Navigating the Digital Marketing Landscape

Episode Transcript

Announcer  0:03 
This is CPG Insiders, the podcast that helps consumer packaged goods companies survive and thrive in business. Now, your hosts, Mark Young and Robb Taylor.

Mark Young  0:20 
Welcome everyone to this edition of CPG Insiders. I'm your host, Mark Young, with my co-host, Robb Taylor. And as we mentioned last in the last episode, we were talking about traditional media for consumer packaged goods. And today we're going to talk about all things digital with the Jekyll and Hyde digital media director Cameron Solu. Cameron Welcome to the show.

Cameron Solu  0:44 
Thank you for having me. 

Mark Young  0:45 
So here's we want to start off. People hear "we need a digital plan." Digital's not one thing. 

Cameron Solu  0:52 
No it is not

Mark Young  0:53 
Digital is a lot of stuff. So could you kind of show tell us the landscape of what falls into that bucket. 

Cameron Solu  1:01 
Sure. Well, first and foremost I mean, most people know search engine marketing that is your paid search ads that's when someone is searching for something showing intent that they're interested in a product or service and you can pay Google, pay Bing, pay Yahoo whoever you want a little bit of money and show up first for certain terms that's kind of the bedrock of the majority of digital campaigns but it is again like you said so much more than that 

Robb Taylor  1:25 
so so intent though just for for the audience that's somebody on a computer raising their hand and saying I'm looking for ...

Mark Young  1:33 
I have a hemorrhoid and I need a hemorrhoid product.

Cameron Solu  1:35 
exactly exactly that's one of the best 

Mark Young  1:38 
In  my case I am a hemorrhoid and someone needs a hemorrhoid product.

Robb Taylor  1:41 
I was going to say that

Mark Young  1:42 
I just thought I'd beat you to it. 

Robb Taylor  1:43 
appreciate it.

Cameron Solu  1:45 
That is the one of the best use cases for sem for paid search because you it's one of the only forms of digital marketing that the consumer actually tells you they're interested in something instead of just showing up in front.

Mark Young  1:58 
Yeah, somebody is raising their hand and say, Hey, I'm over here. And I've got this problem. 

Cameron Solu  2:03 
Yep.

Mark Young  2:03 
Do you have a solution? 

Cameron Solu  2:04 
Yep. And the majority of searches out there don't really show any ads. So if you are new to a space, or you don't have many competitors, there's a really good opportunity there for you to get some really good, cheap hand raising audience eyeballs on your brand. 

Mark Young  2:20 
Okay, now, what's next? 

Cameron Solu  2:22 
Next would be the next most common form of digital marketing is your display ad. And that's just an image shows up online, there are more many more than just one version of that the most common is running probably a static banner on Google Display Network. That's where you're reading, you know, an article on a website, and there's an image on the side for product or in in the in the article itself, there's a break that shows an image but digital display campaigns can be run on really any of the big ad networks, including social media. 

Mark Young  2:55 
Now, keep in mind just we're making an assumption here. So this is assuming they have a good website. We have to have a good website or none of this is going to work. 

Cameron Solu  3:04 
Exactly. 

Mark Young  3:04 
So when we look at banner ads, the static banner ad there's there's a phenomenon which is known as banner blindness. 

Cameron Solu  3:12 
Exactly.

Mark Young  3:13 
 Maybe you can expand on it a little bit. 

Cameron Solu  3:14 
Sure. Yeah. Banner blindness is best way to describe it is going on a long road trip, you get to where you're going. If you were to sit back and think about how many billboards you saw which billboard you saw, I would be surprised if you could name more than one simply because, you know, they're there they are constant five within every mile of driving down the interstate, and you just don't pay too much attention to them. That's kind of what digital display marketing has become, you know, done in the traditional way of just blasting banners out there having a very high frequency meaning that each user just sees your banner over and over and over. And if you do that too too often to a specific user, they're just going to start going b lind to it. Quote unquote which means they're not going to be valuable impressions anymore they're going to scroll by it their eyes and their brain are going to recognize it and move on

Mark Young  4:08 
Using using your analogy comparison there with the with the billboards or something is really good one

if I if I did drive from Detroit to Florida

I'm going to remember the billboard that I the first thing first billboard I'm going to remember is the one I responded to. So if I saw the billboard for the Cracker Barrel and I pulled into the Cracker Barrel I might remember when I get to the end of the trip and you asked me well billboards I might remember the Cracker Barrel because I responded

Cameron Solu  4:37 
you did something about it

Mark Young  4:39 
the second type of billboard I would probably notice would be something that was disruptive that was so outrageous that it made me pay attention 

Cameron Solu  4:48 
it broke the mold it broke your concentration because it was something you were not expecting 

Mark Young  4:53 
and the third one and I might remember probably be would be the one that was so obnoxiously  repetitive that I saw 100 of them between Detroit in Florida 

Cameron Solu  5:03 
yeah but you may not necessarily remember it in the best light

Robb Taylor  5:05 
yeah and that those are the ones that you avert your eyes or scroll past or look just look away from

Mark Young  5:10 
well eventually become blind to them

Robb Taylor  5:13 
I think you kind of get pissed off by them frankly I mean yeah

Cameron Solu  5:16 
Yep

Mark Young  5:17 
Now as we're sticking with these banner ads for a minute and I know we're not big fans of just static banner campaigns

Talk to me a little bit about retargeting because that's an area where banner ads work as I just said I would remember the Cracker Barrel one because I'm interested in going to the Cracker Barrel or I did go 

Cameron Solu  5:37 
yeah so retargeting banner campaigns are the exact same except for their settings except for how they're actually targeted. Instead of targeting a broad audience that you know nothing about as as an a shotgun general banner ad campaign. retargeting uses audience data from different sources and these people are usually people who've already raised their hand like we talked about with. 

