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CRASHING THROUGH THE BOUNDARY: HOW TO MARKET WITH SENSITIVE CONTENT EFFECTIVELY

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Industry: Retail, E-Commerce, International Retail Market (US) The Client If we talk about conversion volume and traffic both online and offline, the retail industry seems to be the one with the most activities amongst others. Brands are created and made visible in their markets in such a short amount of time with less and less effort. Goods are sold at prices ranging from pennies to 6-7 digits or even higher. The urge to own physical objects has become a new human need since the Industrial Era has emerged and it never drops.  However, that does not mean marketing and advertising in the retail industry is a walk in the park. In this project, our client was a Thai manufacturing company that was granted the manufacturing and distribution patent by a brand owner in the U.S.. The enterprise is famous for its explicit sexual lifestyle content since 1953. And of course, its latest product could not speak any louder – condoms. The Challenge OK. So, it’s obvious, we’re talking about sensitive content here. All marketers and advertisers in the world know how ad channels have incredibly strong restrictions for sensitive content in countless categories to protect their audience’s privacy, and sexual content is one of the most notorious one. We were on a mission to target the U.S. local markets in 3 states i.e. Texas, Florida and California. Having the past experience with the previous agency located in the U.S., our client had some difficulties working with them due mainly to Thailand-U.S. time difference, followed by loss of control in marketing, sales and advertising strategy, and lack of transparency. During the period of 10 months plus a huge amount of ad spend, their targets were never reached. (ROAS < 1). The marketing challenge? We immediately realised that our client’s product as a new brand had to fight for the market share against the U.S. staples in the condom market, at the same time, the client also had to meet the minimum sales committed to the product owner enterprise within a tight timeframe.  On top of that, don’t forget that we are talking about highly sensitive content here. Even with the right ad channels, enough budget and efficient sales channels, it’s not like we can shout out loud, “Hey! Buy these condoms, they’re cool!”, even if we wanted to.   The Intelligence & The Effort We first started by looking at the client’s available sales channels, Walmart stores and Walmart Online, Amazon, and its own sales page on Shopify and realised what the product desperately needed was an intense boost of brand awareness.  The campaign strategies were revamped. From running local radio ads targeting areas around Walmart stores, we shifted the focus to increasing online brand awareness together with search frequency which would help increase the online stores (Walmart Online and Amazon) and website traffic (Shopify page). Let’s forget about the most popular ad channels like Google display ad and Facebook ad as it’s nearly impossible to get past their content restrictions without ruining the creatives and/or the key messages. However, thanks to our past experience with XPO, we learnt that Google Search ad, native ad on websites and in-app ad are the channels that can keep it under the radar.  So these were a few channels possible for our client’s case–seemed a little limited. But to make the most out of a few channels available for us, Global Ad Exchanges feature on XPO enabled us to run ads on not only one but several different native ad platforms at the same time. Plus, it is another benefit of XPO to advertisers that not only provides (secret) room for sensitive content via the use of native ad channel, but also intelligently optimises the client’s budget on the channels and/or platforms that perform well thanks to its Cross-Channel AI Auto-Optimisation ability.  Learn more: Digital Marketing Execution at Scale: Automate and Scale Your Programmatic Campaign with XPO. The Results We started seeing results from our campaign a couple of months after the launch. The increased brand awareness showed in the significantly increased Google search frequency within the first 3 months. A 0.9 click-through rate accompanied by increased website traffic and online store (Shopify sales page, Amazon and Walmart Online).  On top of all, we have seen a significant increase in sales from all channels along with gradual improvement of the market share. What we were the happiest with was that the client felt more control in all aspects of campaign execution from building the campaign strategies, budget allocation, detail optimisation to reporting. Beyond Satisfying Results: Ideas for the Future Findings and learnings from our project with the client have opened a new path to its strategy building. Our campaign technique set a new benchmark for dealing with sensitive content and proved that it worked. And with XPO’s unique abilities, it was possible for us to push for the best results. One of XPO’s intelligence that allows endless possibilities to both agencies (platform users) and clients (result bearers) lies within its profound data extraction and data analysis capabilities. Not only did it give transparency in campaign execution and reporting, those data and analysis were used in ways that improved the client’s future plan – an intelligent growth tool based on real stats, no guessing! From our local targeting strategy by states i.e. Texas, Florida and California, XPO system allowed us to extract the in-depth performance analysis by city. Instead of only 3 big states, this information let us see into smaller detail and identify which city performed well with our campaign and product, making it possible for the client’s marketing team to develop effective future marketing campaigns for city-based execution.

