Navigating the Digital Marketing Landscape – Episode 7

This is CPG Insiders, the podcast that helps consumer packaged goods companies survive and thrive in business. Now your hosts Mark Young and Rob Taylor. Welcome everyone to this edition of CPG Insiders. I'm your host Mark Young with my co host Rob 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 Salou. And Cameron, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

So Cameron, here's where we want to start off. People hear we need a digital plan. Digital's not one thing.

No, it is not.

Digital is a lot of stuff. So could you kind of show tell us the landscape of what falls into that bucket?

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.

So intent though, just for, for the audience. That's somebody on a computer raising their hand and saying I'm looking for I.

Have a hemorrhoid and I need a hemorrhoid problem.

Exactly, exactly. That's one of the best in my.

Case, I am a hemorrhoid and someone.

Needs a hemorrhoid product.

I just thought I'd beat you to it.

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 of.

Yes, somebody's raising their hand and saying, hey, I'm over here and I've got this problem. Do you have a solution?

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.

Okay, now what's next?

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 an article on a website and there's an image on the side for a product or 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.

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.

Exactly.

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

Exactly.

Maybe you could expand on that a little bit.

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 billboards 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 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 often to a specific user, they're just going to start going blind to it, 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. Using.

Using your analogy or your comparison there with the billboards, which I think is a 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 at 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 what billboards, I might remember the Cracker Barrel, because I responded, you did something about it. 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.

It broke the mold, it broke your concentration because it was something you were not expecting.

And the third one that I might remember probably would be the one that was so obnoxiously repetitive that I saw a hundred of them between Detroit and Florida.

Yeah. But you may not necessarily remember it in the best light.

Yeah.

And those are the ones that you avert your eyes or scroll past or just look away from, well, eventually you.

Become blind to them.

I think you kind of get pissed off by them, frankly. I mean, yeah.

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 to.

Yeah. So retargeting banner campaigns are the exact same except for their settings, except for how they are actually targeted. Instead of targeting a broad audience that you know nothing about, as in 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.

So they've been to my website, they've.

Been to my website. Or they've searched me, they've searched me, they've viewed my video campaign, they've interacted with my brand in some way. And you can set these settings, you know, 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 this situation, and they will immediately recognize it because they've risen their hand, they already know your product and they have shown intent.

So, folks, if you recall, think about you've been to ebay, you went to autotrader, you went to, you know, Williams Sonoma, and all of a sudden you started getting banner ads for those very same brands immediately, for several days or.

More specifically the hunter boots, I was looking at the very model I was looking at, Right.

In the size and color.

Yep, that's retargeting. So the reason is. So let's use Rob'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 Rob Taylor, he's interested in these boots. Let's keep throwing an ad at him and finish off the sale. 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 can click here and buy it. Maybe they threw something at you that said free shipping in the next 24 hours.

Some incentive.

Yes. Some incentives. But Those banner ads. That's an efficient use of banner ads, those retargeting ads.

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 Rob went first time to this 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.

All right, so let's move now to social media, but not social media as a social media campaign, because 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.

Yeah, those platforms are very similar to what we've already been talking about. They are presenting your advertisements to a consumer that's in a different mindset, which can be very valuable. So as I'm sure most of our listeners here have been on Facebook, been 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, 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 interests, 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.

So talk to us a little bit about the targeting now. So when I'm using digital, and 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.

You're buying everyone.

So even though Fox News is real strong with 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, how specific we can get, or for the sake of this, how frightening can we get with how we can target.

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'll talk to a client and 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. Yeah, I mean, we will field those where it's, well, we did it years ago and it just, it was a waste of money. Why should I do it now?

Were they using the my face or.

The face of the space MySpace space book? That is something that comes up. So how do you tell people now things are different? Sure.

So things are different in good ways and in bad ways. So as everyone again listening probably knows, Facebook is dealing with a lot of drama recently regarding their advertising policies and the amount of information that advertisers have access to. Three, four years ago, in your example, Rob, advertisers had less access to what they do now. They were still building out their ad platform, still building out their objectives, still kind of building what they wanted to do. So it's very general. You could target by demographics, you could target by possible interests. 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.

