In today’s episode of AdTech | AlikeAudience, Sophie Eom, Co-founder, and CEO of Adriel, a marketing dashboard software for real-time reporting and ad optimization, discusses the future of multi-channel marketing with the CSO of AlikeAudience, Elice Lau, and the Director of The Brand Creatives, Jessica Lam.
Tune in to get intriguing insights on:
• Trends and changes across the digital marketing field in 2022
• Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns in digital marketing
• The possibility of a recession and its effects on the modern marketing industry
• How to optimize your marketing budget and profile the right customer
• The need for multi-channel marketing
• How you can implement an AdOps strategy in your campaigns
• The three main steps of AdOps
• Tips on measurement tools and media mix optimizers
Hello from AdTech | AlikeAudience
Jessica Lam: This podcast is brought to you by AlikeAudience, the premier audience-targeting company with high-performing mobile audience segments. Every month, we spotlight leading executives, CEOs, and marketers from industry-leading companies. I’m your host, Jessica from The Brand Creatives, a marketer and copywriter helping tech companies grow with authority content. If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe or visit our website.
Guests for this Episode: Sophie Eom and Elice Lau
Welcome to Episode 10 of the AlikeAudience Podcast! I’m delighted today to invite Sophie Eom the founder and CEO of Adriel, a marketing dashboard software for real-time reporting and ad optimization. Together with AlikeAudience’s CSO, Elice Lau, we’re going to discuss the wave of recession and changes hitting enterprises today, and how we can actually adapt our marketing strategies to face these challenges.
Let’s jump right in and start first with Sophie’s background. Can you share a little bit more about what you do for businesses and your work?
Meet Sophie Eom
Sophie Eom: I’m Sophie and I run Adriel, a marketing dashboard AdOps startup. I’ve been running Adriel for almost five years, with this being my second startup after founding my first startup, Solidware, in 2014.
During my time as CEO, I realized that there are a lot of things I can contribute to the marketing industry because there were many players and a lot of initiatives. Although I couldn’t see one dominant player who could provide a monitoring system, such as a media or war room type of system, I was surprised it did not really exist.
That’s how we came up with Adriel – a very simple-to-use, easy-to-use marketing dashboard, but still provides a very extensive range of data. Adriel has about 75 people now. We’re based in Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, and also South Korea, and we have clients like H&M, Samsung, Juicily, and Furhaven.
Trends and Changes in Marketing to Watch For in 2022
Jessica Lam: Could you share some expertise on how marketing has changed in 2022? What are your thoughts around these changes marketers face?
Sophie Eom: A lot of changes and a lot of big trends. The first one, as everyone knows, is Apple’s determination to strengthen its privacy policy and the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers). That announcement shook up the multi-billion digital advertising industry, as marketers lost access to reach setup click streams and granular data on customer profiles.
So before the trend with Facebook Pixel, Google Ads, and Google Analytics, the identifiers of profitable customers could be mapped against the billions of users on these major platforms. But now that re-targeting has been made infinitely harder, it’s become super important on the other side for advertisers to double down on attracting new users across many different channels while retaining and engaging existing ones.
Before it was Facebook, now known as Meta, Meta and Google were a duopoly. Now, advertisers realize it’s extremely important to invest in multi-channels. Over the last year, many new ad channels emerged. We now see a lot of advertisers switching their ad spend from Meta and Google towards others, like Amazon advertising and Walmart advertising. Advertisers use those two marketplaces, as well as advertising platforms like Twitch.
Programmatic platforms on the DSP side – like The Trade Desk, is used by all advertisers and small businesses who spend less than $50,000 per month. They would typically, on average, utilize at least five, or six different channels. So that’s one big trend that I’ve seen over the last year.
Another big trend that we see is that the user journey, the customer journey across different digital platforms, and social media have become extremely complicated. As all people use multiple apps and media and content platforms, not just a couple.
So it became really important for advertisers to set up the right media mix and social media mix, and the right KPI mix also because defining one single KPI and following only that KPI won’t help them achieve business goals in this extremely complicated user-generated context. Those are some big important trends I’ve seen with real cases.