Mark Young  6:00 
So they've been to my website

Cameron Solu  6:02 
They've been to my website they've searched me they viewed my video campaign, they've interacted with my brand in some way, you can set the settings, you know how however granular you want, but these are people who have interacted with your brand and have shown general interest already. So now you're going to be serving them with a display ad in the situation. And they will immediately recognize it because they've risen their hand. They already know your product, and they have shown intent. 

Mark Young  6:27 
So folks, if you if you recall, think about you've been to eBay, you went to auto trader, you went to, you know, William Sonoma, and all of a sudden you started getting banner ads for those very same brands immediately for several days 

Robb Taylor  6:44 
or more specifically, the hunter boots I was looking at the very model I was looking at

Cameron Solu  6:49 
right in the size and color 

Mark Young  6:50 
Yep,

That's retargeting. So the reason is so let's use Robb's hunter boots. So you went looked at the hunter boots they started throwing banner ads at you with the exact same boot that you were interested in. Because they now know this is Robb Taylor. He's interested in these boots. Let's keep throwing an ad at him and finish off the sale. We know we know he's interested. We know he wants them. Let's make it easy for him. Let's put that picture let's put that clickable banner right there. Probably even tell them you know you can click here and buy it. Maybe they threw something at you that said free shipping in the next 24 hours. 

Robb Taylor  7:28 
Some incentive

Mark Young  7:29 
Yes some incentives but those banner ads those are really the that's an efficient use of banner ads. Those retargeting ads

Cameron Solu  7:36 
Especially because in those retargeting. banners or in those retargeting campaigns you have settings in there that will exclude people who actually did make a purchase so let's say Robb went first time to the site saw the boots bought them he won't be placed in that pool because you already converted your sale he's not going to be hit with those same boots again, which means you're not wasting money on someone who may have already converted.

Mark Young  7:57 
Alright so let's let's move now to social media but not social media as a social media campaign cause we'll cover that as an organic issue, but using social media platforms as a paid advertising media, so we're talking Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. 

Cameron Solu  8:14 
Yeah, those those platforms are very similar to what we've already been talking about. They're presenting your advertisements to a consumer that's in a different mindset, which can be very valuable. So on as I'm sure most of our listeners here have been on Facebook and on Twitter, been on Pinterest, wherever you may be, and you're scrolling through your feed of your personal friends sharing pictures, but right in the middle of it, there's a product or there's a service there's an advertisement that can come in the form of an image or video usually. Facebook is rolling out GIFs they're rolling out different formats, but the main two pillars are images and videos. Now, the image campaign the display campaign, very similar to Google, you know, you can target interest behaviors you can target demographics.

But on top of that, you can also target people who have shown interest in certain things while on the social media platform.

Mark Young  9:07 
So talk to us a little bit about the targeting. So when I'm using digital, this is one of the great strengths of digital is when we buy a TV network, we're getting a particular type of audience based on the content. But there's still some of everything there. 

Cameron Solu  9:23 
You're buying everything. 

Mark Young  9:24 
So even though fox news is real strong with, you know, males over 65, there's an 18 year old watching it too when we're buying digital, because there's so much data available, we can really get targeted on this stuff. So give us some examples of how we can target people.

Cameron Solu  9:41 
Yeah

Mark Young  9:42 
How specific we can get or for the sake of this, how frightening can we get with how we can target

Robb Taylor  9:48 
Can I ask another question that I think will lead into this because it's something that will come up from time to time where we will talk to a client they'll say, Well, I used Facebook three years ago or four years ago, and it didn't work for us. How has that changed? Which I think gets to this next question. I mean, we will field those where it's we did it years ago. And it just, it was a waste of money. Why should I do it now? 

Mark Young  10:08 
Were they using the my face or the face or the space book?

Robb Taylor  10:11 
my space space space book.

That is something that comes up. So how do you tell people now things are different?

Cameron Solu  10:18 
Sure. So things are different in good ways and bad ways. So as everyone again, listening probably knows, Facebook is dealing with a lot of drama reason regarding their advertising policies and the amount of information that advertisers have access to

three, four years ago, in your example Robb advertisers had less access to what they do now, it was they were still building out their ad platforms, still building out their objectives, still kind of building what they wanted to do. So it's very general, you know, you could target by demographics, you could target by possible interest, things that they've liked on Facebook, you can target by that but now and especially, I would say probably beginning of 2018 was probably the golden age of Facebook targeting in terms of the advertiser mindset where you had extremely granular targeting options such as income, such as 

Mark Young  11:07 
And only a couple years ago, by the way, we didn't have the the in feed ads we were still dealing with the right right the right hand column column stuff

Cameron Solu  11:16 
yep and there was a big a big transformation at Facebook once mobile took over and that was the big reason that the feed ad started coming and the the interstitial ads where you're watching a video on Facebook, you go to the next one. But in between that there's a video ad that has a lot to do with the massive shift to mobile traffic on Facebook because no one sees the desktop right hand column anymore. 

So recently, beginning of 2018, you had access to income you had access to race you that access to so many different things that can be extremely valuable to an advertiser. But at the same time, those things are things that can get Facebook into trouble. Their users obviously accept terms and conditions but no one ever reads it. Facebook got into a lot of trouble here at the beginning of the year and now we've kind of settled on kind of a happy medium between the beginning of Facebook and where we were at a year ago. Right now you can target based on general interest, you can still target via demographics you can target via some general behavioral traits but a lot of those things have been removed in this past year 

Mark Young  12:18 
But I could do things like I'm I'm a fan of auto racing or I like woodworking or I like I'm a foodie or things of that nature. 

Cameron Solu  12:27 
Facebook can put you into different buckets as a user based on things that you like like actually physically like a page about woodworking or like a page about auto racing. But they can also and a lot of users don't know this they can understand what you post about what you talk about and the pages you actually interact with.

