Social platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook offer huge opportunities for marketers. They are the new de facto gatekeepers to huge audiences, and there are very few other means to reach younger audiences at scale with ease. But that access comes with trade-offs, and different platforms emerge and disappear rapidly. As part of our Predictions season, The Drum Network seeks to examine where brands and agencies fit into that environment.
Influencer marketing has become one of the most effective ways for brands to reach new audiences, build trust, and drive sales. But for new brands, getting started can feel overwhelming. How do you find influencers? How much should you pay? And how do you know if it's working? This guide breaks down influencer marketing step by step, so even brands with no prior experience can launch their first campaign with confidence.
Just like rock and roll, Black Friday is something imported from the USA that has gone from niche to consumer frenzy levels in a few short years. What originally started as a physical retail initiative has now morphed into a digital one, with offers pinging onto our phones as customers spend more of their lives in the digital, mobile-first realm. With so many brand vying for customers attention, paid online activity is a necessity in developing a smart strategy to win customers not only at this time of year, but to also inform your strategy for the future.
Using Anonymised's privacy-by-design, on-device technology, Audience Lift creates multiple people-based audiences that unlock smarter lookalikes and diversified targeting. Audience Lift enables advertisers to launch interest and intent-based audience strategies, allowing each audience to compete for performance across social and search channels. The solution instantly identifies which behaviours drive the highest conversion value and continuously refines targeting based on real-time performance feedback.
His confident presentation wasn't a nostalgia tour, but served as a dynamic advert for his Merit TV - a bold, multi-platform network that he claims will "own the debate lane," connect with underserved audiences, and deliver real value to brands. "This is not just another presentation," Dr Phil assured attendees. "I want to talk about things that matter to people who care. That's the mission."
1. Outdated media mix models offered by major consulting houses weight older media forms like broadcast and cable more than new forms of media or ignore them completely. 2. Media fragmentation has muddied the marketplace with hundreds of new channels. 3. New media forms don't have or haven't built platforms allowing advertising at scale. 4. Bureaucracy. Large marketing organizations are slow movers, despite audiences moving elsewhere. 5. Change is hard. Lazy marketers stick to what has worked in the past, ignoring audience shifts.
The FX half-hour comedy about a group of recent college graduates in New York begins, naturally, on the subway; what seems like an over-studied portrait of early adulthood intimacy tangled limbs, in-group references, aggressively relaxed banter quickly devolves into a standoff between a creepy subway masturbator and the group's instigator, Issa (Amita Rao), trying to out-masturbate him to make a wildly off point about feminism.
And now, Reddit's redesigned its audience setup process, in order to make campaign creation "more intuitive and streamlined." As part of this update, automated targeting can now be used with custom audiences. This changes the logic between custom audiences and other audience suggestions from an AND to an OR relationship. Similarly, demographic settings such as gender will also follow an OR relationship when automated targeting is used.
It's great to see Google continuing to expand the promotional flexibility of Merchant Center. The ability to target specific customer groups opens up more strategic possibilities, especially when combining promotions with product-level performance data. That said, it's somewhat puzzling why new customer targeting is only available for Shopping ads, while location targeting is limited to organic searches. Both options should be available across all listing types, especially when running region-specific campaigns or in-store promotions.
Sam Meller is the Head of Social for The Hustle, but we briefly got to borrow her for Masters in Marketing, because she makes everything she touches better. That's how I got a chance to hear about a tactical content shift that led to a startling 35,000% increase in visibility on LinkedIn. When I heard this story, y'all, I threw an Asana card on our editorial calendar so fast I nearly broke my clickin' finger.
LightBoxTV is proud to announce a strategic integration with Outra, the UK's leading provider of predictive property and location data. The collaboration will empower TV advertisers with the ability to plan and optimise campaigns based on highly accurate geographic and life-stage insights - bringing a new dimension of localisation and relevance to TV targeting strategies. Outra's household-level data goes beyond typical postcodes, offering a clear view of where high-value customers live, their home ownership status, affluence levels, and future propensity to move or convert.
On Wednesday, Cognitiv released the latest version of ContextGPT, which allows brands to provide more detailed and specific targeting parameters in order to optimize ad performance, Aaron Andalman, co-founder and chief science officer of Cognitiv, told AdExchanger. Brand suitability used to rely solely on keywords, said Andalman, but Cognitiv's technology understands content situationally based on how words are being used.
Audience planning has long relied on segmentation. It's how we bring structure to the chaos - turning abstract brand personas into something targetable and measurable. But the way we define audiences hasn't kept pace with the way people actually behave. Today's media environment is fragmented, fast-moving, and deeply personal. People don't consume content in neat, linear ways. They're scrolling, streaming, skipping, switching. And yet, much of our audience strategy is still based on static, retrospective data: a collection of pre-built segments, often designed for another time, place, or platform.
Omnichannel planning and activation benefit from fragmentation by maximizing advertising budget through reaching audiences across diverse screens, platforms, and media channels.
Advertisers on Vevo can already tap into our existing toolbox to maximise their campaign effectiveness...but now, we are further enhancing our capabilities within audience attributes and affinities.