It’s a com­mon mis­con­cep­tion that direct-response and brand­ing cam­paigns oper­ate in sep­a­rate dimen­sions and, there­fore, do not over­lap. How­ev­er, it’s cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble, and wise, to apply direct-response prin­ci­ples to how a brand­ing cam­paign is man­aged by apply­ing real-time learn­ings from brand stud­ies to opti­mize against top-per­form­ing strate­gies. The key point is that the rela­tion­ship between both cam­paigns can be mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial.

A brand­ing cam­paign can help build audi­ence pools of new cus­tomers for direct-response cam­paigns to nur­ture or trans­late into find­ing sim­i­lar prospects.

Sim­i­lar­ly, insights from direct-response cam­paigns (retrieved from pix­els placed on an advertiser’s site) can help boost the effi­cien­cy of brand­ing cam­paigns by help­ing apply the right blend of tar­get­ing to reach the audi­ence in envi­ron­ments in which they are most like­ly to engage with the brand.

What fol­lows are some com­mon approach­es to direct-response cam­paigns and brand­ing cam­paigns that can max­i­mize the effec­tive­ness of both.

Approach To Direct-Response

A direct-response campaign’s objec­tives always involve dri­ving users to com­plete a conversion—whether it be by engag­ing the cur­rent cus­tomer base, users who have engaged but not con­vert­ed, or by find­ing new users to engage. A thor­ough direct-response cam­paign will seek to engage users at all stages of their con­sid­er­a­tion. The audi­ence that the adver­tis­er seeks to engage will help deter­mine the strat­e­gy devel­op­ment and the lay­er­ing of tar­get­ing tac­tics employed in the cam­paign.

Pro­gram­mat­ic vendors—due to their abil­i­ty to lay­er tar­get­ing from their Data Man­age­ment Plat­forms, or, in some instances, build audi­ences from scratch with pix­el data–are nec­es­sary play­ers in a direct-response cam­paign and are essen­tial in dri­ving effi­cient response. The results include achiev­ing strong cost-per-acqui­si­tions and return-on-invest­ment due to low CPMs.

Depend­ing on cam­paign objec­tives, tar­get­ing tac­tics to con­sid­er can be bro­ken out thus­ly:

Engage current/interested cus­tomer base:

• Retar­get­ing: Tar­get­ing users who have pre­vi­ous­ly vis­it­ed an advertiser’s web­page
  • Dynam­ic Retar­get­ing: Serve cus­tomized mes­sag­ing to users depend­ing on whether they did/did not con­vert, what products/services they browsed, or their geo­graph­ic loca­tion

Reach and impact new cus­tomers:

• Demo­graph­ic: Tar­gets users based on cri­te­ria such as age, gen­der, house­hold income, edu­ca­tion, etc.
• Behav­ioral: Tar­gets users based on online behav­iors: con­tent consumption/browsing ten­den­cies, online pur­chas­es, etc. For exam­ple, tar­get­ing a user who is deter­mined to be a “Sports Fan”, “Tech­nol­o­gy Buff” or “Fre­quent Trav­el­er” based on online con­tent con­sump­tion and online pur­chas­es.
• Con­tex­tu­al: Tar­gets users through spe­cif­ic con­tent top­ics rel­e­vant to your brand.
  • Chan­nel: Tar­gets users through site con­tent cat­e­gories
• Geo­graph­ic: Tar­get users based on loca­tion: Coun­try, State, City, ZIP Code, etc.
  • Dynam­ic: Serve cus­tomized ad depend­ing on loca­tion
• Look-alike Targeting/Prospecting: Tar­gets users with sim­i­lar web brows­ing behav­iors to users who have pre­vi­ous­ly vis­it­ed an advertiser’s web­page or have con­vert­ed

Depend­ing on the objec­tives of the cam­paign, one or sev­er­al tar­get­ing tac­tics may be employed and test­ed in seek­ing to impact the tar­get audi­ence. Pro­gram­mat­ic ven­dors may be select­ed to exe­cute the tar­get­ing accord­ing to their strengths or—as is the case with many pro­gram­mat­ic vendors—according to how many dif­fer­ent tar­get­ing tac­tics they are able to exe­cute to the high­est cal­iber.

In addi­tion to cre­at­ing a strat­e­gy around reach­ing your intend­ed audi­ence via a pro­gram­mat­ic ven­dor and dri­ving actions, a key ele­ment of a direct-response cam­paign is opti­miza­tion.

Real-time algo­rith­mic learn­ings allow pro­gram­mat­ic ven­dors to apply com­put­er-based opti­miza­tions to con­tin­ue to serve against the most effi­cient­ly con­vert­ing audi­ences, in the right envi­ron­ments. Addi­tion­al­ly, man­u­al opti­miza­tions against Key Per­for­mance Indi­ca­tors (KPIs) can be applied as such:

• Ven­dor
• Cre­ative
  • Mes­sage
  • Ad Size
• Tar­get­ing Tac­tic
• Sched­ul­ing (Day — Time of Day)

Approach to Branding/Awareness

Branding/Awareness cam­paigns should seek to engage the current/potential cus­tomer and help dri­ve per­cep­tion and con­sid­er­a­tion.