A Shift in the Market: From Tech Giants to New Channels
Jessica Lam: That’s really interesting. And Elice, from your standpoint, as an audience segmentation provider, do you agree with what Sophie saw in the past year? Do you have other insights to add?
Elice Lau: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I’ve seen this trend since not only 2022, but two years before. Of course, tech giants remained a key platform for digital advertising at the moment, while at AlikeAudience, we sensed the momentum of advertisers shifts of budget into new emerging channel, particularly in this year.
Compared to the survey results we collected from over 100 companies, who are primarily agency heads and brand heads out of the states in early 2021, less than 10% of the respondents would explore new channels for digital advertising with the demise of cookies. And this year, the advertisers started to test and learn on multiple platforms.
Like Sophie has mentioned, I’ve seen momentum on e-commerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and even Kroger. They are the people that are developing their own platforms. CTV channels, SSP, DSP, and their marketplaces. So many channels are available and marketers are yet to consolidate and I see this is a period of time.
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Concerns in Marketing
Elice Lau: ESG is also a hot topic in 2022 in the AdTech industry. In our industry, we have been steering toward becoming ESG-conscious. As we all know, complex supply chains of data centers that power all the data computation necessary for AdTech, and all the online activity mix up around 4% of the world’s global emissions. So to help everyone visualize better, an ad impression generates about a gram of carbon, meaning a million impressions create a metric tonne, which is equivalent to round-trip flights from New York to London.
So a few acts of some companies like one of our partners, like The Trade Desk, saved around 5000 tons of CO2 after pulling out of Google’s open bidding in February when their open path was launched. So in a nutshell, we see changes. And we also see a lot of opportunities in AdTech ecosystem in 2022.
Recession: A Challenge or an Opportunity?
Jessica Lam: That’s really interesting. So it sounds like advertisers are moving to different channels, they’re no longer relying on the same two or three platforms. And that not only setting up the right KPI mix is important, but also that we need to be more eco-conscious about generating ad impressions. So what is your take, from both of you, on whether this is a time of difficulty for enterprises because of the recession? Or is this really a time of opportunities?
Sophie Eom: It is definitely a difficult time, not just in the advertising industry, but in the whole economy, in general. The war in Ukraine, rising inflation rates, tighter monetary policies, COVID outbreaks, and the impact of that outbreak is now being seen everywhere. Real estate prices and other challenges confined global economic growth and ultimately threaten the advertising industry.
The US Treasury and other experts say there’s a 50 to 80% chance that the recession will come in 2023, probably late next year or early the year after. According to a Bloomberg Markets live survey, approximately 48% of investors, or half of them, anticipate an economic slowdown by 2023. And startups, which include Adriel, are already hit by this and many of their valuation or cut less than half, Many failed to raise funds because of that. So they had to shut down. Really sad.
An Evolving Tech Industry During Recession
Jessica Lam: I agree on that. What about for the tech industry, Elice?
Elice Lau: Well, I believe the global economy impacts every industry, including our industry. Inflation rates are really high. Recession is coming. The business environment is really volatile. In terms of the marketing strategy I see, good ROAS from last year may not be generating good results during the recession anymore.
And because we have learned from the previous recession that the evolving technology can cause a change in user behavior, whether it’s a choice of goods, or a channel to buy, privacy concern, which is always a hot topic for us, will help shift the consumer behavior quicker. In particular, have been also impacting advertisers, especially for startup businesses or small to medium business owners. Where they used to rely on a couple of social media channels to acquire leads and customers is where they will suffer even more.
A statistic that I read a while ago said that only 41% of American consumers trust Facebook, and Twitter is at the bottom of the list at 33%. So recession is a must. Budget is limited. Options are tremendous. How an enterprise can be agile and change their marketing strategy from time to time – that is a challenge.