Robb Taylor  12:42 
Sometimes I like to post about how I like to eat food made of wood while driving my race car which is a really good

Mark Young  12:47 
You must get some interesting ads

Robb Taylor  12:50 
it's fun.

Cameron Solu  12:50 
In an unrelated note. I'm very thankful for the unfollow button.

Mark Young  12:53 
But it is true. They're there. They're tracking our every move

Cameron Solu  13:00 
and not only are they tracking you on Facebook, you're tracking you off Facebook as well,

Mark Young  13:04 
I'd love to comment real quick. I will say this and that is heard an interview with a guy who was a CIA Director for Ronald Reagan.

And he said in 1980, we never dreamt that Americans would voluntarily give us all the information that we would ever need to spy on them.

Cameron Solu  13:24 
But voluntarily is in air quotes because again, terms of conditions, no one reads them. So that's the big backlash now, and that's why Facebook is kind of simmered a little bit. But, Robb, to get back to your question, why would I do it now if I tried it a few years ago? 

Well, first and foremost, I would say that most likely you were doing it wrong three, four years ago, not only or not not simply because you know, if you were running or someone else's running it, they were just doing a poor job it was you didn't have the options available to yet to be extremely efficient

Now, now even though there is a little more limited of a targeting set, there is a little more limited options set for you to use when you're targeting your ads, it's much more powerful than it was three, four years ago. And with the right type of management and the right type of optimization, you can see some really good not only interaction on Facebook, but you can also see very good traffic being driven to your website as well. 

Mark Young  14:18 
Now, we've also seen in the past, probably, I'm going to say 18 months, 

Cameron Solu  14:22 
sure

Mark Young  14:24 
...that the consumer is taking advertising messages on the digital platform as with a little more credibility than they used to. 

Cameron Solu  14:31 
Yeah

Mark Young  14:32 
So I now am becoming accustomed to real brands advertising on the web where as little as two, three years ago, it was only shady kind of crackpot companies that were running a lot of the ads.

Robb Taylor  14:46 
Yeah, they couldn't play anywhere else. So they had to go to digital. 

Cameron Solu  14:48 
But not only is it just because they're seeing more real brands. It's because of the capabilities of these platforms are becoming more and more diverse to the point where people aren't just seeing or seeing at all those shady businesses anymore now brands can turn to you because they know you're interested and that makes the advertising seem more sincere because you're seeing things that you may already be interested in

Mark Young  15:11 
And we can make this advertising much more personal now

Cameron Solu  15:14 
Exactly

Mark Young  15:15 
So back to the Facebook issue for a minute. So I'm running an ad on Facebook and you like my ad. Cause you can like my ad

Cameron Solu  15:23 
It's just like any other post

Mark Young  15:25 
so when you like my ad if you share my and then I get to your 200 friends get to see my ad free

Cameron Solu  15:33 
yep even if they weren't in the initial targeting pool that you set your ad campaign up if I were to share your ad is just like any other post my entire audience will now be eligible to see it 

Mark Young  15:43 
now if you like or share my ad and I show your ad and I paid to show the ad to one of your friends. Does that ad now say that you liked it?

Cameron Solu  15:55 
That's a big feature of advertising on social media as a whole is that people are viewing these ads under their own profile and if they take er if they make an interaction with the out if they like it, if they share it the ads will actually start to show I'm scrolling through my newsfeed and I say oh here's an ad for auto racing and it says Mark Young 

Mark Young  16:14 
Well Robb Taylor auto races while eating wood

Robb Taylor  16:16 
It's food made of wood. Very different

Mark Young  16:18 
Sorry, food made of wood

So you see it and say, right so let's say Robb Taylor likes wooden apple auto racing

Cameron Solu  16:28 
Exactly.

Mark Young  16:29 
And then you're going to say oh I know Robb, Robb's a cool guy he's a little weird with his monetary habits but

Robb Taylor  16:34 
unfriend

Mark Young  16:35 
but you're going to now view that ad differently

Cameron Solu  16:38 
there. It adds it adds a sense of social proof as well as legitimacy,

Mark Young  16:44 
Right. So it's almost like Rob Taylor just recommended this to you.

Cameron Solu  16:48 
Normally I don't take his recommendation.

Mark Young  16:49 
Well, it has a good point. But let's assume it was somebody that was credible. You would you then look and say, Okay, well, Robb likes this wooden apple so I'm going to look at the wooden apple

Cameron Solu  17:01 
sure

Mark Young  17:02 
and we don't pay extra for that.

Cameron Solu  17:04 
No, no, it's a it's a, what you would call a value add. 

Mark Young  17:08 
It's huge!

Cameron Solu  17:09 
It's the general it's the best general benefit of advertising at a social media platform is that there is an extra layer of social proof and relevancy that can come from that

Mark Young  17:21 
One of the old adages is in the advertising business that goes back over 100 years is always there's no form of advertising better than a referral and that is the closest thing to creating referrals because you don't actually know that Robb Taylor ever bought the wooden Apple know you just know that he liked it, and therefore it appears to you that he's endorsing it.

Now while we're on this targeting question.

Let's say we have we have a lot of clients who have not just national accounts but regional accounts so they're at Meijer they're at HEB they're down in Publix in Florida,

what can we do for them, where we can really get granular and really get targeted for that retailer without wasting dollars.

Cameron Solu  18:10 
That's another form of targeting that I didn't bring up earlier was on top of demographic on top of behavioral there's geo targeting. And you can do that in a couple different ways. You can target based on radii around certain areas, you can target based on city state country, you can get as granular as an address. And that kind of targeting is really key to a lot of our clients success when it comes to clients or products that are just starting out in one or two regional retailers. Like you said, if if my if my clients in Publix only and they're trying to increase distribution, I don't want to target anywhere but Florida. And with a lot of let's say traditional advertising campaigns, you're going to get a lot of spillover. There's not that kind of granular targeting. Like there is in digital. And that isn't just Facebook that isn't just display. That's almost all forms of digital advertising have very granular location targeting options.

