Digital Platform and Strategy Update: July 2019

Below you will find our monthly roundup of new tools, techniques, and strategies being used across campaigns to improve performance and solve music-specific advertising problems.

1. Mobile-first creative

The growth of mobile in advertising offers considerable opportunities for product advancement. In 2018, Facebook found that “mobile-first creative has a 27% higher likelihood of driving brand lift compared to video ads not optimized for mobile.” Other platforms report similar results. 

Mobile is also where we reach fans most often with artist messaging and advertisements, making it an important strategic space to better understand and take advantage of. For all of these reasons, we are taking a “mobile-first” approach in ad creative. 

What does a high-impact mobile creative look like? Here are three key attributes based on studies from major ad platforms:

• Vertical Video (9:16, 4:5, etc)

• 15 Seconds or Less

• Brand (Artist) in the first 3 seconds

For the rest of the quarter, we will use these recommendations to split test creatives to determine what drives the highest view, completion, sound on, and click through rates from music fans.

2. Youtube Related Videos Extension (Beta)

We now have beta access to Youtube’s new Related Videos Extension. This means we can customize suggested videos alongside In-Stream Trueview ads with four videos of your choice—for example, music videos from your artist’s catalog, interviews, live footage, or behind-the-scenes clips. Before this, the suggested videos were programmatically related to the video.  

Currently available for mobile-only, this extension gives your artist a 100% Share Of Voice when their ad is playing. It also adds four new potential Call-To-Actions to the already-effective Trueview ad format.

3. Google Search Gallery Ads (Beta)

Another new mobile-only extension from Google is Gallery Ads. These are swipeable images (up to eight) that run alongside standard text-only search ads, providing context and visual content to engage fans.

Gallery Ads are designed to improve advertising results when it comes to tickets, merchandise, and special appearances, like performances on Late Night Shows. 

As we test this ad format we will pass along benchmarks and quantify the effect of the additional image extensions on ad performance.

Update by Brendan Neal, Director of Digital Strategy and Analytics at Wavo.