Digital Brand Marketing in fragmented times

Brian Griffin – Digital Marketing Executive – The Marketing Institute

From having to microwave magnetic tape in a small music studio in Spiddal to real-time bidding, Julian Douglas (entertainment.ie) says that even in the digital world “keeping control is impossible; you’ve got to let it go”.

At our latest Marketing @ Night event, Julian spoke about his journey into the online world and took us through the evolution of the media to what’s happening right now. And it appears that one of the things that’s happening right now is real-time bidding.

Real-time bidding is a new tool that allows us to buy an audience as opposed to buying a publication or a placement. This makes it possible to buy only the single impressions that fit our campaign goals, and at a price you can afford.

Here’s an example: A user spends a lot of time on motoring forums, checking new models and looking up reviews. They arrive on a webpage that uses Real-Time Bidding (RTB) to serve ads. On the back end, a budget car manufacturer has specified that they are looking for users that are interested in new family saloons. A luxury carmaker has also indicated interest in this audience. The RTB system matches these advertisers with the user profile and they bid on the ad. Whoever has the highest bid wins, and their ad gets consumed.

As Managing Director of entertainment.ie, the first of Julian’s golden rules, from an online publisher’s perspective, is that the audience must be local. His content is local and so is his advertising. Makes sense. Julian also put a lot of emphasis on the importance of the relevance and context of the Ad. His last golden rule is the Energy of his brand. Most of us are familiar with the terms local and context, but the ears in the room pricked up when Julian spoke about Brand Energy. He explained that this means providing a canvas that allows advertisers to “move somebody with their brand.”  To give an opportunity for the creative to be… well… creative.

Julian demonstrated how entertainment.ie accommodates homepage takeovers and their homepage looks like it was designed with this in mind. He showed us an example of one of their take-overs, it looked great, and this was no accident. “When a brand comes into us, we really like to look after it.”

For the non-designer types out there, a homepage takeover utilises all of the available ad space on a homepage. Below is a screenshot of a homepage takeover taken from entertainment.ie.

Homepage Takeover for the current Bulmers campaign (June 2012)  – entertainment.ie

Creative use of the space and the super slick video from the TV campaign (displayed in the Mid Page Unit – MPU) shows that entertainment.ie understand how best to utilise the medium.

I have seen a few homepage takeover fails on websites that shall remain nameless, and it isn’t pretty. Poor Tiling, zero creativity and a total lack of banner integration rendering the whole exercise a waste of time and money.

Julian gave us an hour, and if the Q&A session wasn’t managed so capably by Conor Crowley from Upstream Digital, it could have gone on a lot longer.

Please click here to watch an interview we had with Julian before the presentation.

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