The following analysis was completed for my work at Performance Content.
Today’s marketing briefs are often tasking agencies to come up with ‘digital centric’ ideas or marketing campaigns that are channel agnostic. Agencies and brands often face a multitude of challenges in developing programs against this ask, ranging from the gathering of relevant consumer intelligence to the measurement models that are put in place to gather the relative performance of the various elements of the campaigns.
We decided to analyze how some of the top Canadian marketers were doing across their paid and social activity, analyzing their programmatic spend and their social presence. The resulting comparisons are quite interesting and illustrates that social success is not indicative of any type of programmatic spending or attempts at driving awareness or engagement through paid media. (See Infographic below)
In terms of the methodology, we took the top 25 Canadian brands as ranked by Canadian Business 2013 annual study and evaluated their social media performance and programmatic media spending of the Q1 2014 period (this is important to note, as there are other higher spenders in the programmatic space and those with better social scores). The social media performance was evaluated on their fan base size and overall engagement, using Socialbakers for data and processing, and Casale Media to supply the programmatic data and ranking.
Social Performance Does Not Equal Programmatic Exposure
Of the top 25 brands analyzed, Canadian Tire is the only one to occupy a top 5 spot in both social and programmatic performance. Canadian Tire has amassed a good social following of 1.2M fans and achieves relatively good engagement rates across both Twitter and Facebook. WestJet is the only other brand to achieve similar results, ranking 2nd in social performance and 7th in programmatic spending. This makes sense, with WestJet’s commitment to social content creation and the lead up to the spring break buying season in the travel industry.
Finance Rules the Roost. Retail Is Non-Existent.
It is interesting to see that some of the top marketers who dominate the real-time bidding market are categories that you would expect. Finance lends itself quite well to this market and over the Q1 time frame would have hit the tax season along with juicy credit card offers around travel rewards. Other categories that one would expect to dominate are less involved, with retailers in the retail grocery space being fairly non-existent. Loblaw is the only brand to be active in the programmatic space, ranking number 8, while Sobey’s and Metro (as well as Rexall and Shoppers Drug Mart) don’t register any spending.
The Top Brands, Are They Really?
Five of the top 10 brands ranked by Canadian Business have no programmatic presence (Jean Coutu, Shoppers Drug Mart, Saputo, McCain Foods, and Rona). Additionally, five don’t crack the top ten when it comes to social presence and engagement. I can understand reasoning behind the programmatic piece and that some brands may not have had a digital presence, but the social side puzzles me. Granted, the Canadian Business ranking is a score based off reputation, corporate culture and other factors, but what is a better indicator of affinity than social media? A place where fans need to seek out and like the brands they have the most affinity for? It seems like the top brands in the country should have a much stronger social fan base.
So, What Does This Mean…
Programmatic buying is a scalable way to drive targeted reach in cost-effective ways. The category is on the rise in digital and will continue to find its way into other channels. Social is now a mainstay and offers intelligence into some of a brand’s best customers. Layering these data sources should be a key element to any marketing plan.
Leveraging the likes, interests and affinities of social audiences is a great way to help scale content marketing plans in the programmatic space. By understanding audiences as a much more granular level, it provides the foundation to help build much more robust profiles of your most valuable customers. This, coupled with more look-a-like modeling tools offered by the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Google, provides an unprecedented way to build solid look-a-like audiences at scale. It isn’t easy, but it isn’t hard either. The industry just needs to think more like direct-marketers in the deployment of their digital activity. It just takes some planning and a desire to test, learn and test again.
Infographic: Canadian Social and RTB Performance, Q1 2014