Mark Young  19:02 
So we could say, so Publix has what, 1000 stores roughly. So you could say I'm going to take these thousand stores. And I'm going to draw a seven mile circle around them

Cameron Solu  19:11 
Around each one. Yep. 

Mark Young  19:12 
And that's where I'm going to do my advertising. So I'm not even doing the entire state of Florida. I'm only doing where I know I have a store

Cameron Solu  19:20 
Yep anyone local to the store that would be most likely to visit

Mark Young  19:24 
And now my ads can say go to Publix. Even though I'm maybe I'm at Walmart someplace else. But here is going to say go to Publix. Yeah. Now do you? Can you tell me people that have been the Publix recently where I know that they've that they do shop at Publix. Because not everybody shops at Publix.

Yeah, no, absolutely. There's a lot of fun new forms of location targeting out there specifically, a lot of it has to do with beacon technology, GPS technology, even Wi Fi technology. A lot of companies are taking advantage of the location data that most if not all consumers with a smartphone or sharing with everyone around the world. When you download a weather app to your phone, and you say allow location services, you don't know if that's what the weather app is doing with it. Obviously, they're they're serving you relevant weather data, but they could also be taking location data and using that for their advertising partners. So what a lot of different companies are able to do are create a profile that would say this is the type of user that we know goes to Publix. And obviously you can target based on that. But it goes deeper than that.

Cameron Solu  20:36 
Specifically, you can say this user goes to Publix, but we also know they go to the gym. We also know they go to Whole Foods, they don't go too fast food restaurants.

Mark Young  20:45 
So now we're saying Okay, so this mobile device visits a gym regularly visits a Publix regularly and doesn't visit fast food. So we're building a personality profile out of where this mobile device goes every day.

Cameron Solu  21:01 
It's it's funny and slightly creepy watch. Just knowing where your phone is, can say about you

Robb Taylor  21:08 
mildly horrifying. 

Cameron Solu  21:09 
Oh, mildly.

Not as horrifying as a wooden apple. But really, what it comes down to is understanding your consumer. I don't care of you do digital, traditional, what have you. But that location data is an extremely valuable resource for a lot of advertisers. Because it can tell you who the people are that buy your product, who the people are, that go to the store that your product is located and what their habits are,

Robb Taylor  21:34 
What is... I'm going to ask two questions, is there anywhere in digital now? And the answer may be No. Is there anywhere that you just wouldn't touch anymore. That's just a waste of money, especially for consumer products,

Cameron Solu  21:48 
specifically, consumer products. I don't think that there's actually some more that's toxic right now, you know, I'm going to cop out answer here and just say that it varies by by the product varies by the the demographic of the audience we're trying to hit. There are many products that I would go, you know, headfirst into Facebook, and go crazy with some display ads go crazy with boosting some post and some videos. But there are other products that, you know, maybe they're, it's an older demographic, maybe it's 

Mark Young  22:15 
So it's more not that there's a bad platform. But there's bad platforms and good platforms, depending on what your product is

Cameron Solu  22:22 
exactly, exactly, it's all about chasing your consumer. And if your consumer is a young 23 year old woman, you're going to want to go to Instagram

Robb Taylor  22:30 
go on.

Cameron Solu  22:31 
Yeah, I should have chosen my words much better than that. 

Robb Taylor  22:36 
And older 59 to 90 year old woman. Go on.

Cameron Solu  22:42 
Yeah, no, it all depends. It all depends where your user is. And there's there's a ton of very in depth studies out there that are updated yearly, based on each of the social platforms, usage rates, you know, what their average demo is, what their average time in the app or on the website is, there's a lot of good reasons courses out there that can help you determine what platform is best for your product. And here at Jekyll & Hyde, we have kind of internalize a lot of that. And we we just go with the flow of where our people are. Facebook could be a great idea of this year. And a horrible idea next year for a certain product

Robb Taylor  23:19 
Is that there's something new tech coming out or some new something on the horizon for digital that is exciting to our team. Is there is there any one thing that you guys have your eye on that not that we're doing it now, but that we're excited to have developed?

Cameron Solu  23:34 
I think it goes back to my location discussion. It's the further proliferation of that technology. 

Mark Young  23:41 
So being able to deliver an ad while I'm in Walgreens.

Cameron Solu  23:43 
exactly exactly that it's possible now. But it's it's limited in the sense that there are very select providers that do it. There are very select companies that actually harvest that data. And that data is not taken just from your phone. It's taken based on the app that you downloaded that allowed that data to be sent to the advertiser. So the more ingrained it becomes into the the phones themselves, the devices themselves the creepier gets, but the more widespread it will be, the more users we will have data on. And I think that is extremely exciting from an advertiser's point of view.

Mark Young  24:19 
Now, the majority of ads that we're delivering today, and again, this will change with the demographic but the majority of the as we're delivering today are going to some type of a mobile device, right? 

Cameron Solu  24:30 
Yes. Oh, yeah. 

Mark Young  24:31 
And as our demographic gets older, that you we will see more uses of iPads, laptops, desktop, 

Cameron Solu  24:36 
Yep. 

Mark Young  24:37 
But any idea how those splits look as we roam through those demographics.

Cameron Solu  24:41 
I mean, overall, with with the majority of our clients, it doesn't surprise me to see upwards of 80% mobile traffic. You know, when you take a look at a campaign as a whole, it can go as low as about 40% mobile. But I think

Mark Young  24:53 
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram is almost all mobile now, right? 

Cameron Solu  24:57 
No one, no one is using

Mark Young  24:58 
Search has gone heavy mobile

Cameron Solu  25:00 
Yep. There's really not much that isn't heavy mobile, unless you are doing some form of long form research. That's where some of our other tactics come in. With sponsored content and things of that nature. Those kind of campaigns do perform well on desktop. A lot of people still like doing their research about products or services in their office chair, looking at a computer screen.

