Carat Media Internship: Journal Entry #22

During this week I had to complete some administrative stuff for the unit itself, which involved a video that I had to have checked (for client confidentiality purposes.) After all this was done I was set a few different tasks which made the day quite a varied one!

The first task was a presentation that needed producing for an airport client: A keywords campaign. I had a few different line items to analyse so what I did was I used Excel to split the data as usual but instead of analysing and annotating the spreadsheets I produced graphs showing the top decile (best 10 keywords) and produced a table showing the top three contrasted with the worst three for conversions and clicks. This was finally accompanied by a commentary on overall performance for each strategy with recommendations for the future. It was an interesting task I thought.

A Decile Analysis

My next assignment was to a DSP task where I analysed a campaign for audience characteristics using what is called a "Pixel," which tracks users so that -in our case- the client could know exactly which group of people were clicking and what their income was -for example, and match this with age, gender or any other sub-group that you could care to mention. However, not all of these categories have information within them, as they may still be building up a picture which -ideally- will occur as time goes by and the data available grows. In my case, the data available to me was limited in one or two areas but I was still able to discover some interesting things about our audience, which was intriguing.

This was my final task for the day, but between tasks I participated in another meeting, in which I listened to what the good people at one of our search retargeting data partnerships had to say in their pitch to Carat, extolling the values of search retargeting technology for us as an ad agency. The presentation was very interesting, the process of retargeting ads to approximated consumer groups via cookie-tracking pixels innovative and displayed effectively through a simple, grid-like infographic showing how data informs the process, the pixel is placed within a publisher's website and how that pixel garners more engagement as the prospecting blends with the contextual (which was also demonstrated via an amended "conversion funnel," like the one below.) 

Conversion Funnel

As you can see above, search retargeting generally fits around the middle of the scale between discovering customers and driving awareness and moving in for the sell to generate conversions and business. During the meeting I also came across a strategy that I hadn't heard of: Yes, I'd heard about Prospecting and yes I'd heard about Remarketing and finally yes, I'd heard about Contextual. But today I learnt of another strategy: Conquesting. This is basically the intense competition between one company's display ads against a competitor's editorial content e.g. an ad for Ford against an actual article about Vauxhall. It's quite popular at the minute apparently, though it does radiate with '80s-style tactics and language that came with the whole "guerrilla marketing" revolution, when marketing directors and execs started reading books about war tactics as well as Jay Conrad Levinson's classic on the subject. But putting that aside, the meeting was most enjoyable and very informative.

Thank you for reading and see you next week!