Six Media Trends to Take Advantage of This Holiday Season

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This Q4 is expected to be unlike any other. Consumer behavior will likely maintain the same offline-to-online shifts that have been in play since March. However, family events, shopping, and travel plans look different than years past. Here are seven trends for navigating Q4 and the upcoming holiday season, keeping COVID in mind. Take Advantage of the Online Shopping Increase Audiences will be shopping online rather than in stores, which opens up more opportunities for your brand to bring awareness, impact consideration or drive action since ad spaces in shopping malls and roadways are far more limited. Get strategic and add review, “top 10” consumer reports, and blogs to your Custom Intent or channel target lists to appear while shoppers are already deciding what options are best. Or run deals with Wayfair, Kohl’s and Target to be right where the action is. Mobility Recovery Reports are a BIG Thing Now Mobile data companies have recently developed mobility recovery databases to inform buyers of the geographies recovering from COVID-19 stay-at-home sentiments. Use them to strategically plan and measure your Q4 campaigns.  Discover geographies to slowly build a presence in again or analyze campaign performance against mobile device trends. Pro-tip: include mobility report findings in your client-facing wrap-up reports for added context and analysis! No matter the need, mobility trends data will help you out. Check out the free editions from Google , NinthDecimal , Foursquare and GroundTruth , or reach out to them for deeper analysis. Extend Your Personal Diversity Efforts into Your Programmatic Targeting COVID-19 hasn’t been the only shift in 2020. More humans and companies are taking efforts to listen, learn and implement changes in their everyday lives. Consider reviewing your targeting and suppression lists to ensure you’re using analytics and measurement data to inform who you should target. Remove unconscious bias and perhaps consider giving your block and inclusion lists a refresh — you’ll likely learn something new about your audience and how they interact with your brand! Dating Apps Are Seeing an Influx of New Users  Many Americans continue to shelter in place and have had to shift from meeting people on-the-go to meeting people via online dating services. This holiday season likely won’t change that. eMarketer forecasts the number of smartphone dating app users in the US will reach 26.6 million this year, an increase of 18.4% from 2019. Extend your audience reach into dating apps to complete your customer journey while users are actively looking for a meaningful connection. iOS14 Is Causing Shake Ups, But It’s Not All Bad Facebook recently stated that Apple’s iOS 14 could cause a 50% drop in its Audience Network advertising business. If your campaigns are affected, move those social dollars into programmatic this Q4 season and beyond with DV360. Google not only has signed-in user data across YouTube and Gmail, but they have made enhancements to their machine learning algorithms to implement conversion modeling across Safari browsers. Now, you won’t lose out on measuring this holiday season’s online sales boom.  In general, programmatic offers inventory directly with publishers who offer DV360 brings the scale and measurement that Facebook may lose.   Pro-Tip: Merge two trends into one and run Match Media Group/Tinder deals in DV360. They have targetable first-party Apple inventory that can be a strong stop-gap to carry on without the IDFA. Podcast Ad Spending Is Taking More Market Share from Digital Radio Podcasts will remain strong for listeners, and even stronger for media buyers, as 2020 comes to a close. Work commutes are dwindling but audiences are continuing to enjoy consuming informational and entertaining audio content.  According to eMarketer’s latest forecast, US podcast ad spending will surpass 20% of digital radio ad spending this year and then cross the $1 billion mark next year. Be sure to incorporate this valuable inventory and buy podcast inventory programmatically or direct.  If you’re launching in DV360, begin with deals. Negotiate your own or get started right away with Adswerve and Google-curated. deals with Spotify, Triton and UNIFD. We can also help get you the information you need to negotiate your own deal with podcast inventory providers who do not offer Always On deals, like TuneIn. Search Dollars Remain Strong, So Bring Those Learnings to Programmatic Search did not take a hit in 2020 like other forms of media. Media buyers have a unique year’s worth of insights that can be leveraged on other audience buying platforms, like DV360. Dive into your Search trend data in Google Ads to identify keyword strategies for DV360 or build clicker audiences in SA360 to target in DV360.