Brands that Continue Marketing can Survive a Recession
Jessica Lam: So what is both your take on marketing strategies? Especially with recession and economic growth slowing down, a lot of companies are laying off people, cutting down their ad budgets. Is marketing more important than ever? Or is this something that we need to cut down on?
Sophie Eom: Great question. So, many people ask me whether they should cut their ad budget to survive the recession. They’re laying off people. So should they keep spending on advertising?
Well, I say the best way you look at this recession and this context, is to try to learn how to prepare your business for recession, rather than just cutting your ad budget or investment in important things. I would say digital marketing is an investment that helps during good times and also tough times. If it’s a tough time, you should look at digital marketing as more of an investment.
So what should we do? I would say don’t cut your marketing budget just like that. Many studies have consistently shown that brands that continue marketing in a recession, are the most likely to survive. If you stop digital marketing, you should be prepared for your competitors to get your potential customers more easily. So those who make a consistent, wise, and calculated investment in digital marketing services will see the most benefit.
Optimizing the Marketing Budget
Sophie Eom: So, of course, you need to optimize and spend wisely. Many people recommend having a major focus on search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, because they’re the safest bet. It’s a long-term investment, but it’s the right thing to do when staying on potential customers radar online. If you keep investing in SEO and PPC, prospects will find you, and eventually become your clients when they are ready to convert.
You should also set up the right data environment for your marketing, because spending your money in the most optimal and wise way basically means that you need to have the right data at the right time. That’s the only way you can be provided with insights and ideas for your next moves. So that’s why today, I’ll also talk about AdOps because that’s the way you set up the right data environment. With the right data environment set up, you should be able to know your customer.
Surprisingly, there are so many clients and advertisers who cannot concretely define their dream customer. But building out a detailed customer persona is, of course, the first step to nailing down a multi-channel campaign. Without it, developing an effective communication strategy becomes a painful and expensive guessing game. First-party data has become much more important these days, especially because the cookieless era is coming soon. Collecting and monitoring data from your users’ behavior, your clients’ behaviors, as well as data on the actions and interests demonstrated across your website or apps, CRM system, subscriptions, and socials is extremely important.
Elice Lau: Marketing is always important, regardless of recession – actually more important in this recession, because people are still spending. Whether they spend on your brand, depending on how you could eliminate your wastage, be wise on your spend of marketing budget to reach to find customers with the shortest distance. So to echo what Sophie said, data insight is very important, because this is step number one for you to profile the right customer segment to target.
The Need for Multi-channel Marketing
Elice Lau: Consumer behavior matters. An article I read from AdExchanger talked about how people’s behavior is shifting away from social media. An example of this was when Facebook saw a drop of a million daily active users in their quarter for 2021 report when compared to the previous quarter. Consumers worldwide have planned to spend less time on social media in the next six months, accounting for about 21%.
While one channel may not work, multi-channel may work better. Options of emerging channels are growing. Have the right data set, set clear marketing goals, identify and profile your customer well, study the channels, especially on the new emerging channels. Know their metrics KPI, and be bold to invest into new alternative channels after testing. You will get advantage of crunching the new algorithm of those new channels and stay ahead of your competitors with a lean budget, if you are one of the first movers. That’s what I observed so far.
Why do we need AdOps?
Jessica Lam: I totally agree with that because it makes sense that during the recession, if you’re spending and your competitors are cutting then you would probably overtake them eventually. It’s very interesting insights as well from both of you on coordinating a multi-channel strategy.
So my next question perhaps is more for Sophie with AdOps and maybe, Elice, you can later share your expertise on ads and targeting strategy. So to manage all the multi-channels and having the right data environment, what is AdOps and how will it help these enterprises face these new challenges we have?
Sophie Eom: So I’ll first explain why we need the right measurement system, why we need AdOps. I’ll first talk about the context.
So in all the challenges we mentioned before, one key solution I can suggest is a multi-content and multi-channel strategy. Targeting customers across multiple touchpoints is extremely important. Especially because as I said, user journey has become so complicated these days. No one stays on or uses one social media or one social channel. No one stays only on YouTube, or only on Facebook, or on Instagram. Instead, what happens is that you watch YouTube at night and post your picture on Instagram, and you communicate with your friends on TikTok. If you wear a hat as an employee and want to talk bad about your employer, you got an app called Blind, for example.