And only a couple years ago, by the way, we didn't have the in feed ads. We were still dealing with those right.

Hand column column stuff. And there was a big transformation at Facebook once mobile took over. And that was the big reason that the in feed ads 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 had 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 engineering 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 interests, 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.

But I could do things like I'm a fan of auto racing or I like woodworking or I like I'm a foodie or things of that nature.

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 and what you talk about and the pages you actually interact with.

Sometimes I like to post about how I like to eat food made of wood while driving my race car, which is a really. You must get some really interesting ads.

It's fun. In an unrelated note, I'm very thankful for the unfollow button. No, it's true.

They're tracking our every move.

And not only are they tracking you on Facebook, they're tracking you off of Facebook as well.

I love to comment Real quick, I'll 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.

But voluntarily is in air quotes because again, terms and conditions, no one reads them. So that's the big backlash now. And that's why Facebook has kind of simmered a little bit. But Rob, 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 was running it, they were just doing a poor job. It was, you didn't have the options available to you yet to be extremely efficient. Now, even though there is a little more limited of a targeting set, there is a little more limited option 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.

Now we've also seen in the past, probably I'm going to say 18 months, that the consumer is taking advertising messages on the digital platform as with a little more credibility than they used to. 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.

Yeah.

They couldn't play anywhere else, so they.

Had to go to digital. 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 target 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.

And we can make this advertising much more personal now.

Exactly.

So back to the Facebook issue for a minute. So I'm running an ad on Facebook, and you like my ad because you can like my ad.

It's just like any other post.

So when you like my ad, if you share my ad, then I get to. Your 200 friends get to see my.

Ad free, Even if they weren't in the initial targeting pool that you set your ad campaign up. If I were to share your ad, it's just like any other post. My entire audience will now be eligible to see it.

Now, if you like or share my ad and I show your ad, and I pay to show the ad to one of your friends, does that ad now say that you liked it?

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 or if they make an interaction with the ad, 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.

Well, Rob Taylor auto races while eating wood.

Yes, exactly.

It's food made of wood. Very different. Sorry.

Food made of wood.

Auto race, wooden apples.

So you see it and say. Right. And so let's say Rob Taylor likes wooden apple auto racing.

Exactly.

And then you're gonna say, oh, I know Rob. Rob's a cool guy.

He's not anymore.

But you're going to now view that ad differently there.

It adds. It adds a sense of social proof as well as legitimacy. Right.

So it's almost like Rob Taylor just recommended this to you.

Normally, I don't take his recommendations.

Well, that's a good point. But let's assume it was somebody that was credible. You would then look and say, okay, well, Rob likes this wooden apple, so I'm gonna look at the wooden apple.

Sure.

And we don't pay extra for that.

No, no. It's what you would call Value add, it's huge. It's the best general benefit of advertising on a social media platform is that there is an extra layer of social proof and relevancy that can come from that.

One of the old adages 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 Rob Taylor ever bought the wooden apple. 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?

That's another form of targeting that I didn't bring up earlier was on top of demographic, on top of behavioral, there's geotargeting 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 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.

So we could say, so Publix has what, a thousand 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.

Around each one. Yep.

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.

Yep. Anyone local to the store that would be most likely to visit.

And now my ads can say go to Publix, even though maybe I'm at Walmart someplace else. But here it's going to say go to Publix. Now, can you tell me people that have been to Publix recently where I know 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 are sharing with everyone in the world. When you download a weather app to your phone and you say allow location services, you don't know if that what that weather app is doing with it. Obviously 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. 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 to fast food restaurants.

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.

It's funny and slightly creepy what just knowing where your phone is can say about you.

Mildly horrifying.

Not as horrifying as a wooden apple. But really what it comes down to is, is understanding your consumer. I don't care if you're doing 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 in, and what their habits are.

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 prices.

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

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.

Exactly, exactly. It's all about chasing your consumer. And if your consumer is a young 23 year old woman, you're gonna want to go to Instagram.