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UNIQUE SYNERGY FOR THE BEST: AI AUTO-OPTIMISATION VS MANUAL IN-DEPTH AUDIENCE ANALYSIS

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Industry: Real Estate, Luxury Property, Luxury House Project The Client It is obvious that real estate is another highly competitive stage for online marketing and advertising. Our client is Thailand’s forefront real estate developer, home creator and hotelier. For over the past three decades, The client has grown dramatically and continuously not only in terms of financial turnover and employees, but also in the ability to offer new heights of quality living through housing innovations. Our task was to market for the client’s brand new luxury home project amidst Bangkok’s prime location Rama IX, with each individual property worth 100-130 MB fully furnished. To our profile as a programmatic advertising agency, the real estate industry has been one of our expertise for quite many years but this specific clientele was brand new to our team and came with a unique challenge, rather, a problem to solve. One of the topics in our very first discussion with the client was, “how can we improve the quality of leads when all the KPIs are already achieved?” The Challenge  So our question to the client’s team was, why exactly did the client want to improve the quality of leads? The client revealed some of the experience from their past campaigns with the other marketing agency before Media Console. From our discussion we found out that, even though all the KPIs were achieved, no sales had been made. No revenue returned from all the media spend despite the satisfying results in the report session. After all, KPIs are just numbers. What comes as the aftermath of those KPIs is, well, the real KPI! And in our case, our KPI, or we can call it “our goal”, was to make sales. The Intelligence & The Effort We learnt from the data of the past campaign kindly provided by the client’s team and came down to the four main channels that both our teams agreed to run ads on–social media, search, display, and native. Upon that we promised to deliver what the client wanted through our intelligent technology, XPO. Why XPO? This is one of our key intelligence, our unique value proposition to our clients. Take the display ad channel for example – most digital agencies (or should we say 99% of them) would assume the most well-known ad exchange, Google Display Network (GDN), while XPO is plugged in with not only GDN but over 100+ ad exchanges globally.  The question we should ask ourselves as an advertiser is, if we are on a mission to find one fish in the ocean (or in our client’s case, only a few rare species), would you fish from only one pond that you know or would you try all the waters that you can find? Learn more: What’s the Difference Between Google Display Network and Programmatic Advertising? With XPO, it gave us the power to do the latter for our client. It simply means that we offered our client with a bigger ad inventory, i.e. more chance to come across the right group of audience, i.e. more chance to come across leads that can make real conversions. But did it mean we had to spend more budget? XPO’s Global Ad Exchange Network is topped with the advanced AI Auto-Optimisation that helped optimise the budget on the ad exchanges and the channels that perform well. Not only did we optimise the client’s budget across ad exchanges (GDN and beyond), we also optimised the budget across all possible online habits of our target audience (social media, search, display and native).  And all of that was done real-time by AI. Without XPO’s intelligent technology, most online agencies even with a big team had to work on all of these channels separately and do the manual routine to optimise the budget if they would make that effort. This was solved by XPO’s Cross-Channel AI Auto-Optimisation, the real-time calculation based on real-time data run by a system, not a person. But with the promise beyond KPI to our client, our effort did not stop at our desk, we really did get to work! With the client’s prompt support, we went to the project location and talked to the on-site sales representative to gain more information about our target customers and their interests that might be useful to our campaign setting.  Out of this extra effort, we found the hidden insights about our target audience that cannot be learned from desks and screens, making it possible for us to achieve even more efficient audience targeting detail like no other people or system could have. The Results  Out of up to 1M THB media spend during the first 4 months, we were able to achieve over 200+ ROAS for this project. Deals were closed and our client was highly satisfied with both the achieved KPIs and the revenue. The ultimate goal of our project was to make sales at which we were successful. But on top of that we worked on the in-depth detail with the client’s team to find the way to improve the quality of leads as we were set out to do. Our findings and learnings were the most valuable asset to both sides. Our extra effort on audience learning also paid off. After the in-depth discussion to dig out the hidden audience insights followed by an optimisation on the targeting detail, we saw a beautiful breakthrough in our campaign performance – the click-through rate increased significantly above the daily average impressions, meaning our ads were visible to more people with the right interest. The Intelligence Beyond Human Experience and Knowledge With our intelligent tech being utilised to its full potential, XPO gave us the profound targeting strategy and optimisation performance beyond human capability. Throughout this project we were working on a niche target audience, we never knew which channel would come across the right person with the exact interest. Thanks to XPO’s bigger ad inventory, we were enabled to find the very few fish in the whole ocean that we

