Paid Media - Mason Interactive

Mason Interactive is proud to announce that we are expanding our programmatic advertising capabilities with a seat at The Trade Desk, and that we’ve a new media team to manage our clients advertising on the Trade Desk.

The Trade Desk is the leading demand-side platform (DSP), a platform for advertisers to purchase and manage digital advertising campaigns across various channels and devices, including display, mobile, video, audio, and connected TV. It provides access to the world’s largest inventory of digital media, and integrates with various data providers, while offering advanced targeting capabilities, audience segmentation, and contextual targeting.

With this new partnership, Mason Interactive is proud to offer clients a comprehensive suite of services to help them reach their goals. The Trade Desk’s advanced technology will enable our teams to make data-driven decisions and measure the performance of campaigns in real-time.

As we continue to stress the importance of diversifying spend across alternative platforms – and ultimately becoming less reliant on Meta and Google – here are a few reasons why The Trade Desk could be right for you:

Reach a broader audience

Diversifying the media mix allows brands to reach a broader audience by utilizing different channels and tactics to engage with customers.

Reduce risk

Relying on a single marketing channel or tactic can be risky because changes in the market or industry could have a significant impact on the effectiveness of that channel. By diversifying your overall media mix, brands can reduce their risk by spreading their marketing efforts across different channels and tactics.

Increase brand awareness

Exploring new channels to engage with customers can increase brand awareness and help brands reach new customers who may not have been reached through their current marketing channels.

Adapt to changing consumer behavior

Consumer behavior is constantly evolving, and diversifying your media mix allows brands to adapt to these changes by utilizing new channels that are more aligned with changing consumer preferences.

This new partnership will provide our clients with the tools they need to succeed in today’s increasingly competitive digital landscape. We are excited to offer our clients access to The Trade Desk’s innovative platform and help them take their campaigns to the next level.

If you’d like to learn more about how Mason Interactive can help you reach your goals with The Trade Desk, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We look forward to working with you!

Introducing Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns

It’s no secret that Meta platforms’ performance is impacted by Apple’s iOS 14.5. Apple’s relentless focus on user data privacy resulted in signal loss, changes to targeting capabilities, and most critically, measurement.

Our view: Instagram and Facebook aren’t broken, they’re different. As industry standards evolve, so do the platforms we use, whether for social connections, community and brand building, or business growth and development. This makes the landscape more uncertain, the data more difficult to read, and the insight more challenging to articulate.

Meta has rolled out Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns globally. ASC use artificial intelligence to enable e-commerce and retail direct-to-consumer brands to potentially achieve better performance, greater personalization and more efficiency through advancements in AI + machine learning. These campaigns provide greater flexibility to control creative, targeting, placements and budget, and more opportunities to optimize campaigns that drive conversions.

What are Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns and how does it work?

Simply put, ASC falls under Meta’s new suite of Total Advantage tools. While Advantage tools are designed to automate a specific part of a manual campaign, Advantage+ focuses on automating a campaign from beginning to end or part of a manual campaign (e.g., placements or creative).

Here’s a simple overview:

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns offer end-to-end automation and support dynamic and static ads

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns combine Prospecting and Remarketing strategies in one campaign

Meta does not see ASC replacing existing products, and it is recommended to test and learn across current Business as Usual (BAU) campaigns

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are designed for Broad reach, removing campaign restraints

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are designed to automate creative, resulting in less audience saturation

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns can test up to 150 creative combinations, reducing creative fatigue

If you’re looking to make your advertising operations more efficient and drive performance at the same time, Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns are worth looking into. If you’re not already a Mason client, book a consultation with our team and we’ll work on a tailored approach for your brand, together.

Google is constantly rolling out new capabilities to make ad targeting more accurate and efficient. Performance max campaigns are a part of that toolbox. Here’s a quick video from Google that sums them up:

We’ve said it time and time again – the marketing landscape is changing. Ad platforms shifting to prioritize user privacy means we have to rethink our approach.

Implementing Google’s tools and solutions available today will help brands prepare for the next generation of performance marketing. Performance Max campaigns are one piece of the big puzzle to help us in that transition.

Now, let’s get into how we can use performance marketing campaigns to maximize campaign performance.

What are Performance Max Campaigns?

Performance max campaigns are a part of Google’s new approach for making local and shopping campaign management more efficient. They allow you to access all your Google Ad channels from a single campaign–freeing you to allocate more time to other aspects of your ad strategy.

Source: Google

How do they work?

