Hollywood’s Biggest Trade Show Runs 25 Million Online Ads – Triples RTB, Adds Lookalikes

Encore client, American Film Market (AFM), wrapped up its 8-day run last week, with an increase in exhibitors, buyers and attendees.

More of the filmmakers, producers, buyers and other industry professionals from 80+ countries that attended the 35th edition of AFM came from digital media than ever before as the event organizer continued to execute on its multi-year strategy of moving ad spend from print to digital.

Due to a 3x increase in real-time bidding (RTB) ads, AFM was able to employ more sophisticated audience targeting and substantially boost its total online ad buy to more than 25 million impressions, which included both RTB and publisher-direct ad inventory.

One of AFM’s new audience targeting tactics for the 2014 edition was “lookalike targeting” (also referred to as “audience extension”, “audience expansion” and “similar audiences”), the process of finding new prospects that “look like” your current audiences i.e. they have similar behaviors and/or characteristics.

Simply put, the lookalike targeting included three steps…

(1) A profile of AFM’s attendee target set was developed using 1st party data, most specifically, anonymous data on its web site activity.

(2) This aggregate profile of AFM’s attendees was compared to large, anonymous 3rd party audience/cookie pools, and new lookalike audiences of potential attendees were created based on users across the web with similar traits to the profile.

(3) AFM was then able to deliver several million ads against these lookalikes through online RTB.

In order to optimize the lookalike ad spend, AFM layered on geo-targeting parameters to focus impression delivery in countries that were priority targets for the show, and used a bid strategy specific to this channel.

Lookalike targeting enabled AFM to further activate its 1st party data, reach potential attendees who have not previously visited the show web site, and cost-effectively scale its audience/cookie pool.

Posted on November 19, 2014