly commercials,” Personette adds.
“That said, I don’t think we’ll ever do a 30-second spot. I think we’ll be focused more so on what we have learned about what it means to consumer video in a mobile-first world, and that means more like six seconds and more like fifteen seconds.”
Available on smart TVs and Refinery29’s digital platforms, the channel will be for young, progressive female-oriented stories, as MediaPost reports. Refinery29, which has a presence in the UK and Germany, will be expanding its brand to Canada and France.
The goal of Channel29 is to offer “powerful female stories” wherever and however users want to engage with them. It will benefit from Refinery’s reach on owned-and-operated venues in addition to its broad social media presence, something that has greatly benefited the 29Rooms experience.
“We originally launched 29Rooms as just a pop-up event and invited people to come celebrate with us and there were lines down the corner,” says Personette. “We have seen the growth of 29Rooms as an experience continue to elevate and escalate over the course of the last three to four years and we feel that same way for channel 29.”
While the hypothesis of Refinery29 has been that if brands can create a social impact it can drive business results, there’s little research to support it. So the company partnered with Spark Neuro to conduct quantitative, biometric research.
Among the findings are that when a brand attempts to have an “inclusive human and empathetic conversation and dialogue” with women, it can change their self-perceptions and “drive better ad recall for that brand. It actually drives increases in purchase intent and it drives increases in overall conversion.”
Refinery29 plans to use the findings to “take that step into a territory that maybe brands and businesses wouldn’t have been comfortable in before,” Personette says.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the Digital Content NewFronts 2018. The series a co-presentation of Beet.TV and the IAB. Please see additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>“We’ve seen an explosion of the golden age of content,” UM WW’s north America president Sarah Personette, who was Facebook’s own agency relations director until 2013, tells Beet.TV. “Consumers want and demand smarter content than ever before – that’s why you’re seeing the rise of House Of Cards.”
And that’s also why marketers need both to work with distributors to program their own content-led campaigns, Personette, says, pointing to Driving On Ice, a documentary made for NBC and online channels to illustrate BMW.
We interviewed her at the 4A’s annual leadership meeting. See the rest of our coverage here.
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