College basketball fans across the country are gearing up to root for their local and national teams in this month’s NCAA basketball tournament. For advertisers, it’s an even bigger moment to get their brand in front of captivated fans as they watch the games on big screens, laptops, and mobile devices.

While it’s tempting to blow your marketing budget on expensive air time, most brands will need to be more creative if they want to generate real business results during one of the biggest seasonal sporting moments of the year.

If your brand wants to avoid spending millions on linear TV tournament ads, but still wants real business results from tournament advertising, you can still score big before the final buzzer. Here are five ways advertisers can win big by tying their brands to “game-time decisions” across mobile, desktop, and OTT:

1

Full court press with your creative

Using basketball-related imagery and terminology in creative can tie your brand identity to the tournament before, during, and after games.

2

All screens matter

Watching a live sporting event on TV involves a lot of untargeted commercials. Your moment to grab fan attention can come during those breaks. As fans scroll their smartphones during commercials, your targeted sports audience segment will reach the perfect consumer, and drive the potential for “in the moment” engagement.

3

Don’t sleep on the rest of America!

While tournament viewership is high, not everyone is a superfan! Advertisers can also reach people who are not big basketball fans but watch along with others in their homes. For those passive fans, a blended combination of mobile, desktop, and OTT will keep your brand front and center for even non-basketball viewers.

4

Think globally, advertise locally

Tournament games are played in several different cities and time zones across the US. If your brand has a local presence, use geo-targeting to reach local fan audiences and game attendees to drive more results, online or in-store, before, during, and after games.

5

Research your national competitors

If you are a local or regional brand, use your online advertising to go head-to-head with the big national chains. Local brands can generate digital “game day” LTOs and other incentives to pull customers away from the big TV advertisers and win their own bracket using the power of their online presence.

Our advice – create a customized advertising game plan for your business, find the open spot on the floor, and let ‘er fly! Use the power of multiscreen geo and audience targeting powered by GroundTruth to hit your shots and grow your brand.

GroundTruth helps advertisers leverage real-world behavior to deliver real CTV business results for small, medium, and large brands. To see how GroundTruth drives performance marketing results for its clients, email us at hello@groundtruth.com.

The post Basketball on the Brain? Great For Advertisers! appeared first on GroundTruth.

As we enjoy the traditions of Fall - pumpkin patches, the changing leaves, apple cider, fall sports, and more, marketers should also be thinking about how upcoming weather conditions will impact the future performance of their advertising. All marketers need to have a weather-responsive advertising strategy in place as we move from fall to winter, and it can start with a simple “temperature check”:

The Fall to Winter Temperature Check

• Review your creative. Are you sharing content, and images, that dovetail with the weather outside?
• Audiences shift behaviors as the weather changes. Assess your targeting and make refinements.
• Know how weather affects your campaign goals. Inclement weather reduces store traffic and drives more online research. Adjust your primary goals to accommodate likely audience behavior.

Once you’ve checked your creative, audience targeting, and campaign goals, it’s time to consider how to leverage digital media to stay ahead of the competition. Having a media strategy that aligns to real-world behavior is your best bet to “winterizing” your ad budget.

Top 3 Considerations When Winterizing Your Ad Strategy

1

Your audience will be indoors more

Fluctuations in weather conditions can turn even the hardiest of outdoor shoppers into homebodies. Cold, rain, or snowy conditions tend to keep most of us indoors where we, in turn, increase our screen time.

To reach your audience during fall and winter, you’ll have to look for them indoors where they’re likely to be consuming video content on connected TVs, tablets, desktops and mobile devices. Placing your targeted ads in video content increases your exposure, and improves brand awareness.

2

Measure everything based on seasonal consumer behavior

In-store traffic is the lifeblood of many businesses. But when the weather changes, it helps to use digital ads to promote online behavior first. Securing and measuring website traffic through relevant, targeted ads can lead to measurable in store traffic, no matter what the weather is like outside.