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A Case Study: Long-Term Benefits of Using Partner Agency to Improve Hotel Direct Booking

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This article will be useful for you if you are running your business or involved in the e-commerce industry. Or if you are running an online retail or service business, this article can give you more understanding on how to link and balance between your direct marketing and partner agency marketing service and how to ultimately improve your sales revenue and plan for your online marketing. Back in 2013, a top Thai five-star hotel brand had a problem with its OTA marketing. The management team shared an important plot that their hotel was banned from its service listing for 2 months because the hotel set its direct booking price lower than the price on the OTA platform. The result? Over 50% loss of total online revenue! The Power of Online Partner Agencies It is commonly known that OTAs, delivery apps and e-commerce websites have a vast amount of visitor traffic as their major advantage. On top of that they run their own marketing to promote their listed hotel clients on an incredibly big budget. Try once and you’ll see: google “hotel in Hua Hin” or “online food service”, big names of these online agencies will take the top spots of your search result, if not the whole first page. The reason is obvious – using a partner agency is a convenient way of bringing in your sales revenue (before commission / GP). This reason alone is enough for hotels, restaurants, cafes, or any online merchants for that matter to get attracted to online partner agencies: It’s easy, low risk, no big investment. But as they say, nothing lasts forever. Relying too much on only a few or one channel of sales can only guarantee you trouble whenever the channel you rely on can no longer bring you the same amount of income. Through all my years in the hotel industry, I have learned that many hotels, local or international names, rely on OTAs as their main sales channel. Many hotel marketing managers and owners shared their numbers with me and it revealed quite a concern whether they realised it or not. Most of the big names you are familiar with rely 60-90% of their total online sales on OTAs! Fact: more than 60% of the hotel industry live and breathe through the service and the power of OTAs. The average 15-30% commission has become a common expense routine, leveraged by sales amount and choice of ad positions on each OTA platform. Is OTA A Sustainable Marketing Channel? It might look like a simple calculation at first—100 THB sales – 50% investment + 15% commission… With the above scenario you might think that 35% profit from OTAs is not a bad idea at all, plus it doesn’t require a team effort to create marketing strategies, sales strategies, booking system operation, etc. What could go wrong? Let’s look at the future and be realistic here. There will be times that we might not be able to maintain the same level of sales revenue (that comes through OTA), possible industry down time, competitor price war, or a more and more intense competition over ad placements that makes 15% commission no longer exist due to the fact that you might forget: your OTA partner is also just another company that needs growth and increase of revenue. If a hotel cannot maintain its sales growth, its OTA partner is most likely to transform into “an expense” that keeps growing and eventually becomes a burden–a big marketing dilemma. Sales Rev Is Everything! One of my clients made a contract that guaranteed minimum sales revenue through its partner OTA platform but failed to deliver. As a result, 1% extra commission took effect. Don’t ever let such small numbers as 1% deceive you, let’s put it in a simple calculation. Take it from the 100 THB sales above and add some more zeros: let’s say your hotel makes 100M THB of sales, you are bound to pay a commission of 15M THB. +1% commission means you have to pay 16M THB commission. The 1,000,000 THB difference that you have to pay is definitely a significant amount that can affect the hotel operations and cost management in many ways. One of the top Thai five-star hotel brands that I mentioned earlier was in the same situation here. Being banned from its partner OTA platform for 2 months took a huge effect on the hotel’s revenue channel due to the fact that 50% of its sales actually came through its OTA partner. And it’s a sad nature of OTA customers that most of them do not have loyalty to the hotel brands because they make their decision based solely on price. In fact, most OTAs even have a price comparison feature for their customers–people who are “looking for the best deal”. And this is why it is not easy at all for hotels to build their loyal customer base through OTAs–it’s not built for that purpose! Many of you must have realised by now, nothing is totally risk-free. Relying on only one channel of income is definitely a risk for your business in whatever industry you are in. Same logic, relying on only your OTA partner’s marketing team and policies without learning to develop your own marketing workforce, you are simply creating a deadend for your own business. In Search of A Sustainable Sales Strategy One thing I can tell you straight out is a sustainable sales strategy for each hotel will look different, that is because each hotel has its own preferred marketing style and target. While some hotels may not have a clear set target to hit and live through their OTA partners together with a few other offline marketings, others may have big scary numbers plus minimum yearly growth for the whole team to get stressed about from the beginning of the year. For the latter case, only OTA service cannot be enough. Through my years of hands-on experience with hotel clients, I have seen a

