Want to know one of the top search terms that’s tied to mattress sales? Try divorce.
That’s the kind of information that marketers are using to help inform decisions on placing ads. And it’s an example of the kind of marketing insight that data-driven platforms like Sightly claim it can deliver to advertisers.
“Everyone learns a lot working for us just about the words people use around their brand,” said Larry Harris, chief strategy officer at Sightly. “They get to see a full report of what people were searching for when they see the ad. You learn a lot, you find a lot of words that are relevant to your brand.”
Sightly is a performance video advertising platform that helps marketers create and deliver relevant video ads to online video viewers. It works with Google’s Adwords for Google Display Network and YouTube, and is currently only operating on the YouTube video platform. Adwords is Google’s online advertising service for marketers, and now makes up the bulk of Google’s revenue (Adsense, the seller side platform that Google offers, makes up about a fifth of Google’s revenue).
We’re just a few years into the great shift of advertising dollars to digital (and mobile) platforms. In fact, 2016 was the first year to see advertising budgets for digital equal those of traditional TV. But consumer expectations are moving more quickly towards personalized and relevant advertising experiences than it seems agencies, marketers and publishers can keep up. And in that way, YouTube stands as an interesting petri dish for advertising across both digital and video.
YouTube is a vast video search engine. It’s considered the second largest search engine in the world – Google being the first, of course – and boasts of over a billion viewers around the globe. “If it was a country, it’d be the fourth largest country in the world,” Harris said. YouTube is also one of the biggest drivers of online video, and has been deemed, on one hand, a threat to traditional TV by service providers, broadcasters, sports leagues and studios; and on the other hand, the future of video consumption itself.
The platform is able to amass incredibly large global audiences together and deliver a level of eyeball reach that’s unparalleled anywhere else in the world for advertising. Increasingly, traditional TV marketers are turning to platforms like YouTube to run their advertisements, and are turning to solutions like Sightly to find targeted, brand-specific audiences.
Sightly claims to be the only YouTube platform partner to serve personalized, localized advertising. “Our targeting is the ability to target existing segments on YouTube,” Harris said. “It enables advertisers to deliver their most relevant video ads to the most receptive viewers on every device. The company leverages people-centric targeting to match the right viewer with the right personalized message.”
While traditional TV advertising uses only limited gender and age type demographic data, Sightly has access to data about device, location, tastes and preferences, income, and other bits and pieces of info gleaned from search engine data, through its partnership with Adwords. “Adwords enables you to use more data,” Harris said. “We can use search data, location data, brand keyword data, competitive keyword data. What were people doing on YouTube and Google Display Network that would make the ad relevant? That’s the question that our algorithms attempt to answer,” Harris said. “People send signals, they do search, or they watch certain types of videos in a row.” Hence, the revelation about divorce and mattress sales.
But Sightly’s secret sauce is in the company’s ability to target specific audiences for video ads, and then personalize those ads to some degree to make them more relevant to the viewer. “Personalization is really the ability to help the advertiser do what’s required to seal the deal,” Harris said. “We know that personalization really does improve delivery, pricing rates and ROI. We’ve run thousands of campaigns and the data’s very clear.”
Sightly doesn’t re-edit the ads, but makes adjustments here and there to tailor the ad to a device, or a specific location or a specific call to action. “That personalization is really around device-centric and location-centric branded changes to the ad,” Harris said. “We make it something that drives to a local store, or a/b test offers. We can also run proximity advertising, we can run within a mile of a store. There’s all sorts of ways to do location, it really depends on your objectives.”
Take a fast food chain as an example: “We might do five different offers around five different college campuses around the state,” Harris said. “We will run all those and then optimize out the offers that aren’t working in each location. What locations are driving the most views? We optimize to the segments and the locations and the offers, and keywords, and other things that drive the best results, the most completed views.”
This approach may work best for brands that are very common, or that have broad appeal, such as chain restaurants, household products and appliances, or airlines; or conversely, for brands that are regional themselves. “We’re exceedingly good at location targeting,” he said. “In our view, most advertisers are trying to hit locations that are near a car dealership or near a store or near a big box store, or certain groups of audiences that are in particular areas. It’s a much better version of addressable TV.”
And unlike traditional TV advertising, YouTube gives viewers an important tool to deliver instant feedback: the skip ad button. “We’re more about delivering performance in the moments that matter,” Harris said. “But the nice thing is that when we’re wrong, we find out pretty quickly, they skip it in the first five seconds. We believe in opt-in: the company is founded on the belief that if you hit the right target, and you have a good message, the advertising is then a service to you and you’ll watch it all the way. So far that’s what we’re seeing.”