Addressability means taking the opportunity to speak to customers based on what marketers know about them — who they are, what their interests are and how they've interacted with a brand to date. According to Liz Rutgersson, Head of Programmatic Display at Periscopix, audiences want addressability and actually engage better when they're targeted with a message that's appropriate to them. Here she discusses examples of luxury brands putting addressability into action.
Addressability isn't new — one of the most common forms of addressable media is direct mail. You can look at your customer database to see home addresses and what people have purchased in the past in order to send a piece of direct mail that's relevant to a given consumer.
Addressing audiences in this way works in digital, too. Email offers the first instance of addressable media becoming digital. It's relatively simple to use a customer database together with details from your customer relationship management system to send newsletters tailored to certain groups of consumers.
Now this is possible across social media, and it's becoming more possible across display and in search. The great thing about programmatic is that you can choose to target ads to users based on all kinds of criteria and combinations of criteria — gender, interest, geographical location, device, income, search history and so on. Gone are the days where we had to serve the same ad to every single person; now we really can make messages individualistic.
The recent work we did for our client 77 Diamonds provides an illustration. We first wanted to understand the 77 Diamonds audience in order to use digital to speak to them appropriately. We looked at onsite analytics and discovered that 60% of the brand's traffic was female. We created three different search ads texts: the first spoke to men ("unsure what to buy?"), the second spoke to women ("find your perfect ring") and the final addressed people who were near the retail location ("visit our showroom for expert advice"). In just one week, the click-through rate for that all-important female audience went up 33%.
Our work with Orlebar Brown shows how dynamic creative enables message changes to happen automatically. They launched a video campaign that includes four pieces of content, each one designed around a different demographic profile. Audiences can self-select which one they want to watch. Using digital in this clever way means we can serve an ad to the audience that's most likely to resonate with a given story.
Temperley is another client seizing the opportunities of addressable media in a very smart way. Using storytelling together with sequential storytelling, they're able to take consumers through the funnel from introducing them to the brand to real engagement and hopefully a purchase at the end. Their campaign centred on London Fashion Week and included three videos. The first was a general introduction. Of the pool of users who engaged with that, we could then show a video showing the preparations for the upcoming fashion show. Then for those users who engaged with both videos, we knew they would be most likely to want to see a third post-show video. With programmatic, it's then possible to remarket to this group again once the collection is live on the site.
If you're getting more traffic to your site at the same budget — and arguably reaching more qualified consumers because they're seeing a message that's targeted to them — then you can imagine the impact that has on your return on investment.