3

Make sure weather triggers are set to the right conditions

Having weather triggers in your digital campaign is key to eliminating wasted impressions, while ensuring better campaign performance overall. The ability to adjust your ad impressions before, during, or after weather events gives you control over when and where to optimize impressions, based on how your business operates.

Wasted impressions should be a thing of the past by now, yet marketers continue to run campaigns during weather conditions that simply cannot produce the result they need. Marketers should be focusing their impressions on the weather conditions that meet their business goals.

Make sure your business is ready to go with a fully winterized digital advertising strategy, and be in position to succeed no matter what the weather looks like outside! Have any questions about weather targeting and CTV advertising? Feel free to reach out to us here. This article was updated for 2022-2023. The original version was also published on Ad Exchanger in October 2021.

The post How To Properly Winterize Your 2023 Ad Campaign appeared first on GroundTruth.

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Connected TV is GroundTruth’s fastest-growing ad offering and has been a game-changer for clients across the country. CTV combines high-quality content with digital targeting to drive awareness, engagement, and results across almost every industry.

In this webinar, GroundTruth assessed the current state of the CTV market and looked ahead to trends and conditions that will impact marketing decisions for the remainder of 2022, and what that could mean for 2023 planning.

We also heard directly from experts on how they align budgets to campaign goals, what to look for in terms of performance metrics, how they measure success, and why CTV needs to be part of every digital campaign in today’s consumer landscape.

The post CTV Close Up: How Innovations in Connected TV and OTT are Changing the Game appeared first on GroundTruth.

In the ad tech space, it seems like every other article talks about the power of CTV as an advertising vehicle. Big screen sight, sound and motion, huge captive audiences, laser focused targeting, zero impression waste, non-skippable ads, in-spot engagement, and transparent, real time campaign reporting. If you’re a big screen buyer, what’s not to love about CTV, right?

CTV and CPM

The most common challenge for CTV buyers is in making sense of the value delivery potential. CPM (cost per thousand) models for CTV are varied. Some providers offer basic CPM packages, but then slap upcharge fees for targeting features like audience or geography. Entry level CPMs are certainly attractive, they are really just sign spinners designed to get you in the door. The problem is that once you’re inside, those deals can get very expensive, very quickly, as soon as you start asking for targeting. It’s important to know how value can be measured head to head when choosing your partner.

The GroundTruth Advantage – CTV Single-Rate Solution

At GroundTruth, we offer a single rate solution for either CTV or OTT, with no upcharges for targeting or other enhanced features. And since impressions across all CTV providers are purchased from the same inventory pools, working with a DSP like GroundTruth means we can share better rates for premium AVOD inventory. Most CTV resellers have to mark up their inventory because they still need to pay an anonymous 3rd party DSP to serve your campaign. Since everything happens programmatically within the GroundTruth Ads Manager platform, from CTV inventory acquisition to ad serving, we can pass the savings back to our CTV clients. We like doing that, it makes for happier, more successful clients.

The GroundTruth CTV Calculator

To measure the potential value of your CTV buy, start with the total number of impressions your budget will yield. For every single extra impression you can get for your budget, you automatically increase your reach. With that added reach, your increased impression footprint mathematically improves the potential for more store traffic, more website traffic, more in-spot QR code scans, more branded time on screen, and more DTC phone calls. To put it simply, the more impressions you get, the greater your opportunity for success. Doesn’t everyone want more?

The GroundTruth CTV Calculator can help you understand whether or not you are fully maximizing your ad budget. Just plug in your total budget and what your current vendor’s CPM is, and you’ll immediately see how many impressions you’re potentially missing out on.

Everyone wants to squeeze as much performance out of their precious ad dollars as possible, and the more impressions you can collect, the greater your odds of success.

Try the GroundTruth CTV Value Calculator for yourself, and then reach out to sales@groundtruth.com or fill out the contact form below to schedule a planning call.

The post GroundTruth’s Connected TV Calculator: Maximize Your Ad Budget appeared first on GroundTruth.

Here are three important areas you should be evaluating before your creative becomes out of date.