roas

MEASURING ROAS IN E-COMMERCE BUSINESS

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If you are in e-commerce business e.g. online retail store, hotel, airline booking, etc, I believe that you are already familiar with “ROAS” (Return On Ad Spend) as a mean of measuring the performance of your campaigns. ROAS tells you how your ad budget is spent and whether it is good value for money against the cheap/expensive price that you pay for your ads. The question raised from this is what level of performance the ROAS you are looking at is reflecting. In this article, I would like to share my experience in running online ad campaigns for Hotels and how we should look at ROAS. But don’t worry if you are in other industries, I will make sure to share on that in later articles. What Is the Campaign Purpose? Most hotels start generating sales (bookings) by using OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) as one of their main online sales channels. The universal condition of working with OTAs is the commission rate that hotels have to pay by a percentage out of their sales revenue. After a period of time and a level of target sales reached, many hotels will then consider running their own online marketing to generate direct sales and thus to lighten the load of the commission that they have to pay to the OTAs. Direct bookings not only solves the commission problem, it also creates brand loyalty amongst those direct customers. While the customers compare and make their decisions based solely on the price shown on OTA platforms, the direct customers are likely to make their decisions based on the hotel’s brand image alongside its added offer as the total value perceived. What Is the Valid Benchmark for Your Ad Budget? Each hotel starts their direct online marketing at different stages of their revenue situations. Most hotels allocate their online marketing budget based on the industry benchmark – somewhat similar to what other hotels are doing. The budget could come solely from the management team’s decision in some hotels, while in other hotels the budget is translated from the online sale revenue i.e. from OTAs. Let’s see a bit of calculation for the latter case where, for example, the commission for OTA service is 15%. Question: what should be an appropriate amount of budget for direct online marketing and how does it compare in terms of ROAS? To set a simple scenario, let’s say our room price is 3,000 THB/night. Assuming that this is the price for 1 booking, the 15% commission is therefore 450 THB per booking. If a hotel brand generates 100 bookings per month in average, the revenue before commission = 3,000 x 100 = 300,000 THB, the revenue before commission = 3,000 x 100 = 300,000 THB, with commission payable to OTA = 300,000 x 15% = 45,000 THB. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that the hotel can start its online direct marketing budget by using the expense on OTA service as a benchmark, which in this case is 45,000 THB per month. How Much ROAS Means Your Campaign IS In Good Shape? Let’s consider an easy start where you budget your online ad campaign at 45,000 THB per month. How different are the ROAS’s in each scenario? Scenario 1: The return of your online ad campaign equals OTAsOnline ad budget = 45,000 THBReturn = 300,000 THBROAS = 300,000 / 45,000 = 6.67 Scenario 2: The return of your online ad campaign is lower than OTAsOnline ad budget = 45,000 THBReturn = 150,000 THBROAS = 150,000 / 45,000 = 3.34 Scenario 3: The return of your online ad campaign is higher than OTAsOnline ad budget = 45,000 THBReturn = 400,000 THBROAS = 400,000 / 45,000 = 8.88 The three scenarios show us that the return from the campaign determines the ROAS ratio, meaning every 1 THB spent on the online ad campaign brings back 6.67 THB of income (Scenario 1). This is the number that the marketing department can use together with other expenses to evaluate the overall performance. Should ROAS Be Evaluated by Comparing It to the OTA Performance? It is one of the easiest ways to set the online advertising KPI using OTA performance as a benchmark because doing so, you are comparing the performance of your online marketing department/agency to that of the OTA service you are using and the return is the most solid indicator. However, the important note is that comparing your online campaign performance to OTA will be the valid KPI only for 1-3 year period or longer. This is because the goal of your online advertising is to create direct bookings. The return from the direct bookings actually depends on many factors such as your website traffic, prices and promotions, competitors’ offers, booking engine fees, credit card service expense, as well as the performance of the key people involved in each step. What Is the ROAS That Should Be Expected to Begin With? I can give you a rough number based on my past experience – if you are brand new to online direct booking and has no traffic to your website or if you are simply a brand new hotel, 0-2 ROAS can be expected during the first 6 months (calculated from the total online marketing budget) followed by a steady growth caused by the gradually improved booking process. Numbers from the Hotel Industry? The ROAS numbers that I have come across during my 8 years in hotel e-commerce vary immensely depending on each hotel direction. I am familiar with hotel chains that manage and market for many properties and have years of experience in online marketing. ROAS usually varies along the hotel’s ADR (Average Daily Rate). ADR 1,000 – 10,000 THB → Avarage ROAS at 5 – 15ADR >10,000 THB → Average ROAS over 15(Watch how ROI 44 : 1 was achieved at a famous hotel chain with an intelligent tech vendor.) There is no one universal formula in digital marketing. Nothing can be achieved overnight. The most important thing that