Go on.

Yeah, I should have chosen my words much better than that.

An older 59 to 90 year old woman.

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

Is there something new tech coming out or something on the horizon for digital that is exciting to our team? 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?

I think it goes back to my location discussion. It's the further proliferation of that technology.

So being able to deliver an ad while I'm in Walgreens.

Exactly, exactly. It's possible now, but 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 phones themselves, the devices themselves, the creepier it 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.

Now, the majority of ads that we're delivering today, and again, this will change with the demographic. But the majority of the ads we're delivering today are going to some type of mobile device, right?

Yes. Oh, yeah.

And as our demographic gets older, we will see more. More uses of iPads, laptops, desktop.

Yep.

But any idea how those splits look as we roam through Those demographics.

I mean overall with the majority of our clients, it doesn't surprise me to see upwards of 80% mobile traffic. When you take a look at a campaign as a whole, it can go as low as about 40% mobile.

But I think Facebook, Twitter, Instagram is almost all mobile now.

Right. No one is using that.

Search has gone heavy mobile.

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.

So I'm going to direct this question over to you, Rob. When you're creating TV commercials today, you're doing a 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 television to a cell phone.

Right.

We start with, you know, the main purpose and which is why there's such a large investment in high def and 4k. That stuff doesn't really pertain to your phone screen 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 Instagram, in a square or in a. So most of the action you see is in that little one by one ratio box. It's not always, but it's definitely something that is more on our radar. And 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 yeah, when you shoot TV commercials.

Do you sometimes shoot alternatives? So certain frames you're going to use in a digital environment versus a bigger.

Screen, we'll shoot shorter versions of the commercial.

More typically for the, for the digital.

We'Re trying to get, yeah, there's 30 or 20.

Even, even shorter than that. The 6 seconds video format is really taking off. Even, even traditionally now you'll. You saw last year's super bowl, it was, I think it was a beer company ran. It might have been Budweiser ran a six second spot on tv. It's attention spans, they are shortening.

So when we think of television commercials today, we still need to think of TV commercials as a video asset because still Video sells better than anything. It's got emotion, it's got music, it's got audio, it has action, it has all the things 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 television 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? Will 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 a computer or a phone, usually probably a smartphone. So how is video doing when you get. So when Rob 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 public 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 you were looking for moms between the age of 25 and 49 that go to Publix.

It's funny, it's actually pretty similar to how traditional is 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 onto 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 interests that I believe relate 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. Normally you'll see, especially these days, video that just starts autoplaying when you're halfway through an article. That programmatic use of video 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, you can find the 25 to 40, 49 year old with children in household who shop at Publix.

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 dental. I can with with digital video.

Now, some of those videos you're going to run as pre roll. 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. And most of those Facebook videos are watched without the audio. 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?

A lot of times we'll recut spots with bigger graphics or intercut graphics. In other times, that's some of the more shocking. Like a recticare commercial, for instance, that begs you to click and see what's going on. So it does change the creative some.

And especially with Facebook and specifically, captions are huge. You need to make sure that those are set up correctly. And not only make sure there's no typos, make sure that the cadence of the captions 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. So I have a list of stores, and then my closed captioning is on.

Top of my store list. The closed captioning doesn't always show up. It only shows up when your audio is muted. But does need to be taken into consideration.

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?

Exactly. Yep. Facebook, just like any other post, you can have the text of the body of your post right above the video, below the video. If you're linking out to a website, 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 text 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 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.

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 reshooting all the creative, we can still use it somewhat effectively with that method.

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

And I think one 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 name that video at people with.

A high income to Rob.

Rob. And he has a couple in it.

Yeah.

So the last area 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 Milty you had to listen to the Texaco commercial. Now consumers, I know I'm going right back there. So nowadays the consumer controls the experience. So the consumer has 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 go to Rob. When you're working on creating content.

How.

Do you format it? What do you look for first? What do you do first? Before you worry about trying to sell.

Something, we try and find a story like you're saying, a story that is valuable to a person, that is relevant.