3 Tips for Spring Advertising

Here are three important tips to update your seasonal marketing strategy for spring:

INSIGHT: According to GroundTruth’s visitation data, foot traffic to entertainment venues start to increase during the spring and peaks in the heat of the summer. In fact, foot traffic to all entertainment categories (Fig. 1) increased by an average of 30% in July of 2021, with Amusement Parks seeing the largest increase (55% above average). Contextual advertising combined with geotargeting is a high percentage media package to reach Spring shoppers.

Figure 1: Foot traffic data retrieved from GroundTruth’s Lean Entertainment Industry Insights Brief (coming soon!).

Along the same lines, media consumption changes during spring and summer. We spend more time planning fun events we’re excited to go to and buying tickets for the family to enjoy a day at the theme park. We need to make sure media plans incorporate a mix of mobile, tablet, laptop, and CTV to capture those looking for entertainment venues. Our media habits have evolved to utilize the power of accessing digital content on any screen, in any location, so your streaming media plan should incorporate a multi-screen strategy to ensure maximum reach.

Want to learn about how to approach a winter advertising strategy? Check out How to Winterize Your Advertising Strategy.

If GroundTruth can help with creative tune ups or media planning for the Spring and Summer seasons, let us know.

The post Spring Advertising: 3 Tips to Update Your Ad Strategy appeared first on GroundTruth.

How CTV Advertising Will Continue to Disrupt the Game

Earlier this year, during GroundTuth’s 2022 Emerging Tech & Consumer Trends Webinar, Mike Brooks, WeatherBug SVP of Revenue got together with Tom Donoghue, GroundTruth VP of CTV to talk about advertising and its connection to CTV. In this conversation, they talk about the current state of the advertising market and how it relates to the emergence of convergent TV and QR code advertising.

Here’s an overview of some of their key moments in a (virtual) room together.

Question: How can marketers think about the inflection point between linear TV and CTV?

Mike Brooks: “I’ve been fascinated by this evolution of media and there’s so much in the digital space. TV is such a big beast. Everything I hear, everything I read today, talks about this inflection point between CTV and linear. Walk me through where we are from an ecosystem perspective and how I as a marketer can think about those two things.”

Tom Donoghue: “For media context, the first radio ad was run by AT&T over a hundred years ago. Prior to radio, pretty much all advertising was in print. Everything was all paper. Radio opened up the opportunity for others to start playing in the ad space, leading to where we are today.”

“Today, people are starting to make decisions based on the economics of when and where they will be able to watch their program, which is leading us to this ‘cord cutter’ or ‘cord never’ revolution.”

“It’s not even generational. I’m a Boomer and my son is Gen Z. Neither one of us wants to pay for cable when we can get our programming via ad supported OTT or through a subscription plan. The whole media landscape has evolved to create this fragmented moment for advertisers struggling to reach the right people. Popular media platforms today have created millions of channels and opportunities, but everyone is scattered over the landscape. So how do you find your audience? That’s where marketers are struggling, with how to place their budgets and get the best return on ad spend.”

Question: What has the evolution of media been and what can CTV get us?

Mike Brooks: “I think about the change that we have going from linear to connected TV. As we think about linear and connected TV, and how businesses are getting used to new ways of buying, there are technical differentiators in this world where you can do things that you couldn’t do in TV. That’s an enormous driver for businesses as well as a reason for so many people moving over [to connected TV]. Talk to me about that and what CTV gets us.”

Tom Donoghue: “I think that what marketers are coming to grips with is that the ability to measure the value of a spot on linear TV has never really been good in the first place. It’s always just been GRP – reach x frequency-based. It allowed us to be forgiving in linear efficacy and measurement. But that’s where CTV and the big screen starts to weave its way into that narrative: ‘how do you do big screen advertising in a convergent way?”

“Convergent means getting the best of linear TV’s brand shotgun approach and CTV’s targeted approach — where you’re going to get your message out there for what is a reasonably low CPM.”

“With linear TV you get back some reporting that tells you, ‘we think your household reach was x.’ ‘Think’ versus ‘know’ is a dangerous thing for marketers. They need to know. I think that’s where CTV steps in and says, ‘you want to target and measure a specific audience.”

