SPEAKERS
Jessica Lam Hill Young, Elice Lau, Sophie Soowon Eom
Sophie Soowon Eom 00:00
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 will not help them achieve their business goals in this extremely complicated user journey context.
Elice Lau 00:22
Inflation rate is really high. Recession is coming. And the business environment is really volatile. In terms of the marketing strategy that I see, with good ROAS last year may not be generating good results during the recession anymore. Because we have learned from the previous recession that evolving technology can cause a change in user behavior, whether it's a choice of goods, or whether it's a channel to buy.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 01:02
This podcast is brought to you by AlikeAudience, the premier audience-targeting company with high-performing mobile audience segments. And every month we spotlight leading executives, CEOs, and marketers from industry-leading companies. I'm your host today, Jessica from The Brand Creatives, a marketer and copywriter who helps tech companies grow with authority content. If you enjoy the podcast, subscribe or visit our website.
Welcome to Episode 10 of your 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. And 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. Okay, so let's jump right in. Let's start first with Sophie's background. Can you share a little bit more about what you do for businesses and your work?
Sophie Soowon Eom 02:05
Sure, I'm Sophie, I run Adriel. Adriel is a marketing dashboard ad ops startup. I've been running Adriel for about almost five years. And it's my second startup, I founded my first startup, which was not really related to marketing, but it was also about data and was called Solidware. And it was in 2014 that I founded this company, I sold it seven months after it was founded, I was lucky. And while I was working as a CEO, during that time, I realized that there are a lot of things that I could contribute to the marketing industry because there were many players and a lot of initiatives, but I couldn't really see one dominant player who could provide a monitoring system, like a media, war room type of system, and I was surprised that it did not really exist.
So 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. So Adriel has about 75 people now. We're based in Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, and also South Korea. We have clients like H&M, Samsung, Cirque du Soleil, and Furhaven. All these are some clients that I can name.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 03:42
Could you share some expertise on how has marketing changed in 2022? And what are your thoughts around these changes marketers face?
Sophie Soowon Eom 03:52
Sure, a lot of changes, a lot of big trends. The first one well, as everyone knows, Apple's determination to strengthen its privacy policy and therefore they depreciated IDFA, Identifier For Advertisers, and 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 that trend with Facebook pixel or Google Ads, Google Analytics, the identifiers of profitable customers could be mapped against the billions of users on these major platforms. But now that retargeting 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.
So before it was Facebook, now Meta, Meta and Google duopoly. But now advertisers realize that it's extremely important to invest in multi-channels. So over the last year, many new ad channels emerged. And we see a lot of advertisers actually switch their ad spend from Meta and Google, those two giants, towards others, like Amazon advertising, it's growing huge, Walmart advertising, all consumer product, advertisers use those two marketplaces, advertising platform, Twitch, etc. And also some programmatic DSP side, The Trade Desk, it's used by all advertisers, even like small businesses, who spend less than 50k 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 will not help them achieve their business goals in this extremely complicated user-generated context. So those are some big important trends that I've seen with real cases.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 06:56
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? Or do you have other insights to add?
Elice Lau 07:12
Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I've seen this trend since not only 2022, but two years before. Of course, tech giants remained key platforms 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 that we collected from over 100 companies, who are primarily the agency heads and brand heads out of the states in early 2021, where 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 developing their own platforms. CTV channels, SSP, DSP, and data marketplaces. So there are many channels are available and marketers are yet to consolidate and I see this is the period of time.
And ESG is also a hot topic in 2022 in AdTech industry. And in our industry, we have been steering toward ESG conscious. As we all know, the complex supply chains of data centers that power all the data computation necessary for AdTech and all the online activities 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 a round-trip flight from New York to London. So a few acts of some companies like one of our partners, 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.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 09:26
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 Soowon Eom 09:54
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 that there's a 50 to 80% chance that the recession will come in 2023, probably late next year or early the year after. And according to a Bloomberg Markets live survey, approximately 48% of investors, like half of them, anticipate an economic slowdown by 2023. And startups, Adriel is a startup. And we also work for many startups. And a lot of startups are already hit by this and many of their valuation or cut less than half, and many failed to raise funds because of that. So they had to shut down. Really sad.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 11:14
Yeah, I agree on that. What about for the tech industry, Elice?
Elice Lau 11:18
Well, I believe global economy does impact every industry and so does our industry. Inflation rate is really high. Recession is coming. And the business environment is really volatile. In terms of the marketing strategy that I see, with good ROAS last year may not be generating good results during the recession anymore. Because we have learned from the previous recession that the evolving technology can cause a change in users’ behavior, whether it's a choice of goods, or whether it's 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 the startup businesses, or the small to medium business owners. Where they used to rely on a couple of social media channels to acquire leads and customers, they will suffer even more.