Mark Young  25:21 
So I'm going to direct this question over to you, Robb. When you're creating TV commercials today, and you're doing the creative on them, we used to build TV commercials for, you know, 50 inch screens. But today, when you're making a TV commercial, you're making an assumption that it's going to run on anything from a 70 inch TV to a cell phone right

Robb Taylor  25:43 
we start with you know, the main purpose and which is why there there's such a large investment in high def and 4k that stuff doesn't really pertain to your phone screen and as much but it's it's more on our radar now. So we'll start with TV but when we shoot some things depending on what the client ask is, we're trying to frame things to exist potentially, in, in Instagram, in a square or in so most of the action you see as a net little, you know, one by one ratio box. It's not always but it's definitely something that is more on our radar. And, you know, all the videos we shoot don't always end up in, in a digital platform. But it's, it's something that we consider and and yeah,

Mark Young  26:27 
when you're shooting TV commercials do you sometimes shoot alternatives so certain frames you're going to use in a digital environment versus a bigger screen environment?

Robb Taylor  26:36 
I will shoot shorter versions of the commercial more typically 

Mark Young  26:40 
For the for the digital 

Robb Taylor  26:41 
Trying to get under the 30 or 20

Cameron Solu  26:42 
Yeah, there's plenty even even shorter than that. The The, the six second video format is really taking off even even traditionally. Now. You saw it last years Super Bowl, it was I think it was a beer company ran might have been Budweiser ran a six second spot on TV, its attention spans, they are shortening.

Mark Young  27:03 
So when we think of TV commercials today, we still need to think of TV commercials as a video asset. Because still video sells better than anything. It's it's got emotion, it's got music, it's got audio, it has action. It has all the things that that we can tell a story with. But we have to stop thinking of television as being the 50 inch TV on the wall. And we now need to start thinking of taking our mind off of the word TV and probably switching our mind to thinking more like devices. Am I going to watch it on a TV? Will I watch it on an iPad while I watch it on my phone. And we know now that about 80% of people who watch TV actually watch it with another screen next to them either an iPad or computer or phone usually probably a smartphone.

So how is video doing when you get it. So when Robb brings you a video asset, you know how to target so we could take that TV commercial. So let's say we wanted to make that TV commercial play for that Publix chain we were talking about what would you do with that video asset now that you had it in your hand. And you knew Publix was the place and you knew what you were looking for moms between the age of 25 and 49 that go to Publix.

Cameron Solu  28:19 
It's funny, it's actually pretty similar to how traditional in terms of the way that I think about the way I'm going to use the asset. So it's all about awareness. It's all about getting eyeballs on to your video. I mean, different videos have different objectives. But if this is just Hey, this product exists, take a look. You might be interested, that kind of asset can be run similarly on digital as it is traditionally where I carve out a demographic, I carve out some behavioral targeting, I carve out some interest that I believe related to this product and I start serving it now that can be on YouTube, that can be on Facebook, that can be programmatically where it's inserted directly into articles people are reading right in the middle you normally you'll see especially these days video that just starts autoplay when you're halfway through an article that programmatic use of videos is extremely hot right now. But the best part as we go back to the geographic topic, the best part about this is I can target strictly people who I believe have the ability to go to Publix. I don't have to buy an entire zone of Florida. Like, you know, traditional.

Mark Young  29:30 
You can find the 25 to 40 and 49 year old with children in household. 

Cameron Solu  29:35 
Yep, 

Mark Young  29:35 
who shop at Publix. 

Cameron Solu  29:36 
It's efficient, there's no wasted spend. If you set it up correctly. And you know TV you can't guarantee that everyone who sees your commercial is in your demo. I can with with digital video.

Mark Young  29:48 
Now some of those videos you're going to run this pre roll.

Cameron Solu  29:51 
Exactly.

Mark Young  29:52 
So I've gone I'm watching a video I see the commercial first some of these videos are going to be in a Facebook feed. Most of those Facebook videos are watched without the audio 

Cameron Solu  30:04 
Yep, that's key

Mark Young  30:04 
So about 80% So Rob when you're making one of these commercials and you know it's going to be on Facebook which means four out of five times No one's going to hear an audio How do you overcome the lack of audio issue

Robb Taylor  30:17 
A lot of times we'll recut spots with thicker graphics or you know intercut graphics in other times that's some of the more shocking you know, like a Recticare commercial, for instance, that begs you to click and see what's going on. So it does change the creative some

Cameron Solu  30:35 
and especially with with Facebook, and specifically, captions are huge, you need to make sure that those are, those are set up correctly. And not only, you know, make sure there's no typos. Make sure that you know that the cadence of the captions is matches up with the audio. But also the video is made with captions in mind, you don't want to have a ton of content at the bottom 10%, right. 

Mark Young  30:56 
So I have list of stores. And then my Closed captioning is on top of my store list. 

Cameron Solu  31:00 
The closed caption doesn't always show up, it only shows up in your audio is needed, but doesn't need to be taken into consideration.

Mark Young  31:06 
Now you also get the opportunity to frame some of these things. So you can put some words around a lot of these ads too right

Cameron Solu  31:13 
exactly. Facebook, just like any other post, you can have the the texts like the body of your post right above the video below the video. If you're linking out to a website, and not just you know, having people watch the video, you can have a link headline, you can have a link description, there's a lot of texts that can go around your video, the shorter the better. Normally, you don't want to take the focus away from the video. And you don't want to make people feel like they're reading an essay. But a little bit of framing around the video. If If your video doesn't start off immediately with the product or the purpose or the use, you can you can explain a little bit of that in your text. 