“So let’s say you’re looking for golfers in Northern Jersey who are high-net worth individuals. When you can create an audience and only target them, when you can hit the mark and you can measure it…oh my gosh, you’ve got a win. If you’re buying linear, you need to start thinking about moving some of that budget (not all of it), to connected TV to find that extended reach of “cord cutters” and “cord nevers” who are never going to see your linear spot. I genuinely believe that the meshing of those two mediums is the best solution for big screen marketers today.”

Question: How are you looking at the distribution of your ad dollars to achieve the success you need?

Mike Brooks: “[At WeatherBug], we talk a lot about the line between branding and performance and we need to take a brand medium like that but apply targeting in a cost-effective way. That’s what we’re going for, especially as a brand who is investing a lot in new users, but also wanting to create a brand halo.”

Tom Donoghue: “How do you, as a person in charge of WeatherBug, acquire a broader audience for your weather platform? How are you looking at the distribution of your ad dollars to achieve the success you need?”

Mike Brooks: “I can give you the story of how the immediate planning has evolved over the past few years. Four years ago, our entire media plan was DR. We started to question, ‘what is the value/force multiplier that investing in the brand could drive?’ If you look at us trying to answer that question, and then you look at the weight in our budget, CTV is now taking up 40% of our budget. As we’re thinking about how the brand has evolved and how we’re connecting with consumers, it’s about telling that story and it’s been surprising to me, coming from a heavy DR background, what the halo effect is.

“What happens with branding and with TV and CTV is the conversion rate on your digital increases, so thinking about it in that more balanced way has challenged us to think about developing a more effective media plan and we have gotten better and better over time by including this as part of the story.”

Question: How do QR codes come into play?

Tom Donoghue: “We’ve been running QR codes for our clients on CTV since July of 2021. Our creative team started putting QR codes in spots and lo and behold, people were scanning them. We knew we were on to a good thing!”

“This year, we are lucky because we have upgraded our capabilities and we are now partnered with Flowcode, which is a brilliant technical organization led by some really smart people, and their capabilities are going to further expand our ability to help our clients. The fact is the consumer journey has to invite an intimate step between the spot and the engagement.”

“[An example of Flowcode in action is] I’m at home watching Game of Thrones on CTV. A spot comes on for Mike Brooks Cadillac. There’s a beautiful car and I go, ‘man that’s the car I want,’ and there’s a QR code on the screen, so I’m scanning it, and then it flings me out to Mike Brooks Cadillac and now you’ve got me! We talked about this before and we talked about the cookie-less world and the dissociation of that for marketers. I’ll say this right now:

“If you’re a marketer, you better get your strategy together now because first party data is gonna be the only thing that’s going to save you.”

“The good thing about CTV is, we don’t rely on cookies, so you know we’re fine. We’re relatively agnostic and insulated from that. But the consumer journey has to have some connection point between the CTV spot or television spot for that matter where we can embed the QR code in your TV spot. The beautiful thing is if I do that and I take somebody to Mike Brooks Cadillac, and you say to me, ‘would you be interested in coming in for a test drive?’ and I go, ‘yeah for sure, and then your chat bot or your microsite landing page asks me for my email address, two things have happened:

1: You’ve created a brand-intimate connection with me.
2. You’ve acquired some first party data that you can use.”

Mike Brooks: “That’s where my head was going. Populating the CRM and giving folks an opportunity to self-identify into your business that didn’t have that opportunity before.”

Tom Donoghue: “Customers willingly [reach out to you] because you have targeted them with a spot that is relevant to their interests. If I know that these people are golfers and high-net worth individuals, and they are in the market for a car and I can serve them a Cadillac ad, I’m hitting the bullseye right where I need to hit it. If I get one step further and I say, ‘hey let’s really communicate,’ and I give you the option to do that with a QR code, Bang! Done. First party data and I’ve got an intimate brand relationship.”

