Forrester senior analyst of performance marketing Nikhil Lai will be speaking at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference on October 17-18 in New York City. Click here to register.
With measurement and identity in flux and an economic downturn looming, marketers care more about business outcomes.
They want to hold their dollars accountable and make those dollars go further. That trend means Forrester Senior Analyst Nikhil Lai, who covers performance marketing, took on his current position at just the right time (yet another key tenet of performance marketing).
The levers that marketers used to pull to power performance, like hyper-targeted Facebook campaigns, just aren’t working anymore. “Signal loss is having a material impact on performance,” Lai says.
Given Facebook’s ballooning cost-per-acquisition rates, Lai sees many DTC brands investing in two other places: compelling creative and contextual signals. “These two non-audience-based tactics are less reliant on invasive audience targeting,” he says.
Addressability remains, but it’s become a spectrum. Consumer consent and the depth of information varies, and each level requires a different approach. The result is that brands must design experiences for people who are OK with addressability and for those that aren’t. Lai also advocates more nuanced measurement approaches that take into account the fact that advertising in one channel creates a halo effect for other channels.
TV advertising, for example, leads to a rise in branded search terms, which are cheaper keywords for brands to monetize. “TV plus digital is a more profitable way to compete for clicks,” he says. “I think that marketers need to understand that reality.”
From the need to think about addressability on a spectrum to a more nuanced understanding of cross-channel measurement, brands have a lot on their plate. But when it gets complicated, Lai says, marketers should look for guidance on a single front: Just pay attention to what their customers want.
Also in this episode: the role Facebook ads played in determining Brexit and predictions about Netflix’s AVOD experience.
For more articles featuring Nikhil Lai, click here.