Robb Taylor  31:49 
You can retrofit and we've done this before older commercials that were never intended necessarily for this model or the restrictions or the knowledge we have now where you retrofit the language that you we couldn't get into the commercial or instead of re shooting all the creative we can still use it somewhat effectively with that method

Cameron Solu  32:10 
If there's a new new slogan, a new catchphrase, something like that instead of you know, sometimes, you know, obviously we'd want to update the creative if possible. But sometimes if if you're not able to that can be included in the link headline or the text or anywhere.

Mark Young  32:23 
And I think what things I really like using digital video for too is you can so target the income levels. So if you're selling Rolls Royces. You can aim that video at people with the right around income to rob Robb and he has a wooden apple in it. Yeah,

so the last here I'm going to I'm going to hit you with Cameron is paid content marketing. And to put that into perspective for people. When we think of content advertising for the past hundred plus years has been we control the media, we control the newspaper, we control the radio station, we control the TV network, and we could force our message into your face and you had no choice because if you wanted to watch Uncle Miltie, you had to listen to the Texaco commercial.

Now, consumers, 

Cameron Solu  33:22 
My childhood

Mark Young  33:23 
I don't I'm going right back there. So nowadays, the consumer controls the experience. Yeah, so the controller the consumer has a as a remote with DVR for television, the consumer can have ad skip technology, the consumer can skip over our messages. So content marketing is now instead of us pushing a message into people's faces. This is about us providing relative information to people's lives. So this is really about we need to create this is about valuable content, valuable storytelling that will improve someone's life, whether they buy the product or not, we're going to deliver them content that is going to enhance their life. So first, I'm going to Robb when you're working on creating content, what how do you format it? What what do you look for? First, what do you do first, before you worry about trying to sell something,

Robb Taylor  34:22 
We try and find a story like you're saying a story that is valuable to a person that is relevant to the person we try and craft headlines that show them that they're going to get enriched on some level. And 

Mark Young  34:34 
So it's newsworthy, 

Robb Taylor  34:35 
Newsworthy, or news might be a little bit too short term of a word, it's it's something that I'm going to get value out of 

Mark Young  34:43 
Newsworthy, health related self improvement 

Cameron Solu  34:46 
Advice articles,

Robb Taylor  34:47 
You're giving me something and I know it, and we'd normally will craft those messages. It's the first third or so is just about that story. And, and what we're going to bring them sorry, that's a horrible way to say that, but it's how we enrich their lives in that first third, and then we'll flip into the commercial content. 

Mark Young  35:09 
If they read that first part of the story, 

Robb Taylor  35:12 
they'll, they'll walk away, if they stop, they walk away with a little more knowledge,

Mark Young  35:17 
which is what I expect 

Robb Taylor  35:19 
right. 

Mark Young  35:19 
And as a user, and think about it, people, whenever we use the internet, we expect everything to be free. And we expect every piece of knowledge in the world to be at our fingertips, and that we don't have to pay for it. Yeah, so we expect that you're going to give us something of value. And so in content marketing, we have to remember, we're we're putting ourselves out there and letting the consumer invite us into their life, we're not forcing ourself into their life,

Cameron Solu  35:47 
Yeah we're not pushing our piece of content on anyone, we we advertise that the content exists, if they're interested, they click and they can start reading and learning. And that's the best part about content is, like you said, it's not just shoving your brand in someone's face.

Mark Young  36:01 
So Robb said earlier, how he's he talks to clients and they say, you know, we did Spacebook or Facebook or whatever they did three, four years ago. 

Robb Taylor  36:11 
Whatever it's called

Mark Young  36:12 
...and it didn't work. 

Cameron Solu  36:14 
You see what I deal with

Mark Young  36:15 
The inner webs fail.

Now I talk to clients and Robb's probably had these too I've talked to clients and say, well, we we've done content marketing, and it didn't work. Now, here's what I usually hear from people. We did content marketing. Well, what did you do? Well, we had somebody come in around a bunch of stories, and we put it on our website. Yeah, and then nobody came to our website and read it.

That's not really content marketing, right? That's just ad copy. 

Cameron Solu  36:40 
Yeah, that's just lost in the sea of blogs. 

Mark Young  36:43 
So how do you Cameron? How do you take that content and put it in front of millions of eyeballs where it becomes relevant?

Cameron Solu  36:51 
Yeah, so, you know, normally, what we like to do is, is we like to utilize social media platforms, you know, for some for some products for some services that are, you know, maybe not as glamorous, maybe not something that someone would want to interact with on a social platform, we would use a different platform, but specifically if this if this product or this service is something that someone would want to learn about, which is, you know, obviously, 

Mark Young  37:18 
So where would you put content first where we live? 

Cameron Solu  37:20 
we would we would put that piece of content on a content website,

Mark Young  37:24 
not on the client's website. 

Cameron Solu  37:25 
No, no, not on on the client's website. The best part about content marketing is that if done correctly, it can... it can provide third party validation for the product. If you put that piece of content on your website. Everyone going there everyone reading it is going to know you wrote it is going to know this a shameless self self promotion. But if it is put on it on another website and other platform, it looks like it's a third party is 

Mark Young  37:50 
So we're going to put it on Men's Health, BuzzFeed Prevention Wisdom to Live 

Cameron Solu  37:55 
Yeah, 

Mark Young  37:56 
We're going to put it on legitimate legitimate news sites where I don't think people are deliberately or, totally focused on selling the product. So I need to see a website where I see there are hundreds of other news stories, not just this product. 

Robb Taylor  38:13 
And and I'm a user who goes to those sites expecting an article so exactly what you're going to deliver me in an article 

Cameron Solu  38:20 
Exactly. And the way that we'd like to drive traffic to those websites is via display ads. What we do is from that third party websites, social account, let's just say Wisdom to Live for example, from the wisdom to live profile, we will create ads and target exactly who we wrote the article for

18 to 35 year old female would be interested in this product. 

Mark Young  38:43 
So let me give you an example. 