“You mentioned search before, Mike, I don’t know what the percentage is… it’s like 90% of people watching TV have their phone on them, and a percentage of them will actually view the ad and then they’ll just go out to Google and they’ll type in, ‘Mike Brooks Cadillac.’ With Search, maybe you’ve been outbid by five of your competitors, or you are below the fold on the SRP for Google, and you have essentially lost your competitive advantage from the TV commercial.”

“With the QR code, you avoid all of that. It’s literally an Uber ride: it’s point to point. It’s a QR code in-spot that leads to your site, and that is exactly what marketers need. They don’t want to thread the needle through a Google search result page that puts them in a competitive environment. I think it just kind of makes sense.”

Question: How can paid search impact how you allocate investments in the big picture?

Mike Brooks: “We think about how paid search integrates with marketing strategies. How can that impact how you allocate investments in the big picture?”

Tom Donoghue: The cost of acquisition is extraordinarily high on paid search. Just legal and financial services is something like $86. Why? To me, in a sophisticated marketing universe where you can isolate the audience you want, pay only for that spot and then achieve the objective that you want, why does money keep flowing towards Google? There are more sophisticated ways to acquire customers than a text based result on a busy page.”

“I mean, 2009 called and they want their marketing budgets back.”

Question: What about the Coinbase QR code?

Mike Brooks: “The other thing to talk about is the Coinbase QR code. They drove 20 million hits in like a minute.”

Tom Donoghue: “You need a hundred million eyeballs in order to get that kind of pull. But twenty percent pull on a 100 million eyeballs is insane. Their ROI was beautiful. They only really wanted people who were committed, so they knew that they were going to get an inordinate amount of draft. But their goal was to get that brand engagement moment on the biggest stage where their dollars were going to generate the right return. I thought it was pretty smart and I think that they’ve opened the door to other brands to be able to use those embedded QR codes in their spots.”

“There is $68 billion being spent on television and there is $19 billion being spent on CTV. That is really encouraging because that shows the playing field is not crowded right now, so if you want to get into CTV, you really have an open playing field to work with. You’re not going to be back to back on a sitcom where there’s like five car dealers or five local advertisers, on CTV it’s just your spot, and then the program comes back. That’s very powerful. I think the budgets will get there and I also know that cord cutters will continue to grow, volume will continue to expand, and that will open up even more avenues of opportunity for marketers.”

The post How CTV Advertising Will Continue to Disrupt the Game appeared first on GroundTruth.

What do auto dealers and restaurants have in common? GroundTruth has ready-built solutions created to accurately serve omnichannel media to key audiences, with the end goal of increasing visitation to both categories of business.

From driver audiences to drive-thru locations, you will learn effective tactical strategies to boost awareness, increase consideration, and ultimately steer visits to your business.

In this webinar, we focused on:

• Key audience segments, ranging from behavioral to custom
• Innovative targeting tactics that can help you reach and exceed your KPIs
• Understanding how foot traffic patterns can unlock insights to fuel your overall marketing strategies

The post Best Practices: Unlocking Marketing Strategies for Auto and Restaurant Industries appeared first on GroundTruth.

College basketball fans across the country are gearing up for another epic season of March Madness. If you are a superfan, you will likely be watching every game, and maybe even rewatching a few of the games over streaming services. Along the way, you’ll check your brackets more than you would care to admit and watch countless commercials by some of the biggest brands in the country. You will be part of a captive audience that every advertiser wants to reach. So, it’s no surprise that marketers will spend lots of money to be part of one of the biggest TV moments of the year.

According to CBS, the price range for a 30-second commercial is from “a couple of hundred thousand dollars” for early-round games to “well over two million dollars for the championship game.” Very few brands can afford to run TV ads consistently throughout the tournament with that kind of cost.

The good news? Even if you aren’t one of those brands spending millions on linear TV March Madness ads, you can still score big. Our advice – find the open spot on the floor and let ‘er fly! Meaning, pick your ad spot time, audience, ad format, and activate wisely.

Convergent TV: Merging Linear TV With CTV

Advertising during March Madness and other big seasonal TV moments throughout the year has traditionally been out of reach for smaller to mid-size brands. But the strong emergence of Convergent TV which merges linear TV with CTV has changed all that.