A statistics that I read from share through a while ago, actually 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 enterprises could be agile and change their marketing strategy from time to time, that is a challenge.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 12:48
So what is both your take on marketing strategies especially, because with the 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 Soowon Eom 13:10
Great question. So, 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, cutting your investment in important things. I would say digital marketing is an investment that helps during good times and also tough times. It's a tough time, but you should look at digital marketing as more like 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, they're the most likely to survive. If you stop digital marketing, I think you should be prepared for your competitors to get your potential customers more easily. So those who make a consistent investment, a wise investment, a calculated investment in digital marketing services will see the most benefit.
So, of course, you need to optimize and spend wisely. Many people recommend having a major focus on search engine optimization and pay-per-click campaigns, because SEO and PPC, they're the safest bet. It's a long-term investment, but it is the right thing to do to stay 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. Because that's the only way you can be provided with insights and ideas for your next moves. So that's why today, later on, I'll talk about ad-ops because that's the way you set up the right data environment. And I'm going to talk about that later. And 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 really define concretely their dream customers. But building out a detailed customer persona is, of course, the first step to nailing down a multi-channel campaign. And without it, developing an effective communication strategy becomes a painful and expensive guessing game. So first-party data has become much more important these days, especially because the cookieless era is coming soon. So data from your users' behavior, your clients' behaviors, all the actions, and interests, demonstrated across your website or your apps, or data you have in your CRM system, subscription data, social data, collecting all these and monitoring these are extremely important.
Elice Lau 16:33
Yes. So marketing is always important, regardless of recession. And actually more important so in this recession, because people are still spending. And whether they spend on your brand, depending on how you could eliminate your wastage, and 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.
And consumer behavior matters. An article that I read from AdExchanger this week, again, talks about how people's behavior are shifting away from social media. And as an example, when Facebook saw a drop of a million daily active users in their quarter four, 2021 report comparing to the previous quarter. And more so, consumers worldwide have planned to spend less time on social media in the next six months and it accounts for about 21%.
So one channel may not work and multi-channel may work better. Options of emerging channels are growing and having the right data set, setting clear marketing goals, identifying and profile your customer well, study the channels, especially on the new emerging channels well, know their metrics KPI, and be bold to invest in the new alternative channels after testing. You will get advantage of crunching the new algorithm of those new channels and stay ahead of your competitions with a lean budget, if you are one of the first movers. That's what I observed so far.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 18:20
Yeah, 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. And 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 ad-ops and maybe, Elice, you can later share your expertise on ads and targeting strategy. So you know, to manage all the multi-channels and having the right data environment, what is ad-ops and how will it help these enterprises face these new challenges we have?
Sophie Soowon Eom 19:05
So probably first I’ll explain why we need the right measurement system, why we need ad-ops. I'll first talk about the context. If that's okay.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 19:20
Yeah, sounds good.
Sophie Soowon Eom 19:22
Yeah. So all the challenges that we mentioned before, one key solution that I can suggest is multi-content and multi-channel strategy. Targeting customers across multiple touchpoints became extremely important. Especially because as I said, user journey has become so complicated these days. No one stays on or uses only 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 Tik Tok. And when you wear a hat as an employee, and you 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. So on average, the statistics that 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 does not make sense at all these days. And it's the same for content. People react differently to different type of content, different type of key messages, different type of content, different type of image, video.
I have one example. It's an example of our client, ARKET, it's a brand under H&M group, the fashion group. And they have been updating their ad content almost like every two, three days for about a year. Sometimes they use model images, sometimes product images, sometimes just a huge promotion, intro text image. And of course, they use these content in many different channels. And they have been like an adventure of new media, they always want to try new, emerging social community that just launched their ad platform, and it was actually a big success.
And ARKET was able to have their success because they adopted ad-ops system. And ad-ops basically includes marketing dashboard, where you centralize all the data, which can help you monitor and optimize your multi-channel and also multi-content strategy. And it's not just a dashboard, it will provide insights, and it will provide the way you can act, you can take certain action, like moving your certain budget towards different channels, also change your beat strategy. So ad-ops system includes a dashboard where you can monitor, but also many different features that you can use in order to react to the changes and trends that you see on the dashboard.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 22:45
Okay, so it sounds like part of ad-ops is about being able to manage all these different multi-channels and having the right KPI mix and letting you take action on that. And that's one of the ways we can cope with the challenges. Is that right?
