Summary
All too often, ad providers overpromise to win your business — only to underdeliver and leave you searching for a better provider with the money you have left. Instead of a directly measurable return on investment, you’re stuck with vague assurances about high-quality impressions and promises that true results come with each additional campaign you sign on for.
It comes as no surprise to hear that brands are tired of it, and the shift toward in-house advertising teams is a result. But there is still a problem. According to the “Nielsen CMO Report 2018” only 25% of marketers are confident that they can accurately quantify the ROI of their campaigns.
As an industry, we can do better.
Get to Work Aligning Goals
A brand exists to sell a product or service, not to put out ads. While metrics such as “engagement” are often easy to measure and interesting to discuss, it’s more foot traffic and higher sales that you want when you drop an ad campaign. The goal must be performance—moving more products off the store shelf, cars off of the dealer lot, or policies from agents.
Anything else is a wasted ad spend, and wasted advertising ultimately leaves no one satisfied: brands feel cheated and solution providers feel the weight of impossible demands.
At Valassis, we work hard to ensure our customers aren’t paying for wasted impressions. Our strongest defense is our data and our technology that’s focused on optimizing for real results, not merely impressions. Instead of someone simply seeing the ad, we want that person to walk into the store and take a product off the shelf or look for more information about a brand online and research its products.
Since entering the digital space, we’ve been focused on driving sales and delivering results. Valassis is breaking the mold in distinct, measurable ways.
1. Providing the best location data
You don’t need to know where people are — you need to know where your people are. We look beyond GPS coordinates and use a store visit profile and other details to identify your target market. Then, we determine how this audience wants to engage with your brand based on its existing channel and timing preferences. Location data can be incredibly powerful, but it’s not about finding where a random crowd is gathering; it’s about getting the right crowd in your store.
2. Providing a unified intent engine
Most advertisers looking to execute targeted digital ads find that they must work with multiple providers, meaning they are constantly moving data from place to place. And the unintended and unfortunate side effect is that important insights are regularly lost to data leakage. Valassis offers a unique approach that we call the “unified intent engine,” which enables brands to go from capturing and reading consumer signals to analyzing and redeploying insights from campaigns — all within a closed, connected loop.
3. Ensuring campaign feedback drives future success
The conclusion of a campaign is just the beginning. Campaign data affords an in-depth look at which advertising approaches work the best and which need to be updated or eliminated. With these findings, Valassis informs every other advertising initiative down to the SKU level, allowing for a process of constant optimization and improvement.
We believe the model that many digital ad vendors currently stand on is broken, and the companies paying these vendors are the ones falling through the cracks. If you’re ready to see how Valassis brings performance to the advertising ecosystem, read our white paper on driving digital ad performance.
