11. 22. 2016

Social Media Week Chicago: A Roundup in 17 Tweets

Reading Time: 3 Minutes

Last week, I had the opportunity to return to my old stomping grounds for Social Media Week Chicago. I heard from individuals at leading organizations spanning technology, media, non-profits, and more.

As a #SMWChicago content partner, Adaptly held a presentation with Instagram and a panel with clients Allstate and The Richards Group. If you couldn’t attend, here are some highlights from the #SMWAdaptly sessions.

A How-To: Boost Ad Performance Across Facebook & Instagram

In our session on Monday, our VP of Strategic Accounts Ruth Arber was joined by Jaideep Mukerji, Head of Advertising Research at Instagram. They discussed how brands can leverage Facebook and Instagram in their marketing strategy.

Ruth kicked things off with an overview of the digital landscape – specifically, “traditional” media versus the new breed of platforms. Media from the early era of digital advertising has standardized formats, cookie-based data, and longtail reach across multiple networks. On the other hand, walled gardens like Facebook and Instagram have native ad formats that are natural to the user experience, first-party data (through log-ins), and extensive targeting capabilities.

Then Ruth and Jaideep dove into the opportunities available through Facebook and Instagram. Facebook has 1.71 billion users while Instagram has 500 million. The two platforms enable advertisers to reach these massive, engaged audiences and achieve brand and direct response objectives – from increasing awareness to boosting sales.

How exactly should we be thinking about Facebook and Instagram as channels? Jaideep noted that “Facebook is more centered on the personal, private sphere. Instagram has a public sphere to it: people are willing to follow public figures and people they don’t know personally, but they’re connected through a shared interest or passion.”

Facebook and Instagram users visit the respective platforms at similar times throughout the day and share and curate the same amount of content.

Advertisers can tap into Facebook’s rich data for targeting – location, demographics, interests and behaviors, website and app, etc. – across both Facebook and Instagram through Placement Optimization. Brands should see better value using this method, said Jaideep.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach but if you have good-performing creative on Facebook, you should have similar strong results using it on Instagram.

One key takeaway: test, test, and test some more to learn what works when running ads across both Facebook and Instagram.

All in all, with Placement Optimization, you can reach more people, generate greater lift, and drive efficient costs. Case in point: Lay’s.

We’re in a Vertical Video Era. Now What?

On Thursday, Charlie Neer, Adaptly’s SVP of Revenue, moderated a panel with Megan Presslak, Associate Digital Media Manager at Allstate, and Jeff Kauffman, Media/Group Head at The Richards Group. Charlie opened with a rundown of how social media video has evolved from YouTube’s launch to Twitter’s livestreams of sports games.

People spend an average of 45 minutes a day viewing video on smartphones. And over 100 million hours of video are consumed via Facebook every day, with most of the time spent on mobile devices.

According to Charlie, if 2016 was the year of viewability and fraud, 2017 will be the year of attention.  How much time do consumers spend viewing your content?  Hone-in on audiences who dwell on your ads for longer.  There will be increased competition across channels for share-of-time on marketing.

“Turning your phone is hard,” said Presslak. Snapchat has 150 million daily users who send more than 1 billion snaps and view over 10 billion vertical videos.

It was recently reported that the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds. Note: Goldfish can concentrate for 9 seconds. Brands have a limited time to engage users through storytelling with high-quality visuals and sound.

Jeff shared a graph highlighting how paid TV was at its peak around 2011. In Q2 of 2015, paid TV took its biggest subscriber hit to date. In 2021, major TV contracts across the NFL, MLB, and NHL will expire.

For leagues to grow globally, they need global distribution partners like Twitter and other tech companies.

Megan advised brands to dip their toes in paid social little by little through testing or lose a huge chunk of audiences they want to reach.

Kauffmann ended the panel with a similar recommendation for brands to allocate marketing dollars to testing.