Leveraging Entertainment Events: No Longer Just a Job for Social Media

In an era when consumers are inundated with marketing messages, delivering relevant and resonant digital brand advertising is more important than ever.

One way brands have done this is to create social media campaigns that align with major live entertainment events – think Samsung during the 2014 Academy Awards, or Oreo during the 2013 Super Bowl. These brands managed to leverage real-time entertainment moments to garner attention for themselves, all while staying on-message.

Using social media in this way is a smart strategy for brand marketing, but brands also have a significant opportunity to achieve the same kind of engagement and impact year-round by working with entertainment publishers. All that is required is the ability to select the right publishers to work with on high-impact, creative campaigns, and the technology to execute their creative strategies to maximum effect.

Direct order automation presents just that opportunity for brand advertisers.

How It Works

Direct order automation achieves just what the name suggests. It is a marketplace technology platform that enables brands to discover the right publishing and mobile app partners (or onboard relationships with existing ones), and then execute their advertising buys and launch their campaigns. The execution capabilities involve everything from streamlining pre-campaign workflow to setting the parameters for how that direct deal should be delivered on the publisher’s site or mobile app. Direct order automation can facilitate three major steps for creating a successful campaign:

1. Discovering Ideal Publisher Partners

Through direct order automation, brands can discover the ideal entertainment publishers and mobile apps with whom they should strike direct deals. To select the right mix of entertainment publishers, brands can use their own data to discover which audiences most overlap with their own. They can also use intelligence from their exchange buys to discover those entertainment publishers that have traditionally performed well for their brand.

2. Getting Creative

Brands maximize their opportunity with entertainment publishers and mobile apps if they develop entertainment-focused creative that speaks to that audience in context. Publishers themselves are great sources of insights about their audiences and the creative executions that will work best. And by using automation to execute their direct buys, brands open up the possibilities to use publisher data to optimize delivery of their campaigns.

This can matter a lot for entertainment-minded campaigns. Creative that references the Super Bowl can leverage playoff fervor in the run-up to the big game. A campaign that references a hit television series might cite a major “whodunit” plotline in the run-up to the finale. Publishers will have the institutional knowledge to help brands create high-impact and authentic creative that speaks effectively to those audiences. With automated guaranteed, brands and their agencies are free to explore these possibilities with publishers, and use technology to meet delivery requirements for those ideas, including the timing, sequence, and frequency of creative over the course of the campaign.

3. Connecting to Real-Time Events

Ultimately, these strategies can dovetail nicely with brands’ promotional strategies on Twitter, a medium that’s still ideal for real-time engagement with audiences watching entertainment programming. Just last week, Nielsen released the results of a study about Twitter sentiment which concluded that “advertising in highly social programs could be an opportunity to drive both advertising memorability and sales outcomes.” By adding a pre-event dimension to their entertainment-focused digital advertising, brands can foreshadow those real-time strategies and ultimately enhance their effect.

This year’s awards season is behind us, but some major television finales and high-stakes sporting events are just ahead. I encourage brands to imagine how they might use audiences’ zeal and significant investment in these events to push brand messages in a fun, relatable, and effective way, by pairing both direct relationships with entertainment media owners and the technology that can help them find those relationships and execute their ideas. Direct order automation is up to that task.