Activating Omnichannel Audience Data for Social Campaigns

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Eyeota Audience Data Session: The At Home Edition!

You can now activate Eyeota audiences on social channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat through our unique partnership with Amobee. Watch this discussion between Kristina Prokop, CEO of Eyeota, and Luke Hathaway VP, Social from Amobee to learn why you should include omnichannel audience profiles in your social media advertising campaigns.

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Don't want to watch the video? Read the transcript instead!

Kristina Prokop:

Hi everyone. I'm Kristina Prokop, CEO, and co-founder of Eyeota and I'm very happy to welcome you to the next installment of the Eyeota Audience Data Sessions this week with Amobee. So I'm very happy to have Luke Hathaway from Amobee join me today. He's the VP of Social and yeah, Luke, you wanna just give us a quick hello and background from your side?

Luke Hathaway:

Sure. Thanks, Kristina. Hi everyone. My name's Luke Hathaway, as Kristina said, I'm the VP of Social for Amobee. So I oversee sales and partnerships for Amobee. And a big piece of that is developing a new data partnerships like this one with Eyeota. So very excited to talk to you, talk to you today.

Kristina Prokop:

Great. And as a background for everyone listening, we recently announced a partnership with Amobee where we'll be allowing our data to be activated for usage across social channels through Amobee and that's on a global basis. So something we've been really excited to get going and start, start seeing activity on. So Luke, just to start off yeah, just in general, in looking at Amobee strategy, what role does social play in the organization and in the platform, or maybe not only from a, from a, maybe also looking between a US perspective and an outside of US perspective.

Luke Hathaway:

Sure, yeah. So Amobee as a business has evolved over these past few years and we now focus on everything from linear television to digital broadly speaking. So CTV, online, video, and then social, right? And the mission that we have is to really help advertisers develop strategies that span all three of those big pillars. And so social as a massive piece of advertiser's overall investment plays a critical role in, making sure that we're able to build these omnichannel strategies that, that advertisers can use to, you know, to drive the bottom lines of their business.

Kristina Prokop:

And do you see a lot of, is there any sort of difference in between the uptake between the US where it's obviously been active a bit longer and in the States as, sorry, in the US and internationally?

Luke Hathaway:

Well, we do. Right. So I think and, and particularly in the use of data to tie things together, I think the US market is a bit further along and, and that has come over really the past two years. Right. So, that only started for Amobee and for most of the market, in 2018 when, yeah, sorry?

Kristina Prokop:

Yeah, no, I was just going to say actually, as a background for, for those of the, for those of the viewers that maybe weren't around when all this was happening, it would be great, if you could just highlight what, what was the initiator for you guys to move stronger into this channel?

Luke Hathaway:

Yeah, absolutely. So in, in, in 2018, so Amobee has been doing social for, for many, many years first as a managed service provider. And then as a technology provider with self-service tools that advertisers could use to manage their campaigns on social. In 2018, the big change that happened was that Facebook deprecated their partner categories, which meant that the third-party data assets that were available natively for advertisers to use to target users on Facebook were being removed from, from the platform and advertisers that wanted to use data, wanted to use outside data to inform their targeting strategies, had to figure out a way to get that data back into Facebook as a custom audience, right? So at that time, Amobee already had many relationships with data partners and in the US we really kicked off that, that practice of activating outside social data on, on Facebook.

Luke Hathaway:

And what has happened over these past few years is that the rest of the market has actually begun to follow suit. So in 2020 in January, Twitter made the same move, which, which really, what we've seen as a result of it is that advertisers are now looking across the board. They're not sort of taking data off the shelf and using it as much. They're thinking about what's the right data to drive my business and how can I, how can I invest in a data strategy that is, that is broader than just the channel in which I'm advertising. And so we've really seen that become a cornerstone of the way that we engage with advertisers, especially because it helps them sort of build a strategy that is portable and that does, you know, potentially run across all of those channels from linear television to digital, to social.

Kristina Prokop:

Yeah, I think that that leads into a really, a really important question that I'm assuming a lot of people are asking. So obviously social channels have a lot of data. They may know a lot about, at least, at least in this one area of how, of how we interact with our digital consumption. They do know a lot. So I, I'm assuming one of the questions that come up a lot is do you really need external data sources in social channels? And so if you, you know, if you can give us some insight into what you as Amobee and what the, what your clients see as the use cases, and what's driving the usage of external data and those platforms, that'd be great.