To the, the person.

We try and craft headlines that show them that they're going to get enriched on some level. And so this is newsworthy, newsworthy or news might be a little bit too short term of a word. It's something that I'm going to get value out of.

Newsworthy, health related, self improvement advice article.

You're giving me something and I know it. And we normally will craft those messages. It's the first third or so is just about that story 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 and if they read that first part of this story, they'll walk away.

If they stop, they walk away.

I got a value.

They walk away with a little more.

Knowledge, which is what I expect.

Right.

And as a user, 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. So we expect that you're going to give us something of value. And so in content marketing, we have to remember we're putting ourselves out there and letting the consumer invite us into their life. We're not forcing ourselves into their life.

We're not pushing our piece of content on anyone. 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.

So Rob said earlier how he talks to clients and they say, we did Space Book or Facebook or whatever they did three, four years ago, and it didn't work.

You see what I deal with?

The interwebs fail. Now, I talked to clients and Rob's probably had these two. I talked to clients who said, well, 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 and write a bunch of stories and we put it on our website and then nobody came to our website and read it. That's not really content marketing. Right? That's just ad copy.

Yeah. That's just lost in the sea of blogs.

So how do you, Cameron, how do you take that content and put it in front of millions of eyeballs where it becomes relevant?

Yeah. So normally what we like to do is we like to utilize social media platforms 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 the 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.

So where would you put that content first? Where would it live?

We would. We would put that piece of content on a content website.

Not on the client's website?

No, no, not on the, on the client's website. The best part about content marketing is that if done correctly, 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 is shameless self promotion. But if it is put on another website, another platform, it looks like it's a third party.

So we're going to put it on Men's Health, buzzfeed, Prevention, Wisdom to Live.

Yep.

We're going to put it on legitimate news sites where I don't think people are deliberately or totally focused on selling me product.

Exactly.

So I need to see a website where I see there are hundreds of other news stories, not just this product.

And I'm a user who goes to the sites expecting an article. So if you click it, you're going to deliver me an article. Exactly.

And the way that we like to drive traffic to those websites is via display ads. What we do is from that third party website's social account, let's just say Wisdom2Live, 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.

So let me give you an example.

Yeah.

Let's use one that we did, which was for toenail fungus.

Sure.

And the headline was the. What was it? The headline was the dirty little secret your nail salon doesn't want you to know.

Yes, exactly. So we obviously targeted females. We targeted females anywhere between, I think it was 25 to 65 plus. It was generally broad. Your audience that goes to a nail salon is generally broad. So it wasn't as granular as some.

Of the other ones.

But we were also able to target by interests, specifically people who are interested in nail salons, people who are interested in going to any sort of beauty salon. Cuticle 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 used 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 generally pretty general. It doesn't include the product, doesn't include anything. It's an image related to the product. So specifically for the nail fungus, we showed an image of a salon worker working on nails. Just something that will get you in the mindset of what we're talking about.

So I'm a 35 year old woman who goes to nail salons. I'm on Facebook, I'm looking to see what my friends are doing and I see this story that says the dirty secret your nail salon doesn't want you to know. So I'm going to click that because I'm going to, because I'm probably look at that. I'm going to say I go to nail salons, I don't want injury, I don't want to find something bad. So I click it and I land on a news site, a content site.

Wisdom to live for.

Now Rob, what am I going to see when I get there?

In that case, we had the headline that continued that conversation. So 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, the actual sanitation practices backed by statistics of what most nail salons do, don't do, should do and how that can lead to certain conditions like toenail fungus. And then after I got that and got appropriately scared, it flipped it into the what could I do about commercial content? Right. The what you can do, which to be fair is a legitimate solution to the problem. Yeah.

And it was a product that was able to help fight that sanitation issue. And 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.

So you put this ad on Facebook or someplace, the dirty nails, the dirty nail salon thing, I clicked it, I came to Rob's story, I read Rob's story. Now what happens to me?