Leveraging automation, performance max campaigns will mix your visual creative, copy assets, and audience signals to figure out what combination of them performs best on each channel your ads appear on. You can even preview how these varied combinations will appear before publishing.

Source: Google

Your ad campaigns’ audience signals will be paired with machine learning to make sure your ads reach the audiences with the highest intent at the right time. Owning your brand’s first-party data is crucial for the targeting to work, and here’s a quick post on how to do that.

Source: Google

Let’s take Guesswork out of your Google Ads.

If you’re looking to make your advertising operations more efficient and drive performance at the same time, Performance Max campaigns are worth looking into. If you’re not already a Mason client, book a consultation with our team and we’ll work on a tailored approach for your brand, together.

Mason recently hosted an interactive webinar with Meta to talk about how Conversions API can help to strengthen ad performance & reporting.

If you weren’t able to attend, or simply wish to relive the session, you can rewatch here.

Why this matters:

Web browsers and platforms are enacting new policies meant to align with a future without cookies. These changes will weaken insights you’re used to accessing–Conversions API (or CAPI for short) is here to help us navigate around that.

CAPI is meant to work with the Pixel and as an alternative to the Pixel. What does this mean exactly? Much like GA4, CAPI is meant to work alongside tracking you already have in place in order to collect valuable data you can leverage after cookies are phased out.

Source: Meta

Should you implement CAPI today?

In short, yes. Without conversion optimization, brands typically see higher CPAs.

It’s recommended that brands implement CAPI as soon as possible–not only to allow time to onboard technical teams, but also for testing & evaluating the quality of the data you’re collecting.

For more information on this, access a helpful document from Meta here.

Source: Meta

The digital landscape shifts with a new emphasis on user privacy, but it’s still possible to leverage data to reach new audiences and accurately track your efforts.

Check out the recording of Strengthen Your Brand’s Ad Performance for more information, and if you’re not already a Mason client, you can start your journey here.

Picture your eCommerce site as a physical store. Now, imagine your wholesale retail buyers as the businesses next door. Sure your products get sold either way, but you still want to make the sale yourself, right?

Small and medium-sized D2C brands often depend on third-party retailers for exposure to larger audiences. However, the risks include not only loss of revenue, but the opportunity to capture the first-party data needed for future sales & growth.

This is not to say that it’s a bad thing to sell your products through a larger retailer, that’s great!

However, when high-intent users directly search for your brand, you should rank higher than your retailer.

In fact, you lose big time when you don’t.

Ex: A direct search for Hamilton Dress Shirts gives 5 results for 3rd party retailers & none for the actual brand.

The right media strategy puts you in a position to make the sale and capture the first-party data you need to succeed in today’s digital landscape. The wrong media strategy surrenders sales opportunities to retailers that bid for on brand terms.

Here are a few things to think about when balancing your DTC & B2B strategies.

What’s at Stake

A few things happen when a retailer ranks higher than you on your terms. For one, they have a better chance than you to win sales. With that sale comes the opportunity to collect the customer’s first-party data, which means you won’t be able to directly engage your most likely buyers via social media, email, ads, and more. This doesn’t just affect prospect customers. First-party data can help drive brand loyalty & future sales, and you’d lose out on that too.

Going forward it’s going to be incredibly important to build authentic relationships with your customers, and it will be harder to do if you’re not appearing in direct searches.

Stop competing against yourself.

It’s entirely possible to balance your B2B relationships while owning & growing your own customer base.

At Mason Interactive, we have 13 years of experience working with DTC brands that also have a physical retail presence. We can help optimize your media strategy so you can capture your most high-intent prospects. Set a meeting with us today to learn more.

We’re excited to announce that Mason Interactive recently added the International Center of Photography, a world renowned institution dedicated to the practice and understanding of photography, to our portfolio of notorious New York brands.

Founded in 1974 by Cornell Capa, ICP continues to champion “concerned photography” — socially and politically minded images that can educate and change the world. Since its inception, ICP has presented more than 700 exhibitions and provided thousands of classes to artists, scholars, and students worldwide.

CONTACT HIGH | A Visual History of Hip-Hop

Image: Barron Claiborne, Biggie Smalls, King of New York, Wall Street, New York, 1997.

This exciting new partnership will focus on growing awareness and driving qualified leads through a long-term digital marketing strategy that will center around the institution’s One-Year Certificate program. The Mason Paid Media + SEO strategy teams will be responsible for increasing YoY revenue, and working with the ICP team to explore new channel opportunities, with an emphasis on driving new enrollments and brand loyalty.

Learn more about ICP and plan your visit to visit the new location at 79 Essex Street in New York.