Luke Hathaway:

Yeah. The question does come up a lot. I think that advertisers' data is an investment, right? Like you, it's not free, you have to pay for it. And it has to make sense for your business. And the way that we think about this investment for advertisers, it's sort of a, it's sort of in two ways. One is when you build a strategy, that is omnichannel, how do you want to define your audience? Right. And do you, you want to be able to offer advertisers a way to define that audience that is channel-agnostic, that allows them to build this strategy that spans all the different media that they run. And, and that allows them to understand the efficacy of that, you know, each individual channel at driving the outcomes that they, that they care about. And then the second big piece, in terms of understanding why to invest in data on social is, is really like, what is the signal that the advertiser is that they care about?

Luke Hathaway:

Right. So social channels do a lot of great data. They have a lot of great online data. They have a lot of great social interaction data. But when you look at the needs of some brands that isn't enough, right? And when you look at, you know, for instance, a CPG advertiser, that's looking to drive, purchase behavior offline that signal isn't available in many cases, too, the social channel on which they're advertising. And so in those cases, it often makes sense to develop a data strategy. That's, you know, that's using outside data to inform their advertising.

Kristina Prokop:

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. So just curious on a personal level, have you, have you always been involved in social channels, like social channels and other parts of your career, or was, you know, was, was this a, was this a move that you initiated because of an interest in the, in the space or was something that got dropped on your lap?

Luke Hathaway:

No, it, it, it was. So I started my career in banking. I, the first phase of my career was in, was in banking. And then now about, I guess about eight or nine years ago, I made the move to the social tech ecosystem, which has, you know, and that ecosystem has changed dramatically over, over the course of time that I've been involved in it. And, and really when I started the focus was, was very much on things like single-channel optimization and ad management and data was nowhere, nowhere on the radar. But, but over these past few years, it's really come to the forefront as, as a toolset to help marketers actually, you know, tie things together in a meaningful way across multiple channels that historically have been treated as silos and walled gardens.

Kristina Prokop:

Yeah. Interesting. Going back to the other about these strategies, cross omnichannel strategies, have you seen, are there, are there different sectors that have, that have picked up, you know, are really executing very thoughtful and well planned out omnichannel strategies, or are there some sectors verticals that are, that are further along than others right now?

Luke Hathaway:

I think that what we've seen is that first of all, yes there are, and, and when we see that the types of brands and types of brand portfolios that are moving very quickly to develop these omnichannel strategies many of them are brands that are historical large TV advertisers that, you know, as we start to see the TV world change and for some of that data around what's happening on TV to become accessible, to be able to deploy on digital these brands are thinking forward around like, okay, I want to tie together what's happening on TV and digital, and I want it to tie together in a similar fashion what's happening on digital and then social another sort of like walled garden, another, a channel that historically had been planned and executed in silos, right? So those are, those are CPG advertisers, those are auto advertisers. You know, those are the kinds of there, there are, there are others as well, but we work with a number of very large brands that are big TV spenders in verticals like those that want to build more cohesive strategies across, across all of the channels.

Kristina Prokop:

Yeah. Interesting. So now looking at, we talked a little bit about the international, the international aspect of this is, you mentioned that this started in 2018. Now is, I'm assuming that kind of started primarily in the States, is that it, where are you in the long, like, along the lines of you know, obviously, we've started this partnership globally, where, where is international, like let's say, outside of US markets along in this in this kind of trajectory of the, of the social offering.

Luke Hathaway:

Yeah. So we already offer social, you know, sort of across the globe. The social data offer is, is really just taking off for us in markets, outside of the US so in, in APAC and EMEA we've heard from clients that they want this we've, we, you know, we, I work very closely with our teams in those markets. And the, you know, the reality is that a lot of this, you know, a lot of the stuff that we just talked about, you know, omnichannel planning and you know, sort of understanding the impact of social in the context of the broader media buy. These markets are, are hungry for this. And, and our teams are, are, you know, sort of ready to help deploy, you know, solutions like the one that Eyeota an Amobee are bringing to the table. But it's, but it's early days, you know, and we see, we see strong growth in those markets on social in general. And, and I think that the the value of tying it together with what we're doing with those partners and what those partners are doing outside of the social is, is really the next phase of its growth.

Kristina Prokop:

Yeah. Was that, was that decision to move into the international markets at this point in time, in time with the data offering, did that have to, what, what was that, what was triggering that, is it the pace of growth of, of the spend in those markets? Or was it more a, if I'm coming from a client demand of wanting to have that same, that same access,

Luke Hathaway:

It's both, right. And I think that it's also when we look at the role that we play as a, as a tech partner to a lot of these brands and agencies the, you know, the need for simple ad management on social alone from a third-party technology partner is, is not as great as it was, that's just a few years ago, right? So the publisher native tools have continued to improve in their quality. And, and many brands and agencies can manage their ads appropriately with those tools. And what they're looking for is more sophistication in terms of the kinds of campaigns that they can run and the kinds of like media plans that they can build across multiple channels. And so it's certainly, it's certainly driven by client demand. Like all of the clients that we talked to in these markets have asked for access to more data. And, and it's also when we look at the growth in those markets, it's, it's just, it's really strong in general. And so it's, it's about like, how do we, how do we craft something together with, with companies like yours that like, that can unlock real value for these advertisers

Kristina Prokop:

Now is it something, the social data offering that you have, does it have to be, does it have to be, so is it linked to them being a customer of yours on the platform?

