Real Time Advertising: Instantaneous Replay Ads Can Double Your Revenue

• Updated on: 2017-09-27
• Read original article here

Branded advertisements in real time drive engagement and sales in ways not possible even a year ago.

The world of digital advertising is expanding at a rapid pace. New advertisement methods are being introduced, exploited, and are saturating the market more quickly than ever before.

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Methods that worked like a charm a year back lose their effectiveness soon unless brands know how to keep on innovating and experimenting.

As advertisement mediums keep on transforming into newer and better shapes, advertisers need to identify the right moments to latch on to upcoming and novel channels to broadcast their branding messages in an impactful manner. And in that sense, this is the perfect time for brands to jump aboard the real time advertising. Let’s tell you more.

Real time advertising is centered on the idea of taking the latest content and augmenting it with a brand’s logo. Using the crisp branding message and broadcasting it across networks and platforms is where users will engage with the content because of its recency and freshness.

This approach of digital advertising makes use of already created content and exposes relevant audiences to it, grabbing eyeballs because of its impact. We see this driving prospects to more content rich online destinations such as YouTube channel pages, landing pages, etc.

Related: What Digital Ad Agencies Need to Navigate the Future

The core pillar of real time advertising, of course, is recency. In order to transform the latest content into a lot of online interest, the content needs to capture the high impact, unexpected and sought after moments.

Think of it -- what makes replays so high on engagement power when you watch a soccer game? The reason? The replay shows you a highly interesting, high impact, or memorable moment. When you miss out on that goal, it’s the replay you need to feel alive again.

Related: The New Prime Time for Ads -- and How to Use It

Now, imagine how engaging such a replay would be on a web page a soccer fan is browsing. Expect instant engagement, and most likely a click on the advertisement, which will take the surfer to the broadcaster’s online streaming service’s landing page.

Another instance may be something like a five-second clip of Donald Trump’s viral smirk from the day’s public address, bombarded on web pages that cover world politics stories. A click on the auto-replaying video advertisement takes the web browser to the YouTube channel of an investigative journalism brand.  

Imagine the kind of involvement, surprise, and engagement such a campaign can generate. Instantaneous replay ads combine the power of recency and high impact, grabbing attention and eyesballs like no other advertisement.

Real time advertising is a part of display advertising and can be viewed as a three-step mechanism of advertisements that aim at maximizing exposure, engagement, and action.

1. Identifying recently generated high-value content that brands already have access to.

2. Augmenting and packaging the content in the form of a crisp, attention grabbing, and branded advertisement.

3. Serving the advertisement to the most relevant target audiences.

4. Digital platforms help brands set up automated campaigns that can manage all three steps of this advertisement methodology, delivering quick, scalable, and highly differentiated results for brands.

Google's Art, Copy & Code project uses, among others, the idea of real time advertising with instantaneous replays to create brand engagement and drive desirable consumer behaviors.

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Using this approach, it was able to deliver significant improvements in advertisement outcomes for Rogers Communications, a brand known for broadcasting National Hockey League across Canada. Just in-sync with the three step approach we described in the above section, this campaign had:

1. A prototype advertisement created by using clips from game highlights uploaded on Rogers Communications’ YouTube channel.

2. Automated augmentation of the clip with the brand’s logo and subtle marketing messages.

3. Delivery of the advertisement to targeted hockey fans.

The test advertisement soon started driving traffic to the brand’s NHL GameCenter LIVE site, where the audiences were served with the option of buying a subscription to view all NHL games live.

Conceptually, the campaign showcases a very realistic and representative taste of what the real product would be like, via the real time advertisements. The recency and impact of the advertisement’s contents gathered attention and created the right context before pushing users through the sales funnel, into the landing page.

In the case study we described, it was noticed that users spent an average of 63 seconds per advertisement, which is almost four times the average time spent on traditional expandable ads.

Rogers Communications also experienced a 30 percent year-on-year increase in the number of subscriptions on the Rogers NHL GameCenter Live page. Helene Bahsous, Rogers’ brand manager, attributed the improved subscriptions results to the real time advertisement campaign.

A great advantage of using this advertisement approach is that it uses content that’s already owned by the brand. For sports broadcast right holders, news channels, celeb and lifestyle channels, and entertainment brands, the proposition of putting their owned content to work in the form of advertisements is hard to turn down.

This helps recoup the expenses that went into the creation of the unique and copyrighted content by driving more advertisement juice out of them.

Coupled with bid management tool such as DoubleClick Bid Manager, these advertisements can be targeted at focus groups, improving ROIs. Rogers Communications was able to reach 6.8 million fans via its instantaneous replay advertisement campaign.

Platforms such as Google's Art, Copy & Code project also deliver the benefits of analytics to help brands understand factors influencing engagement on different devices. It also provides the visable analytics across different geographies and user groups, and different content types. The result -- it’s possible to fine tune and improves the campaign to drive more sales.

Real time advertising makes the maximum out of high impact and high-interest content, along with real time branded advertisement generation to drive engagement and sales up.