Marketers find value in new channels ahead of this unusual back-to-school season

For the latest edition of our Marketing Briefing, available exclusively to Digiday+ members, marketers weigh in on the trends that will dominate the back-to-school season as the industry prepares for a slow return to classrooms.

In this week's Media Buying Briefing, another member exclusive, senior editor Michael Bürgi talks to the founders of Media Matters Worldwide, Josy Amann and Taji Zaminasli, on their unlikely entrance into the agency world and the state of the industry today.

You can get a taste below and subscribe to Digiday+ for full access to all briefings as well as original research, reports and guides, tutorials, unlimited stories and much more.

Marketing Briefing: Marketers find value in new channels ahead of this unusual back-to-school season

By Kimeko McCoy

Summer is still in full swing. But with the pandemic leaving a trail of uncertainty and shoppers getting a head start on things for the classroom, marketers have already started to think through ad strategies ahead of this year’s back-to-school season. For the latest edition of our Marketing Briefing, marketers weigh in on the trends that will dominate this period as the industry prepares for a slow return to classrooms.

Bigger ad budgets and a crowded digital marketplace

One of the major shifts marketers saw during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown was the increase in online shopping. And of course, marketers moved to meet them in those channels. At Gupta Media, a Boston-based digital marketing agency, clients are coming to the table with bigger budgets for digital ad buys ahead of this year’s back-to-school season.

“Part of it is, with the pandemic, so much shifted to digital advertising overall. We saw advertising and digital channels get a lot more expensive,” said Ilyssa Bloch, an account director at Gupta. “In order to achieve similar volume results that we achieved in past years when things were cheaper in the digital space, budgets had to ramp up to keep up with that increased competition.”

It’s especially true when it comes to marketing that targets college-aged students as enrollment returns to pre-pandemic levels, Bloch said.

And according to social media advertising company Smartly.io, tech brands (i.e. laptops and tablets) have been ramping up social media advertising efforts, surpassing even the investment levels of Black Friday last year, per Corinne Demadis, vice president for Smartly.io for the U.S. East Coast.

Aggressive on TikTok

Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat will continue to be key parts of brands’ strategies. But brands are getting more aggressive in their approach to TikTok, emphasizing the short-form video platform in their back-to-school marketing campaigns.

“They’re so authentic. The ad types are unexpected and different,” said Gupta Media founder, Gogi Gupta. “So they have balanced out some of the more corporate sales just being able to influence behavior.” Gupta Media, a Boston-based agency, has a client list that includes Amazon Prime and Amazon Student.

Quote of the Day

“Test outdoor advertising. This would be a time to double down on measurability and scalability. And remain in test mode channels outside of that.”

— Overheard on the first day of Digiday’s CMO Summit on July 19, which operates under Chatham House Rules as marketers talked through the pain points of modern-day marketing.

Subscribe to Digiday+ below to access the full briefing.

Media Buying Briefing: How two friends reluctantly got into media and built their agency from scratch into a $200 million business

By Michael Bürgi

Media Matters Worldwide, an independent San Francisco-based media agency, might never have formed if its co-founders and co-managing partners Josy Amann and Taji Zaminasli hadn’t been subtly misdirected into the media side of the agency business at the start of their careers.

Both had planned to become creatives when they started their first jobs (Zaminasli at McCann and Amann at Lowe & Partners), but as Amann recalls, “they led me to the dungeon where the media department was.” Still, the two women gained knowledge and skill in media at their respective shops. They met in 2002 at a small performance agency, Becker Media, where they realized their complementary strengths — Amann in planning, traditional media and B2B, and Zaminasli in buying, digital and consumer — by lunching together every day for three years. Media Matters Worldwide launched in in 2005 with just the two of them working from home and no financial backers, but has grown today to 60 people (still mostly remote) and from $65 million in billings in 2020 to an expected $200 million this year, with clients including Shipt, Proactive, Sierra Nevada, SAP and Hitachi.

Digiday spoke with Zaminasli and Amann about the media business today. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In early 2020 when the world came crashing down around our heads, it sounds like it was an intense growth opportunity for you as you grew from 25 to 60 employees during that time.

Amann: Everybody had a moment of complete panic because everyone was shutting everything off, but … we’ve been in business so long, we’ve seen those trends happen. In 2008 was one of them, and then obviously COVID. I think we kept pretty level-headed. We’ve always kept our roster equal between B2B and B2C and I think that’s really kept us healthy over the years because when all of a sudden B2C freaked out because consumers weren’t buying anything, B2B still maintained. There really wasn’t much of a pause, so I think that really helped us keep our footing and then we pivoted and found new business, like Shipt, a grocery delivery company that couldn’t be more appropriate for the time.

Zaminasli: I also think the way we built our model over the years … you see ebbs and flows, and shifts with companies in-housing and then going the opposite way. Our model is almost plug and play. For some of our clients, we are agency of record, for some of our clients we handle their entire budget, working on the strategies and analytics. But then the [client] might have a really strong performance team in-house, so they do that while we work on the brand side and then bring it all together under one analytics deal.

Direct quote

“Clutter is just as important to consumers and to the marketing efficacy as you can relate to. If you’re seeing 12 ads in a row, the likelihood of you memorizing any individual one versus seeing no more than 2 ads in a row is going to have a giant impact.”

— Krishan Bhatia, president and chief business officer, NBCU, on reduced ad loads on streaming platform Peacock, speaking with Mike Shields on the Next in Marketing podcast.

Subscribe to Digiday+ below to access the full briefing.

Further reading

Work-life boundaries continue to blur: How the pandemic has changed co-living
With remote working becoming a way of life, working from overseas is set to become even more popular, and no longer confined to digital nomads traveling for months on end.

Ad tech’s revival: boom or bubble?
Today’s ad tech market feels a lot like the bubble of 2013. Back then, the companies were mostly ad networks claiming they were software companies.

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