What is Convergent TV?

Convergent TV, one of the hottest topics in advertising right now, is the intersection of linear TV and Connected TV (CTV). Convergent TV, and the analytics it demands, merge the power of linear TV with the zero-waste targeting of CTV, creating cost-efficient TV ad opportunities early adopters are already profiting from. The technology now exists to apply sophisticated digital measurement to linear TV investments, and advertisers are racing to understand how this game-changing strategy can improve measurable outcomes for big screen advertising moments such as March Madness.

Convergent TV: The Perfect Solution for Small Advertising Budgets

If your team is small, and your budget is even smaller, convergent TV could be the answer. Cost-efficiency and strategy are key here:

• What’s your budget, message, and who are you targeting: national, regional, local, or all three?
• Are you going to serve ads at the beginning of the tournament (more ad availability, less cost), or;
• Wait until the Final Four (more expensive, more visibility, less availability)?

GroundTruth’s Solutions for Your Convergent TV Advertising Strategy

At GroundTruth, we’re developing powerful convergent TV solutions that brands can apply today. We believe this is an opportunity for advertisers to think about their big screen investments in a more thoughtful, strategic way. When an advertiser is investing in linear TV, and/or CTV, they need to know what’s producing measurable results, and why. Convergent TV isn’t about measuring impressions, it’s about using data in addressable ways to extend the targeted reach and get better outcomes. Companies like GroundTruth are giving advertisers the data analytics they need to optimize investments that meet cross-screen expectations, across local, regional, and national campaigns.

GroundTruth’s Convergent TV Solution: Linear Visitation Analysis

GroundTruth’s convergent TV model applies the best of our MRC-accredited Ad Technology with the ability to analyze and take action on linear campaign data. We call this solution Linear Visitation Analysis. Just like CTV, we can apply data analysis that shows how a linear campaign can be measured by household exposure, and then take it up a level to show resultant foot traffic attribution.

Running a linear campaign will always deliver broad reach and frequency, but now those attributes can be tied to tangible, location-based traffic results. Linear Visitation Analysis is helping brands optimize and refine their campaigns in real-time, making their big-screen investments more efficient, and their brand messaging more targeted and impactful.

Convergent TV has arrived, and smart brands will recognize the opportunity cross-screen measurability, on linear and CTV, represents to the future of strategic big screen advertising… even beyond March Madness.

To see if GroundTruth can improve your brand’s advertising efficiency, give us a call.

The post March Madness: An Opportunity to Leverage Convergent TV appeared first on GroundTruth.

On-Target Audience Delivery with CTV

When B2B advertisers think about their campaign goals, their first step should be to think “audience first.” Unlike linear TV, where the ad buy is content-oriented, audience targeting on Connected TV (CTV) ensures delivery to the right audience, with less waste. Location targeting and behavioral affinity can further refine campaign parameters, leading to a hyper-optimized “on target” delivery via CTV.

Did you know 25-34 year olds take up the largest CTV user share? Learn more about CTV for 2021 and 2022. Download GroundTruth’s CTV Lean now.

Is CTV beneficial for B2B Advertising in 2022?

Yes, Connected TV is a very beneficial advertising strategy for any B2B business for 2022. CTV can add yet another power play to a B2B ad – attribution. If a campaign goal is lead generation, it’s vital to be able to measure post impression activity in order to assess performance. CTV can track video completion rates, foot traffic, and even on-screen engagement (via embedded QR codes). QR codes are a seamless way to engage a prospect in real-time, and they can be actionable through the entire, non-skippable CTV commercial.

B2B marketers have a huge opportunity in front of them to explore the benefits of CTV in 2022. The targeting, reach, and measurability of CTV can boost local or national B2B marketing efforts, driving better, measurable ROI than traditional media.

To see if Connected TV advertising is right for your B2B business goals, visit GroundTruth’s CTV platform to learn more.

The post Is CTV Beneficial for B2B Advertising in 2022? appeared first on GroundTruth.