Luke Hathaway:

Yeah. Great, great question. Not necessarily. And that, that's something that we, we made a very specific push to decouple those product offerings, right. And so we knew that the decision of whether or not to use data on social, it's different from the decision of whether or not to use a new ad management platform on social. Right. And so knowing that we made it, we made a very clear decision to, to decouple those and to say, you can use this data and Facebook's native tools, and Twitter's native tools. You can use it in you know, another, another third party tech platform. We're really, we're really focused on enabling those sorts of sophisticated data strategies, whether or not the advertiser chooses to use the Amobee social platform.

Kristina Prokop:

Interesting. So how, so how would some, how would that actually work? Because if you guys don't have, do clients just come to you and say, is it a separate sales team, do they contact you about the data activation only?

Luke Hathaway:

Yeah, no. So the same sales team. But the process is actually pretty straightforward. The way that the audience management works and pretty much all of these social platforms is that there's a permissions process that happens within sort of the business manager tools on social. So you essentially say, you know, I want to give Amobee access to be able to deploy audience assets into my social ad accounts. And then and then we build those audiences, push them into the ad account, and when they're available to be able to add to any of the existing campaigns. So no operationally speaking it, it's pretty straightforward and, you know, on an ongoing basis, those teams that are, that are running those campaigns and that are requesting new audience assets. Nothing really changes in terms of the way that they're managing the campaign with the exception of the fact that they're able to add these data segments to their targeting capabilities.

Kristina Prokop:

Okay, great. Now, looking at the data partners that you work with on this product, is it, is it 'cause you guys, obviously in the, in the, is that in the ad, in the ad management technology, part of the platform, you obviously work with a lot of different data, data companies. Is this something is, are the same, are all the same data providers in there? Is it a subset? What, what kind of data is available then through the social channels as opposed to the platform in general?

Luke Hathaway:

Yeah, that's a good question. It is certainly not the whole list, right? So what we've done on social is to move forward with a very focused list of 'best-in-class' data providers that support the needs of our clients for the regions in which we operate. Right. So on the, on the DSP side of our business, on the, you know, sort of broad, broad, digital side of our business. We work with, you know, many, many data providers on the social side, it's a very focused list. So it, you know, it, it's a handful of data providers that are driven by the needs of our clients, are driven by our understanding of who is best in class, in the, in the regions where we, you know, where we want to operate and where we want to deploy these strategies for our clients. And, and I, I see that continuing, right. I think that advertisers are not asking for a, you know, a fully blown out data marketplace where there's, you know, 70, 80 providers. They're asking for specific data providers that, that they want to be able to run on social, and that's the way that we've responded.

Kristina Prokop:

Great. So when now we spoke a little bit earlier, about the concept of this change, there is a bit of a change in mentality moving from as kind of accepting and moving in, starting to test data in this environment. Is there any, can you tell me a little bit about the transition you've seen in, in, in mindset, at least from some of the customers who have been working through this in the States, and maybe some, some tips for brands, who are brands and agencies who are, who are considering looking at extending into data into these channels, if you can offer any kind of insights, or best, best tips to get started or what you should really be looking at compared, based on, based on the experience that you've seen your clients go through so far.

Luke Hathaway:

Yeah. Yeah. I, I think the first big change in 2018 when Facebook made the change there was a long reset period where brands and agencies were learning everything from the get-go. This was the first time they, most of them had paid for data on social. It was a brand new process in terms of how they would get the data into their ad accounts. And it took a lot of time for brands to be able to say, okay, I understand, you know, what data I need, how to get it, and the value that it's adding to, to these social campaigns. What we saw in, in 2020, when, when Twitter removed the natively available data segments has been, a much quicker transition, right? Like many of these brands and agencies, know the data assets that they want to work with. And they're, they've kind of gone through this before. And so I think the, you know, the net result of, of all of these changes is that companies are like you said, they're no longer just taking the data that's on the shelf because in some cases there is no data on the shelf. And now they're thinking, you know, it's sort of broadly about like, what is the best data to suit the needs of my brand or my client's brand. And, and, and how do I build a strategy that, you know, that sort of drives the bottom line of the business, right? So, brands and agencies are thinking much more strategically about what data they need and how to use it. And I, and I see that growth, you know, starting, but continuing as, you know, the international markets pick up as well. And so a lot of the groundwork has been laid in terms of like how this works and some of the ways to assess the value of data. And, but, and so I expect that as we start to see more growth in, in international markets, it will, it will be much quicker than, than what we saw over these past two years in the US.