Sophie Soowon Eom 23:01
Yes, yes, right. Well, actually, when you google ad-ops, broadly speaking, it used to refer 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 like a loose definition. The way we define ad-ops 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 that we see.
You need to have the right monitoring system, and you should be able to analyze the data that you see. And 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 actually running ads. And so all these forms ad-ops. And ad-ops is basically a system and culture in an environment that can support the whole process that I just described. And it also helps collaboration between different teams that are in charge of all these different steps of the digital marketing process.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 24:38
Wonderful. So let's get a little more granular. Maybe Elice, if you can share from your expertise on ads and targeting strategy, when in the scope of ad ops. What would you recommend for marketers when it comes to adapting their strategies for advertising?
Elice Lau 24:57
So my experience has been always in the past decade with data companies, which is part of that ad-ops system. And I believe, and I really thank Sophie for sharing all the insights on ad-ops. And per my role and experience with my working clients on ad-ops, usually, it always includes three steps - profiling, targeting, and measurements. And they all work hand in hand, and you need all of them. And of course, you know, if you're setting your number one step, that is the profiling of your customer through data and insights well, your campaign cannot go too wrong.
But, how you profile your right 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? And at AlikeAudience we work hand in hand together with our clients to profile and custom segments for them. Targeting measurements dashboards matters. I've seen one of the top agencies with big metrics table with a very comprehensive dashboard. And 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, coming back to what I mentioned at the beginning, when there's a change, there's always an opportunity and being flexible and being open minded, maximize your opportunity by optimizing the budget, and echoing what Sophie said, at right timing to right channel with the right content matters. For me, by reviewing the previous recession, I will suggest probably it would be wise to be flexible to allocate the annual budget. For example, as a retailer or a 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.
And keep studying the emerging channels. A few emerging channels which could be interesting, NBCU shoppable TV ad formats, which could target housewives for their conversion of last click by having the QR code scan for purchase right at the spot. Netflix ads platform could be another interesting one, Horizon media, PubMatic and other SSPs, DSPs’ new solutions like TTD UIDs. E-commerce platforms like Amazon, Walmart and more emerging platforms are coming.
So all in all profiling your audience segments, know your campaign goals, and look for partners who have expertise to work with you closely. And they could be a consulting, they could be a subject matter of the ecosystem, all matters to you. And last but not least be aware of the legal governance of the 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.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 28:23
Okay, that's very interesting from both your insights from the more overall Ad Management to the more granular profiling, targeting, and measurement. So 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 Soowon Eom 28:46
It sounds kind of obvious, but in order to measure something, you should first centralize data and standardize the analytics. And you can fully leverage automation in order to give it. So 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 it will eventually help adjust the marketing mix based on what worked and what didn't. So huge brands, even marketing gurus like Nike or Samsung Electronics, they're also actively looking for the right measurement tools and media mix optimizer.
And Adriel provides ad-ops, including marketing dashboard, where you can send text, all centralized data visualization and media mix optimizer. And you can allow you to centralize all the data from different channels and optimize a marketing mix. And 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.
So robust Digital Analytics setup also tells you, it's also important because it can tell you whether your site interaction effectively generate 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. And Google Analytics 4, GA4 is coming next year. So you should be prepared to upgrade the version and try to get used to GA4 because it's quite different from GA3.
Other than analytics, search engine optimization tools are also recommended. It includes Google Search Console, Google Trends, Semrush, Moz Pro, all these are kind of the suite of the right measurement tools. But what's important is your determination to collect actively user data. And for that, it's crucial that you invest in the right tool at the right time.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 31:16
Oh, absolutely. So it sounds like having these right tools and centralizing all the data will also help marketers deal with these challenges. Going back to what Elice was saying about testing all 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 31:43
Yeah, measurement is always been a hot topic as well, because of the emerging channels that enable advertisement. And 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, if your audiences are being targeted on connecting TV, say, Netflix has just announced that they have appointed DoubleVerify as their measurement company. And I personally would suggest every company should do A/B testing on the measurement by ideally having another third-party solution with comprehensive dashboard.
I've seen brands, they develop solutions in-house. And however channels are tremendous, the effort that being developed in-house can be wasted or one day it is useful, but the next day it is already obsolete. It's because we're not utilizing that channel anymore. So appointing a comprehensive third-party solution could be the way to save your budget during the recession while you are achieving your measurement goals at the same time.
Jessica Lam Hill Young 32:56
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 ad-ops 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.