Programmatic

PROGRAMMATIC: THE TIP OF THE WHOLE PRECISION PERFORMANCE MARKETING ICEBERG

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Ten years ago or so we would just think to ourselves, “WHERE do I want to put my ads? A heavily populated place, perhaps? It must be expensive though but worth a shot. I mean, millions of people are going to see my ads”. Two months later, you end up in huge debt from renting a billboard that no one looks at because they are busy wandering around on their personal screens.    Now? First off, starting with the ‘where’ question, especially when you mean physical location, will get you nowhere. People still wander around like they always do for the past millennium, they just don’t look up anymore. They look down at their screens, digital devices e.g. smartphones, tablets, laptops, whatever has internet connection. With programmatic advertising method, you leave the ‘where’ (and so much more) to the platform intelligence. What you need to tell the platform in order for your ad campaign to fly high is ‘who’ — “who do I want to put my ads for?”  By definition (you can just google this), ‘Programmatic’ is an ad buying method, typically referred to as the use of software to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs, human negotiations and manual insertion orders.  It’s using machines to buy ads, basically.  With programmatic ad buying method, rather than buying ad spaces, you buy ad views. It means you can throw away guess work, sacred prayers, and good-luck charms out of the window because now you know for sure that your ads are being seen not by any typical Jane or regular Joe but by the exact group of people that you choose i.e. your target customers.  The efficiency of programmatic ad buying method is made possible by a little magic called ‘Pixel’, which works as a CCTV camera on your website monitoring how your customers shop, browse, hang out, or just leave with or without buying. Scenario one, if they buy and leave, your ads can follow them somewhere else to offer what they might like to get them to come back and buy more from you. Scenario two, if your ‘almost-customers’ leave without buying right at the check-out, your ads can follow them anywhere and remind them with what they almost buy, to bring them back and actually buy from you. Scenario three, people who shop around elsewhere for products that are very similar to yours are considered prospects, so they are shown with ads displaying products of their likings to increase the chance of those prospects becoming your customers.  And just to think … all of this happens in just a matter of milliseconds.  Well, that part about programmatic already sounds wonderful and all, but it is only one small part of the work of wonders provided by what we call Precision Performance Marketing, that enables you to grab the attention of the right audience right down by their needs with the right type, look and format of marketing messages at the right moment.  Thanks to Data Management Platform (DMP), Precision Performance Marketing solutions today, one of the leading providers amongst others in the industry such as Media Console, can equip you with even more ways to deeply personalise your marketing messages to shoot your customers right between the eyes… metaphorically of course.  With Media Console partner, the full-stack programmatic advertising platform — Knorex XPO, you can amplify the way your customers are engaged your website, and the process started via sophisticated and personalised marketing messaging—displayed dynamic ads that capture your customers’ attention. With the use of built-in capabilities of XPO platform, you can even run split tests to learn more about your customers’ preferences and optimise your ad campaign even further. Cross-device & Cross-channel targeting is another capability that allows you to retarget your ads to follow your customers into very precise locations such as shops in malls or different rooms on different floors in a building.  And when some might sleep with one eye opened wondering their ads and precious products might appear on some porn or racist sight just because it is all just a machine work, XPO can block all sensitive categories by default to avoid serving ads in any of these red zones.  So in the words of popular culture to all advertisers, let’s just …   “Keep Calm and Go Programmatic.”  Learn more about Media Console and our value, read our stories and case studies, or hear about our success story from our clients.