Cameron Solu  38:44 
Yeah 

Mark Young  38:44 
Let's use one that we did, which was for toenail fungus. 

Cameron Solu  38:47 
Sure. 

Mark Young  38:48 
And the headline was the what was the headline was the dirty little secret your nail salon doesn't want you to know. 

Cameron Solu  38:54 
Yes, exactly. So we obviously targeted females, we targeted females, anywhere between I think it was 25 to 65 plus was generally broad, your audience that goes to a nail salon is generally broad. So wasn't as granular some of the other ones but we were also able to target by interest, specifically people who are interested in nail salons, people who are interested in going to any sort of beauty salon care cuticle care Exactly. Yeah, but what I was going to say is we extrapolated that further to say if someone goes to a nail salon they're obviously interested in their self image they're interested in looking good feeling good and they may have a little bit more of disposable income as well because they can afford that so we use Facebook's targeting options via interests behaviors demographics to target the exact person that we wrote the content for the type of ad that we will serve for that for that campaign is is generally pretty general doesn't include the product doesn't include anything it's an image related to the product so specifically for the the the nail fungus we showed an image of a salon worker working on nails you know just something that will get you in the mindset of what we're talking about

Mark Young  40:11 
so I'm a 35 year old woman who goes to nail salons I'm on Facebook I'm looking at my friends are doing and I see this story that says the dirty secret your nail salon doesn't want you to know right so I'm going to click that because I'm because I'm probably a look at that I'm going to say I go to nail salons I don't want injury I don't want to know find something bad so I click it and I land on a new site a content site Wisdom to Live, now Robb what what am I going to see when I get there

Robb Taylor  40:40 
In that case you we had that headline that continue that conversation that so the the start of it delivers on the expectation for the user that is here's this scary thing which in this case was the sanitation pra- the actual sanitation practices back by statistics of what most nail salons do slash don't do slash should do and how that can lead to certain conditions like toenail fungus and then then after I got that and got appropriately scared that flipped it into the commercial content right the what you can do which to be fair as a legitimate solution to the problem 

Cameron Solu  41:22 
Yeah, it was a product that was able to help fight that right sanitation issue and it's it's relevant, it flows very well gives you a problem gives you an issue and then can give you a solution and it doesn't even though it clearly stated that this is commercial sponsored content, it doesn't feel that way if it's written correctly.

Mark Young  41:42 
So you put this ad on Facebook or someplace the dirty nails the dirty nail salon thing I clicked it I came to Robb's story I read Robb's story.

Now what happens to me

Cameron Solu  41:53 
There's a few different options throughout the throughout this piece of sponsored content, there are links to the the clients website or the clients product. Those obviously don't start until further down into the into the story you can click on those and learn more about the product if you are still interested. But you can also just leave you can bounce you you read the article, you got sufficient information and you left. Now that also still has value though because from there, you are entered into a retargeting pool. Now if you let's say, spent five seconds on the website or we deploy scroll depth technology.

Mark Young  42:32 
So I read the story. But I didn't read about the product. I'm on my phone. The picture of the product never came up on my phone. I only read the story about the nails

Cameron Solu  42:42 
Yep. And that's the best part about especially having your own domain, you can deploy these type of technologies on the back end that can actually show you how far users have scrolled down on the page. So if we know that the product doesn't show up until 50% down the page, anyone from zero to 49% doesn't know about the product. They only read the story had no idea it was a piece of sponsored content. That person though obviously had some interest because they scrolled they continue to read 

Mark Young  43:09 
So they were clearly concerned about nail salons 

Cameron Solu  43:12 
But for whatever reason they left the website before seeing the product. From there we can very confidently assume that they were interested and they would most likely be interested in the product even though they didn't see it that retargeting pool would have a specific banner that would talk about the product talk about the story again to relate them back to the story that they just read the day before two days before

Mark Young  43:36 
So this gets back to the retargeting ads are talking about which is really cheap so my retargeting ad in this case might be, you know, don't fall victim to, you know, dirty nail salons, click here or something of that nature. But if I got further down, and I read about the product would my banner ads now change and maybe my banner ads would talk about where to buy it. It was like it's, you know, how many it's available at a store. Or

Cameron Solu  44:02 
now if you are a user who scrolled 50% plus down the page, you know, the product, you you understand what the product can do to solve that, that issue. I don't need to educate you anymore. I mean, obviously, I want you to come back to the website and read about the product, but you don't need much more education. Now. You just need to know where to get it.

Mark Young  44:19 
So Robb, what kind of things would you put in that banner ad

Robb Taylor  44:23 
We've done the, you know, the we've created urgency around product, you know, X number of pieces remaining at your local CVS. We've done 

Cameron Solu  44:31 
Social proof

Robb Taylor  44:32 
Social proof, so five star reviews. So, you know, essentially, if somebody comes away from that thinking, well, I don't know if this will work or not. They'll see other people confirming that or, I guess overcoming that question. So there there's a bunch of different things we do. Those are some of the tried and true methods. 

Mark Young  44:48 
So I see a picture of the product I'm already familiar with it because I was just there 

Robb Taylor  44:52 
picture of the product and something that says you know, 1000 plus reviews five stars or something like

Mark Young  44:58 
this was the best product ever renews, Barbra Jean, Dubuque, Iowa, and then I might see something that says find it at CVS now, four or less available,

Robb Taylor  45:08 
Right. Something that drives me to act now or overcomes the concerns I have or you know, just ultimately completing the conversation and dealing with any objection that someone might have about a product 

Cameron Solu  45:20 
With retargeting at that granular level, the the two things you've mentioned are some of our most successful tactics, it's urgency and its social proof. When you are granular enough for you know exactly what the consumer knows about your product, you can hit them hard with that kind of urgency message. And that kind of social proof message because it's those final steps that most people need to overcome. Before making a purchase. I can read all day about a product that I love. But I don't necessarily know reviews. I don't know anything about how it's been received in the public, that urgency and that social proof can put me put me over the edge.