So there are so many social communities that people use when they want to act as a different player in their lives. On average, the statistics I’ve seen is that people use more than three social media channels, more than two e-commerce marketplaces, and more than three content or e-commerce communities. So focusing on one single ad channel just doesn’t make sense these days. This is the same for content. People react differently to different types of content, key messages, images, and video.
AdOps in Action: ARKET Success story
Sophie Eom: I have one example. It’s an example of our client, ARKET, a brand under the H&M fashion group. They have been updating their ad content almost every two to three days for about a year. Sometimes they use model images, product images, promotions, and intro text images. And of course, they use these content in many different channels. They have been an adventure of new media. They always want to try new, emerging social communities that just launched their ad platform, and it was actually a big success.
ARKET was able to have their success because they adopted an AdOps system. AdOps basically includes a marketing dashboard, where you centralize data to monitor and optimize your multi-channel and also multi-content strategy. It’s not just a dashboard, as it will provide insights, ways you can act, and ways you can take certain actions like moving your budget towards different channels. The AdOps system includes a dashboard where you can monitor, but also includes many different features that you can use in order to react to the changes and trends you see on the dashboard.
AdOps is a Process, a System, and a Culture
Jessica Lam: So it sounds like part of AdOps is about being able to manage all these different multi-channels and having the right KPI mix and letting you take action on that. That’s one of the ways we can cope with the challenges, is that right?
Sophie Eom: Yes, right. Well, actually, when you Google search AdOps, broadly speaking, it refers to processes that support the management and optimization of advertisements through different digital mediums such as ad servers, networks, SSPs, and DMPs. But that’s more of a loose definition. The way we define AdOps is more like a process – it’s a system and it’s also a culture. It starts from the system where you can monitor everything that’s going on because as we said, it’s extremely complicated context now.
You need to have the right monitoring system, and you should be able to analyze the data that you see. Then you need to be able to react to the trends and changes you see eventually, in order to optimize your marketing mix. And there’s also some services included like consulting, planning, creating, and running ads. So all of these form AdOps. AdOps is basically a system and culture in an environment that can support the whole process that I just described. It helps collaboration between different teams that are in charge of all these different steps of the digital marketing process.
The Three Main Steps of AdOps: Profiling, Targeting, and Measurements
Jessica Lam: Wonderful – so let’s get a little more granular. Elice, if you can share from your expertise on ads and targeting strategy, when in the scope of AdOps, what would you recommend for marketers when it comes to adapting their strategies for advertising?
Elice Lau: My experience has always been in the past decade with data companies, which are part of the AdOps system. I really thank Sophie for sharing all the insights on AdOps. I believe, as per my experience on working with clients on AdOps, that usually, it always includes three steps – profiling, targeting, and measurements. They all work hand in hand, and you need all of them. Of course, if you’re setting up your number one step, it should be the profiling of your customer through data and insights. How you profile your audience matters.
As an example, do you know how to profile your audiences for World Cup? How do you define your audience for Black Friday, or Cyber Monday? At AlikeAudience, we work hand in hand with our clients to profile and custom segments for them. Targeting measurements dashboards matters. I’ve seen one of the top agencies with bait metrics table with a very comprehensive dashboard. They have metrics highlighted in different colors for management to make decisions, as well as for operations to make decisions.
So coming back to how to deal with the recession on the ads and targeting strategy. I would say, when there’s a change, there’s always an opportunity to be flexible and open-minded, maximize your opportunity by optimizing the budget, and echoing what Sophie said, adding the right timing to the right channel and content matters. For me, by reviewing the previous recession, I suggest it would be wise to be flexible in allocating the annual budget. For example, as a retailer or consumer brand, they may want to shift the budget significantly for seasonal campaigns, such as Black Fridays, Christmas, or China’s Singles Day, if they have Chinese audiences.