Kristina Prokop:

And what channels right now are, is data enabled in through your platform. So it's really through, for example, through this relationship that we have.

Luke Hathaway:

Yup. So it's Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat.

Kristina Prokop:

Okay. great. No, that's, that's really a, it's really helpful and exciting, you know, I think it's social is obviously if you look at any report growing leaps and bounds, and we all see how much time everyone's, everyone spends on social. So yeah, you know, I think it's also, we're also big believers in, in an omnichannel focus because, I mean, just from our side, we also see there is, there is inherent value in having one common currency and one set of a set of data with consistency that you can use across all channels. So it was great. That's why we were so excited to, to take part in this. Cause it, it plays also very well into, into the message that, that we, that we're sending out to market as well. Yeah. So looking, looking forward, is there, is there anything else big, you see coming on the, on the front of data and social, or, you know, things that are planned from the social product from, from Amobee side coming up the rest of this year or in the next year in the next year or so?

Luke Hathaway:

Yeah. I mean, that's a good question. We're always looking to continue to invest in this, in this area of the business, because it really is the thread that ties together what advertisers are doing outside of social with, with what they are, as we know, not a lot of data comes out of social, but the fact that you can develop a strategy where you can deploy these segments into social is really meaningful to, to, to advertisers. And so, you know, when I look, when I look forward, I think that what I see is continued growth, even, you know, particularly in the use of data on channels like Snapchat and Pinterest, right. I think that the advertisers on Facebook have, you know, really understood this data investment thought process for a while. They're doing so on Twitter and as they're doing so on Twitter, which is just at the beginning of this year. I think many of those advertisers, they're starting to think more holistically across the rest of social, right. So they're saying, well, I'm already, I'm already building a strategy for now Facebook and Twitter and CTV and digital. Why am I leaving Snapchat and Pinterest out of that same thought process, even though there may still be some, you know, some data that's available natively in those platforms? I think advertisers are thinking more holistically you know, across, across all of those channels. So I do expect that to continue to, you know, to continue to move throughout the rest of this year.

Kristina Prokop:

Yeah. And I think, you know, when I, when I look at also the opportunity of using external data in these platforms, I, you know, obviously they, they see a lot, but I'm not always convinced that my, as a person, I just look at myself. Right. You know, I, I don't necessarily think that my, and maybe I'm wrong and the computer intelligence, artificial intelligence, and machine learning would prove me wrong, but I don't feel like my behavior in social channels reflects how I behave in all other parts of my media consumption. So I, I wonder, I mean, it's obviously a bigger question that we won't be able to answer today, but I, you know, some part of me also wonders how much of, how much of the accuracy of the 'me' that a Facebook knows is the 'me' everywhere else.

Luke Hathaway:

And

Kristina Prokop:

Yeah, I mean, are you, or what does your social profile look like? How, how active are you?

Luke Hathaway:

I'm, I'm somewhat active. I on, yeah, on, on quite a few channels, actually, I, I'm always exploring, I'm always exploring you know, sort of the new growing channels as well, to understand, you know, the experience, the user experience and sort of the difference in terms of like how those channels look and feel and interact with, with people. So I spend a lot of time on social. And I think you're right though, like I, in terms of like the difference between what someone's social behavior looks like and what someone's even digital online behavior looks like, that's something that we, you know, we see, we have a, we have a listening and insights platform that is fed by things like smart TV panels and online web user panels and social data. So we look at public API and we, you know, we pull in you know, Twitter data and, and you're, you're absolutely right that the, that there is a big difference in some cases between what someone is doing on social and what they're doing on digital, and certainly what they're doing offline. Right. So when we think about how to define the audience in some cases it makes, it makes a lot of sense to, to use data, to define the audience particularly when you feel that there might be some disparity between the signals that someone is exhibiting on, you know, on one piece or on one channel versus who they really are.

Kristina Prokop:

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I think that answers all the burning questions that I had for you today about data in social channels and the way that you guys offer that within the platform. So I'd like to thank you very, very much for joining me today. It's been a very interesting session, learned a lot, and thank you for everybody who was watching and we'll catch you on the next Audience Data Sessions. Thanks a lot, Luke, take care. B