Building A Holiday Plan That Earns The Window

Platform changes can erase a paid social strategy overnight. Damien Voita, Principal Campaign Manager at AdRoll, has nine years of paid media and integrated campaign experience across B2B and B2C brands. He explains how Apple's iOS 14 privacy update broke targeting-first campaign setups and moved performance toward creative. He also covers working with designers on ad creative and spreading spend across platforms instead of depending on one. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iHereEverything.com.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.

• 0:42Speaker 03

  Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

• 1:16Speaker 04

  I'm Benjamin Shapiro and joining me today is Damian Volta, Principal Campaign Manager at AdRoll, a multi-channel advertising platform that helps mid-sized brands run full funnel campaigns across the open web. And today Damian is going to explain how to optimize your media strategy for the holidays. Which marketing fad did you fall for that taught you to question the next one?

• 1:41Speaker 05

  I, in early in my career, was a paid social hands-on keyboard execution person. And pre iOS 14, when the privacy stuff got really intense, when I learned there was a specific way you could set up your campaigns in terms of, you know, we're doing prospecting to this group, we're targeting to this group, we're, you know, testing these different types of targeting for prospecting, building the machine became the focus. And I thought way less about creative, copy, uh, copy like underpaid social ads on your actual ads themselves. And I kind of had this attitude of, send me whatever creative you got, I'll find a way to hack it into this machine and make sure we get the result we need. Like, I don't, you know, I'm not really interested in which ad did best.

• 2:24Speaker 05

  It's just the one that drove the most and I'm going to keep piling money into that one. But that all got upended overnight once Apple introduced iOS 14, which is, has since created this Ask App Not to Track thing that pops up anytime a new app opens up, which most people obviously do. And that really turned everything upside down. Targeting wasn't as effective as it used to be. And Meta has since adapted and I mentioned creative kind of leading the charge there a little bit more, but that was a good lesson for me in that you might think you've got this thing figured out and that the technology is really the, the linchpin of it all. Technology changes so fast, there can be updates overnight and whole strategies can just be deleted, basically. So I think, again, going back to that point about fundamentals, that's the point where I really started to think about what does good creative look like?

• 3:07Speaker 05

  And I should probably spend more time talking to designers and learning from them and hopefully teaching them about what I'm seeing too.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think the other lesson that I would add from my experiences, don't be dependent on one platform because they change. Right? And, you know, hey, Facebook is great and I can target everybody and it doesn't matter with the creative and it's working, cool.

• 3:28Speaker 04

  Apple put a bullet in that relatively quickly and then all of a sudden, whether you had to get better at creative or you had to change your platform mix, nothing is forever.

• 3:39Speaker 05

  The tech companies do love to undermine each other every chance that they get, even if it's just purely out of spite, it seems sometimes. So you can definitely get caught in that crossfire when one of them makes a big change.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  One of my favorite questions ever answered on this podcast was when I asked the Facebook CMO what his reaction was to Apple's privacy update. And I think his response was something like, "You brilliant cynical bastards," or something like that, but personal highlight for me. All right, and that wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Damian Voita, the Principal Campaign Manager at AdRoll. If you'd like to get in touch with Damian, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes or in his company's website, which is AdRoll.com, a sponsor of the Martech Podcast. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a weekly stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed next week.

• 4:33Speaker 04

  All right, that's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast and I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iHereEverything.com.