There's a few different options throughout the, throughout the piece of sponsored content, there are links to the client's website or the client's product. Those obviously don't start until further down 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 read the article, you got sufficient information and you left. Now that also still has value though because from there you, 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.

So I read the story, but I didn't read about the product. Yet I'm on my phone, the picture of the product never came up on my phone. I only read the story about the nails.

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 0 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 continued to read.

So they were clearly concerned about nail.

Salons, 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.

So this gets back to the retargeting ads you're 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 I have to buy it.

Exactly.

You know, how many is available at a store?

Or now if you are a user who scrolled 50% plus down the page, you know the product, you understand what the product can do to solve 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.

So Rob, what kind of things would you put in that banner ad?

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 social proof, 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's a bunch of different things we do. Those are some of the tried and true methods.

So I see a picture of the product, I'm already familiar with it because I was just there, picture of the.

Product and something that says 1000 plus reviews, 5 stars or something like that. Something that's cool.

This was the best product I ever used. Barbara Jean Dubuque, Iowa and then I might see something that says find it at CVS now four or less available.

Right. Something that drives me to act now or overcomes the concerns I have, or just ultimately completing the conversation and dealing with any objection that someone might have.

About a product with retargeting at that granular level. The two things you mentioned are some of our most successful tactics. It's urgency and it's social proof. When you are granular enough where 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 over the edge.

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 and follow them down the purchase path. We're able to continue to deliver messages. We know frequency matters now. We know that we clicked 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 it really gives us the ability to follow these people all the way through.

Not only follow them though, one more point on that is we can stop following people as well.

So if this forever.

Exactly. 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've 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.

So the last thing I want to bring up here, and I'll start with Rob on this one, and that is, Rob, 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 this strategy 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 or new new products into their stores. Now, Amazon sales are critical to that decision making and retailers are terrified of Amazon.

And reality is, any digital campaign we do is going to generate a lot of Amazon sales.

Yeah. Even if it's not the focus.

Right. Because I have a mobile device in my hand, I have an Amazon prime account.

I'm one click away from a purchase.

Right. I'm one click away. I can just click buy it now.

Yeah.

I'm sitting on a couch, I'm interested. But CVS is a block down the road.

I have to get up.

Yeah.

So I'm gonna go on Amazon, I'm 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, order it there. Even if I didn't mention Amazon once in my ad in the story, in any sort of creative, it's going to boost Amazon sales, 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 now, you know, everybody knows about Amazon. Walmart.com is being a player, Meijer is a player, Kroger is a player. Because now you can order your groceries online. Everyone is moving into this space. All these platforms now have an internal ad platform of their own. So now we need to start building ad campaigns inside Amazon, inside Walmart, inside Kroger. How important is that?

Extremely important. It's similar to the conversation about why Facebook is important. Because you know where your audience is, you want to go and meet them, you don't want to waste spend. If you know that 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're wasting money. So within each retailer's 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 as well. On Amazon, you're talking to someone who doesn't want to get off their couch. So it's a total.

I won't even go on my phone. I'll just tell Alexa to add it to my cart.

Yeah, good point.

I do that all the time. Pick the phone out now, which is really.

I hope none of you are listening to this on your Alexa, because now you can just ruined your day.

What do you mean? Alexa, please order wooden apples. Wooden apple, stat.

Cameron. Rob, this is great. I want people to understand we just spent probably about an hour on this. We didn't cover 5% of the topic.

My throat's not sore yet, so I haven't even scratched the surface about what I do.

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 it to somebody.

Don't tempt me.

But certainly an hour or two explaining each tactic.

Exactly.

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

Maybe not every aspect.

Right. And not every tool.

Yeah.

But there is a digital model. There is a digital model for every product.

That's my biggest message here, is digital can and will work for you. It just depends on how it's planned, what platforms you're on. Everything is appropriate for anyone, but you need to make sure you're using your dollars efficiently.

Rob, any last words?

No. Great show, guys.

Thanks, Cameron.

Cameron, appreciate it.

Thank you again for having me.

Yeah, thanks. That's it for CPG insiders. We'll see you on the next Ed.

Sam.