digital marketing campaign that was just
absolutely killing it.”
As a whole, Silvano says digital adver-
tising mechanisms like social media, pay-
per-click (PPC), online video, mobile
applications, and affiliate marketing have
all become “much more effective” during
the past couple of years. “When I look
at what our clients were doing and how
much money they spent on mediums like
social media marketing a few years ago,
it was basically a lot of money for very
little result,” says Silvano, who sees social
media’s audience targeting capabilities as
one driver of better results.
“Today, we have campaigns where
social media marketing is the primary
driver of traffic and orders,” Silvano
explains. “Some of that is because you
can genuinely target your message and
creative to, say, women who are 55 years
and like country music. You can’t do that
anywhere else.”
Optimize Your Strategy
The last decade has seen a proliferation of digital advertising opportunities
and a fair share of challenges put in front
of companies that want to either go
digital-only or combine it with an existing advertising portfolio. Content marketing (i.e., storytelling used to increase
brand awareness), social media marketing
(Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), and
search engine optimization (SEO) —
both organic and paid — rank high on
the current opportunity list.
Other mechanisms that marketers
are either experimenting with or already
using successfully include search engine
marketing (getting unpaid traffic via
search engines like Google); PPC (the
paid version of SEM); affiliate marketing
(making money from selling other com-
panies’ products to your own audience);
email marketing; and mobile phone mar-
keting and mobile apps.
Calling Google Ad Words the “800-
pound gorilla” of the digital advertising
world, Silvano says Facebook is Google’s
counterpart on the social media side,
followed by Instagram. “You Tube can be
huge, depending on the campaign and
the messaging/content,” says Silvano.
“The question is, can you edit a video
that’s engaging enough in the first five
seconds to keep people from clicking
For the marketer than can confidently
answer “yes” to that question, Silvano
says You Tube is delivering results. Un-
fortunately, because the barriers to entry
and the costs associated with low-quality
projects are both low in the online world,
success rates aren’t always noteworthy.
“To be very good at digital marketing
is a different ball of wax,” says Silvano.
“To be effective, you have to go beyond
just checking a box that says, ‘Do you do
Google Ad Words? Yes or No?’ and find
ways to genuinely think through and optimize your strategy.”
The Mobile Evolution
Sarah Baehr, executive vice president
and managing partner, digital, for Horizon Media in New York, points to mobile
optimization as a key concern for digital
advertisers. “If you listen to the number
of ads running on Facebook midstream,
less than 25 percent of them are optimized for mobile, yet so much of that
activity is running in the mobile environment,” she says.
And while mobile device screens are
Creating video ads today now means
creating an experience that makes sense on
a particular screen: from the largest 4KHD
TV to a smartphone, and everywhere in
between. “How do we grapple with knowing
that time is being spent on a different-sized
screen?” asks Horizon Media’s Sarah Baehr.
MEDIA SPOTLIGHT
