Most of the advertisers that have shared early results from the Facebook Exchange are small- to mid-sized, direct response focused companies (AdExchanger story). On the list are Shutterfly, Hootsuite, GoPro, and SurveyMonkey.
But that’s slowly changing. Media agency Arena Media is going public with data from Dominos pizza delivery, a much larger brand. During a week-long campaign (Aug 25 to 31), Arena used demand side platform MediaMath and its T1 platform to buy FBX ads promoting Dominos in the UK.
The results were impressive to client and agency, who said FBX Facebook delivered substantially lower cost-per-sale (CPS) than standard real time bidding. Not only that, it beat CPS for search ads on non-brand keywords (i.e. “Pizza” not “Pizza Hut”) with a 62 percent lower CPS.
Those results make it clear that even for Domino’s, this is a performance channel. Simon Wallis, Sales and Marketing Director at Dominos Pizza UK, put it this way in a statement: “Facebook has always been an important part of our marketing mix. FBX is a significant innovation which will allow us to further develop Facebook as an acquisition channel, building on our social success.”
Through its in-house programmatic buying team, Havas-owned Arena uses MediaMath to place RTB campaigns across a range of display ad supply sources. It says all sales measured as part of this case study were “incremental and post-click only,” meaning view-through conversions were screened out and only sales were only counted that came directly downstream from the ad.
Arena Media takes an integrated approach to its online media trading efforts, including social, display, broadcast and other channels. Ben Downing, head of programmatic buying, tells AdExchanger he doesn’t think of his team as a “trading desk.” He says, “We operate more like an agency department than a trading desk. We believe that programmatic buying has come of age and needs to be delivered in an integrated way alongside TV, search, press etc.”
Arena’s programmatic media operation employs 6 people who place buys through MediaMath. It does not work with Digilant, the former in-house trading desk at Havas (previously Adnetik), which was spun off within the last two years but still has a big relationship with the agency holding company.