Estab­lish­ing a con­nec­tion with your tar­get audi­ence is often dif­fi­cult to do with a sim­ple ban­ner ad. A stronger approach is to pro­mote cap­ti­vat­ing con­tent and/or make ban­ner units engag­ing.

Native adver­tis­ing – through a pre­mi­um pub­lish­er net­work with exclu­sive part­ner­ships and empha­sis on brand safe­ty and cus­tomer trust – can assist in bring­ing aware­ness to the brand by pro­mot­ing:

• Owned con­tent
• Earned con­tent
• Social chan­nels
• Video chan­nels

Addi­tion­al­ly, an aware­ness cam­paign should accom­plish user engage­ment through the use of high-impact and high­ly-engag­ing cre­ative exe­cu­tions that cap­ture users’ inter­ests and prompts them to want to learn more about the brand.

Cre­ative exe­cu­tions such as Road­blocks, Takeovers, var­i­ous rich media units with embed­ded engage­ment func­tion­al­i­ties and video are all visu­al­ly dom­i­nat­ing exe­cu­tions. Incor­po­rat­ing high-impact units on endemic/contextually rel­e­vant envi­ron­ments are typ­i­cal­ly the high­est engag­ing, lay­ered in with rel­e­vant tar­get­ing.

Brand stud­ies are a rec­om­mend­ed ele­ment to an aware­ness cam­paign because they help pro­vide insights on met­rics beyond sim­ply track­ing clicks, social shares, video views, or rich media unit engage­ments.

A brand study helps deter­mine whether cam­paigns are tru­ly hav­ing an impact with the audi­ence with regard to brand per­cep­tion and pur­chase intent. Sur­veys are served to a group of users who have not viewed the ad and anoth­er group of users who have, then mea­sur­ing the dif­fer­ence in per­cep­tion the view­ing of an ad has on an audi­ence.

With a brand study, real-time insights into how users are engag­ing and being impact­ed by adver­tis­er mes­sag­ing can assist in opti­miz­ing the cam­paign to what is help­ing dri­ve increas­es in brand per­cep­tion and pur­chase intent. Brand stud­ies pro­vide insights on per­for­mance against Aware­ness KPIs against the fol­low­ing:

• Ven­dor
• Cre­ative
  • Type (stan­dard ban­ner, rich media unit, etc.)
  • Mes­sage
  • Ad Size

An aware­ness cam­paign can share prin­ci­ples with a direct-respon­se/per­for­mance-dri­ven cam­paign as it seeks to opti­mize against KPIs such as brand per­cep­tion and pur­chase intent gath­ered from the brand study.

Integrating Direct Response & Awareness

Brand­ing efforts can help dri­ve vis­its from new and engaged prospects, which can boost effec­tive­ness of audi­ence pools used in direct-response cam­paigns for nur­tur­ing and build­ing of prospect pro­files.

Specif­i­cal­ly, branding/awareness cam­paigns can enhance the efforts of a direct-response cam­paign through assis­tance in build­ing cook­ie pools for the employ­ment of retar­get­ing and prospecting/lookalike tar­get­ing.

For instance, through the pix­el­ing of a land­ing page(s) used in a branding/awareness cam­paign, pro­gram­mat­ic ven­dors can build a cook­ie pool to retar­get users who have engaged via the branding/awareness cam­paign with cus­tomized, direct-response mes­sag­ing.

Addi­tion­al­ly, if the objec­tive is to fur­ther expand the cur­rent cus­tomer base, pix­el­ing a land­ing page(s) uti­lized in an branding/awareness cam­paign can help a pro­gram­mat­ic ven­dor build prospecting/lookalike audi­ence seg­ments from the cook­ie pool. This can find users sim­i­lar to those who have engaged with mes­sag­ing and then tar­get users with direct-response mes­sag­ing.

Addi­tion­al­ly, pix­els from direct-response ven­dors that are placed on branding/awareness land­ing pages can help gath­er demo­graph­ic and behav­ioral insights about the users engag­ing with the brand­ing mes­sag­ing. This includes infor­ma­tion about age, gen­der, income, lev­el of edu­ca­tion, fre­quent­ed sites and pre­ferred con­tent.

Lever­ag­ing the infor­ma­tion and the audi­ence insights that these pix­els pro­vide can help the effi­cien­cy of branding/awareness cam­paigns by nar­row­ing and lay­er­ing tar­get­ing applied to the cam­paign.

The result can be the abil­i­ty to focus on the audi­ence that is engag­ing most with the brand­ing mes­sage and reach­ing those peo­ple in the most rel­e­vant envi­ron­ments to help boost brand trust and pur­chase intent.

Per­for­mance-dri­ven prin­ci­ples, such as the lever­ag­ing of real-time data for opti­miza­tions, can then be applied to the brand­ing cam­paign, through the use of brand­ing stud­ies. This can help opti­mize per­for­mance beyond stan­dard met­rics like clicks, site vis­its, etc. so that the cam­paign can con­cen­trate on best per­form­ing publishers/creative/etc. that dri­ve the most brand trust and pur­chase intent.