Mark Young  45:57 
So what we're really doing here is we're identifying a pool of people, bringing them into a piece of content that is relevant to their life, telling them about how we might be the solution for this issue in their life. And then we're able to stay with that consumer follow them down the purchase path were able to continue to deliver messages,  we know frequency matters. Now we know that we click them with a banner ad, they read an article that's a second frequency now we start hitting them with some banner ads frequency 3, 4, 5, and we can track when they click the banner ad. So really gives us the ability to follow these people all the way through, 

Cameron Solu  46:40 
Not only follow them. Now, one more point on that is we can stop following people as well. So if this 

Mark Young  46:47 
We don't follow them forever

Cameron Solu  46:48 
If this is an e commerce product, and you purchase it online, that can trigger you to fall out of the pool. If it's been over a certain amount of days that we determined irrelevant you fall out of the pool, if you really any action can put you in or take you out of a pool keeping this one of the most efficient forms of digital marketing.

Mark Young  47:08 
So the last thing I want to bring up here in a start with Robb on this one. And that is Robb when you're deploying a digital campaign most of our clients are always focused on the brick and mortar business but how important is Amazon to the strategy

Robb Taylor  47:22 
Critical. I mean you know five years ago the brick and mortars didn't know how what Amazon sales meant you know they didn't they they wouldn't translate that as far as helping or bringing new clients that are new new products into their stores now Amazon sales are critical to that decision making and retailers are terrified of Amazon

Mark Young  47:47 
And the reality is any digital campaign we do is going to generate a lot of Amazon sales

Cameron Solu  47:52 
Yeah, even if it's not the focus

Mark Young  47:54 
right because I have a mobile device in my hand I have an Amazon prime account 

Robb Taylor  47:58 
I'm one click away from a purchase. 

Mark Young  48:00 
right I'm one click away. I can I can just click Buy it now.

Cameron Solu  48:03 
Yeah, I'm sitting on my couch. I'm interested. But CVS is a block down the road

Mark Young  48:09 
I had to get up.

Cameron Solu  48:10 
Yeah, so I'm going to go on Amazon. I'm going to search the product name and if it shows up and it's the same ish price and it can be here within an hour with Amazon now or in two days I'll order there even if I didn't mention Amazon once in my ad in the story, any sort of creative it's going to boost Amazon sales.

Mark Young  48:27 
Then the last thing I guess I'll finish on this thing with Amazon is the other area where we need to consider digital where clients need to consider digital is we know you know, everybody knows about Amazon. Walmart.com is being a player. Yep. Meyer is a player and Kroger is a player because now you can order your groceries online now everyone is moving into this space and all these platforms now have an internal ad platform of their own 

Cameron Solu  48:40 
Yeah 

Mark Young  48:40 
So now when you just start building ad campaigns inside Amazon inside Walmart inside Kroger

How important is that

Cameron Solu  49:05 
Extremely important it's similar to the conversation about why Facebook is important because you know where your audience is you you want to go and meet them you don't want to waste spend if you know that your your audience is a Walmart shopper you need to go to Walmart and you need to build a campaign with them and you need to show to them where they are if you're on Facebook blasting out your message and your audience is not on Facebook you you're wasting money so within each retailers ecosystem whether that be Amazon whether that be Walmart you need to have a specific strategy and they most likely will be different if you've got one for Walmart one for Amazon you're talking to two different people you're talking to someone on walmart.com that probably still goes to the Walmart location yeah as well on Amazon you're talking to someone who doesn't want to get off their couch so it's a totally different 

Robb Taylor  49:56 
I don't even even go on my phone I'll just tell Alexa to add it to my cart.

Mark Young  49:59 
Yeah, good point.

Robb Taylor  50:02 
Which is really 

Cameron Solu  50:03 
I hope none of you are listening to this on your Alexa because Robb just ruined your day. 

Robb Taylor  50:07 
What do you mean? Alexa, please order

Mark Young  50:10 
Wooden apple.

Robb Taylor  50:11 
Wooden apple. There you go.

Mark Young  50:14 
Cameron, Robb This is great. There is I want people understand we just spent probably about an hour on this. We didn't cover 5% of the topic. So...

Cameron Solu  50:24 
My throats not sore yet. So I haven't even scratched the surface about what I do.

Mark Young  50:28 
So hopefully this gave you at least a cursory view of what's out there. But you can find out a lot more. So you're always welcome to contact our offices, you know, at Jekyll and Hyde and you can talk to account executives, you can set up a meeting with Cameron and some of the people on his staff. And we can go into some of these things deeper because every one of these topics we just spoke about, we just spoke about a dozen topics. Every one of those topics you could literally spend a day explaining that to somebody

Cameron Solu  50:57 
Don't tempt me

Mark Young  50:58 
But certainly an hour to explaining each tactic. 

Cameron Solu  51:01 
Exactly. 

Mark Young  51:02 
I think the thing to come away with for our audience is one it doesn't matter what you tried and digital in the past it's real it's a thing and it's always changing and you can't avoid it and the people who don't embrace it are going to have problems now because you need this has to be part of your ad campaign.

Cameron Solu  51:22 
Maybe not every aspect

Mark Young  51:23 
right and not every tool yeah but there is a digital model there is a digital model for every product

Cameron Solu  51:29 
that's my biggest message here is digital will can and will work for you It just depends on how its planned what platforms you're on everything is appropriate for anyone but you need to make sure you're using your dollars efficiently.

Mark Young  51:42 
Robb any last words?

Robb Taylor  51:45 
No. Great show guys. Thanks Cameron for coming on.

Cameron Solu  51:48 
Thanks again for having me.

Mark Young  51:49 
Thanks. That's it for CPG Insiders will see on the next edition.