Hollywood’s Largest Trade Show Runs 35 Million Online Ads

Encore client, American Film Market (AFM), deployed its largest online advertising campaign ever to attract industry professionals from around the world to its 36th edition, which wrapped up its eight-day run in Santa Monica a few weeks ago.

The global b2b event, which has launched over 10,000 films and drives more than one billion dollars in film deals annually, ran 35 million digital ad impressions across display, social, mobile, search, video and native, which were purchased using traditional and programmatic tools.

Granular transparency and control provided by AFM’s advertising vendors were key drivers of the show’s digital media strategy, especially in enabling AFM to see where it was getting the best results and optimize its ad spend.

Here are some insights from the campaign…

Creative Assets: One Monday a few months out from the show, AFM posted a set of infographics across its social net accounts linked to a dedicated landing page on the show website. By Wednesday, it was the third most viewed page on the website, with an average time on page of seven minutes.  This data was used to inform AFM’s advertising strategy, which immediately deployed this content marketing asset across its retargeting, paid social and look-alike campaigns.

The ability to swap out creative assets on a real-time basis, and leverage creative transparency, enabled AFM to continually optimize against its winners, such as these infographics which became one of the campaign’s best performing creative assets.

Media Buying: While native in-feed ads were the most expensive units AFM purchased, granular visibility into performance enabled AFM to see that added-value (no-charge) social actions driven by these ads were substantially reducing its effective cost-per-engagement (eCPE), in one case by more than 50%.  Capitalizing on the flexibility provided by its media buying platforms to adjust ad spends on-the-fly, AFM shifted more ad spend to this format – a reallocation which helped boost ROI.

Ad Placement: By having domain-level reporting for impressions acquired through real-time bidding (RTB), AFM was able to see what sites its ads were running on, and identify opportunities and problems it would not otherwise have seen. For example, this transparency enabled AFM to notice “unusual activity” on some placements, which were removed immediately to avoid wasted ad spend. AFM also used this granular control over placements to negatively target entire categories of sites as well as remove specific sites, which were not appropriate for the show.

Audience Segmentation: AFM’s campaign employed multiple cookie durations, and its reporting data showed material differentials in engagement based on cookie age i.e. how long ago someone last visited the show website. For example, in one ad buy run against two different durations, with a 4x differential in the maximum age between the oldest and newest cookie pools, there was a 75% CTR variance between the two audience segments. In-flight optimization of the ad buy against the optimal cookie pool not only resulted in a substantially lower CPC but also higher reach.

Bidding Strategy: Granular control over bidding and transparent reporting enabled AFM to best target its ad spend. AFM bid aggressively for ads bought on an auction basis to reach certain audience segments due to the significant spreads it was seeing between its bids and the clear prices it actually paid. In one ad buy, AFM increased its bid by 67% to win more ads, yet the clear price only increased by 33%. AFM also adjusted bids on ad placements so it could win more ads on specific domains, and control the amount of ads showing on desktop vs. mobile devices.

As you seek to maximize attendance and other results from your online promotion, choose digital marketing vendors that will give you the granular transparency and control that AFM had in its campaign.

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Posted on November 24, 2015