The first few seconds of retooled TV creative might be better viewed as a “front door.” This door leads to a deeper, more informative consumer experience. By giving the viewer a reason to come through the door, and having a very specific “ask”, you invite them to take the next step in building a personal connection with the brand. That moment of engagement is the beginning of brand intimacy.

One of the easiest, and yet least applied, ways to achieve this “front door” moment is through the use of the good, old quick response code. Quick response, a.k.a. QR codes were introduced in 1994 to track inventory through a multi-symbol image. Almost 28 years later, the QR code has been revitalized and is starting to have its most important moment in the marketing spotlight. Pre-pandemic, one would be hard-pressed to find someone engaging with QR codes. However, over the past couple of years, smart marketers have been upgrading their creative, and aligning the storytelling value of a 30-second spot, with a digital call-to-action, camped out on a consumer’s TV screen.

In fact, we (GroundTruth) partnered with a major brand just last month that wanted to run their 30-second spot on CTV, targeting pet owners. To tie the ad and the brand’s wealth of pet-related online content, we added a QR code to the ad which read “Learn how to keep your pet safe”. It was positioned on the top border of a custom QR code that was embedded into the video. Suddenly, what was originally an awareness commercial about healthy pet food, was now an invitation to learn more about how to keep pets safe, happy, and healthy. All of this may seem simple, but yet very few “early” adopters have taken advantage of this unique engagement technique. They are the ones who are profiting from building “on the spot” customer relationships and inviting them to have a deeper brand experience.

Can QR Codes Save Linear Advertising?

The humble QR code has the potential to help revive static advertising channels such as linear TV. A 30-second spot can be the entry point to an entirely new model for commerce, simply by moving a viewer from passive to active through a “hold your camera up” moment. Adding QR codes to DRTV spots can also revolutionize data capture and accelerate engagement. Lastly, the QR code can revitalize the time honored offer of a “product sample” offer, while helping brands build powerful first party data.

While linear TV continues to lose viewers, CTV continues to rapidly expand in usage. The advantage of CTV is in the audience targeting, ensuring zero waste in the impression, and a chance to take someone on a deeper brand journey about something they care about. In combination, both linear and CTV can expand brand reach and engagement, and leverage QR codes for an invitation to a deeper experience. Understanding how to move consumers from awareness to engagement has been a vital marketing principle for a long time. With personalized digital advertising moments and something as “old school” as the QR code, we believe that we are on the doorstep. All we need to do is invite viewers, and savvy marketers, to “step-through” the front door.

The post The 2022 Consumer Brand Journey Starts by Opening the Front Door appeared first on GroundTruth.

In fact, the winter storm that ripped across much of the United States in early February, which forced Wal-mart to close as many as 500 stores across the South and Midwest (New York Times) is a stern reminder for all marketers to have a winter-proof advertising strategy in place this holiday season. Having the flexibility to pause or even activate in certain weather conditions will be vital to success as brands also face shifting consumer behaviors amid the COVID-19 Delta variant.

Here are three things to “winterize” when building your advertising strategy for the fall and winter seasons:

INSIGHT: If you want to reach your audience during fall and winter, you’ll have to look for them indoors, where they are likely to be consuming ‘on-demand’ content on connected TVs, tablets, desktops, and mobile devices. Moving some of your linear TV budget towards geo-contextual CTV advertising means better targeting, less wasted impressions, and more measurable ROI.

INSIGHT: Wasting impressions should be a thing of the past by now, yet marketers continue to run campaigns in weather conditions that simply cannot produce the result they need. Marketers should be focusing their impressions on the weather conditions that meet their business goals. This includes working with a digital marketing partner that has weather triggering capability embedded in its ad serving platform.

INSIGHT: For marketers who want to reach this growing audience it will be important to stay engaged with them throughout the winter by using personalized advertising based on their behavior and visitation patterns within their home location.

Winterize your advertising now, and put your business in a position to succeed, no matter what the weather looks like outside!

The post Don’t Wait to Winterize Your Advertising Strategy appeared first on GroundTruth.