Also, keep studying the emerging channels. A few emerging channels which could be interesting, NBCU ShoppableTV ad formats, which could target housewives for their conversion of last click by having a QR code for purchase at the spot. Netflix ads could be another interesting one, Horizon Media, PubMatic and other SSPs, DSPs, and new solutions like TTD UIDs. E-commerce platforms like Amazon, Walmart and more emerging platforms are coming.
When profiling your audience segments, know your campaign goals, and look for partners who have expertise to work with you closely. They could be a consultant, or they could be a subject matter of the ecosystem that matters to you. Last but not least, be aware of the legal governance of privacy law changes. Study the ad platforms and vet their data sources. Does the data source comply with your national privacy law? That would help you save a ton.
Measurement Tools and Media Mix Optimizers
Jessica Lam: That’s very interesting – both your insights from the more overall Ad Management to the more granular profiling, targeting, and measurement. Let’s talk a little bit about measurement. Measurement is quite an important thing because we need to obviously have that to be able to measure our success. So how should marketers set up these right measurement tubes?
Sophie Eom: It sounds kind of obvious, but in order to measure something, you should first centralize data and standardize the analytics. You can fully leverage automation in order to give it. I would recommend an all-in-one tool that can provide a 360-degree view of cross-channel metrics, because they will help you navigate and visualize data, and eventually help adjust the marketing mix based on what worked and what didn’t. Huge brands, even marketing gurus like Nike or Samsung Electronics, are also actively looking for the right measurement tools and media mix optimizer.
Adriel provides AdOps, including a marketing dashboard, where you can send text, all centralized data visualization, and a media mix optimizer. You can allow you to centralize all data from different channels and optimize a marketing mix. After you have that environment, KPIs and marketing analytics will help you determine which online marketing tactics gives the best results, and which ones are underperforming.
A robust digital analytics setup also tells you whether your site interaction effectively generates business for your brand. For example, Google Analytics provides a good way of comparing different pages on your website to see how they support your conversion goals. Google Analytics 4, GA4, is also coming next year. So you should be prepared to upgrade to this version and get used to GA4, because it’s quite different from GA3.
Other than analytics, search engine optimization (SEO) tools are also recommended. This includes Google Search Console, Google Trends, Semrush, Moz Pro, all these are kind of the suite of the right measurement tools. What’s important is your determination to collect actively user data – for that, it’s crucial that you invest in the right tool at the right time.
Appointing a Third-Party Solution for Accurate Measurement
Jessica Lam: So it sounds like having the right tools and centralizing all the data will help marketers deal with these challenges. Going back to what Elice said about testing these new upcoming channels, and having the data to support that and see what’s working, and what’s not that would kind of help them optimize their ad spend – Elice, do you have anything to add to Sophie’s?
Elice Lau: Measurement is always been a hot topic as well, because of emerging channels that enable advertisements. Hence, there are a lot of solutions for measurements. I would say, first of all, we should look at our campaign goals. Say for example, your audiences are being targeted on connected TV (CTV) – say, Netflix has just announced that they have appointed DoubleVerify as their measurement company. I personally would suggest every company to do A/B testing on measurements by ideally having other third-party solutions with a comprehensive dashboard.
I’ve seen brands that develop solutions in-house. However, channels are tremendous. The effort that is being developed in-house can be wasted or useful, but the next day it’s already obsolete. This is because we’re not utilizing that channel anymore. So appointing a comprehensive third-party solution could be the way to save your budget during recession while achieving your mission and goals at the same time.
Subscribe and Stay Tuned!
Jessica Lam: Wonderful. So let’s wrap up here! Thank you very much for sharing all your expertise. It was really insightful to learn about all these different ways marketers can face with the new challenges in AdOps and in advertising campaigns today.
Thank you so much for listening. To find the show notes, transcripts, and more information about our audience segment offerings log on to our website www.alikeaudience.com. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to hit subscribe and leave us a review. We’ll catch you in the next session!
