Chris Keenan, managing partner, global solution design & development at GroupM, looks at the importance of micro-moments, and how they can help brands speak directly to consumers…

We all know what it’s like when we receive a poorly-timed ad: an eye-roll of annoyance, perhaps a feeling of apathy and an urge to get it over with. A humorous example that comes to mind is a viral tweet posted by comedian Stephen Merchant: “Maybe don't put ads before first aid vids? I don't have time to watch a Red Lobster ad when my gran is choking on a fish bone.”  

Though not all poorly-timed or irrelevant ads are a matter of life and death, often they can lead to mistrust and disengagement in a brand or a platform. Whilst we can all spot the risks associated in this situation, how can we make sure we do get the right ads to the right people, and crucially, when it works best for them?

We all know that delivering the right ad, in the right place, to the right audience, at the right time is key to driving meaningful outcomes. But while this goal is well understood, the challenge has always been in actually achieving it. Marketers face barriers such as fragmented data sources, signal loss, inconsistent audience definitions, and the difficulty of aligning ad delivery with real-time context. Now, however, advancements in technology are breaking down these barriers. By appending audience and real-world context datasets such as weather, events, and promotions available at nearby retailers against location signals, brands can serve ads that feel less intrusive and more naturally aligned with consumers’ current experiences. 

We’re all familiar with this concept: imagine coffee ads delivered to a sleepy commuter in the morning or a beach holiday offer triggered as it starts to rain. But until recently this has been very difficult to achieve at any kind of scale. 

However, this next-gen approach to precision targeting taps into "micro-moments", helping brands to be part of consumers’ lives in the most relevant ways possible – bridging the gap between intention and reality with real-world, contextual insights. 

The promise of precision targeting is simple enough: we know that audiences react better to more relevant ads, so let’s use the sources available to us to deliver those ads and produce a better outcome for advertisers and a better experience for audiences. And while there are challenges in this area around the future of third-party cookies and the rise of data privacy and anti-tracking features, numerous promising alternatives are emerging – ones that could elevate advertising into a new era of customer relevance.

It’s time to transition beyond third-party cookies

Cookies were never a panacea for accurate advertising, and many advertisers had been looking for alternatives even before ‘cookie deprecation’ entered our shared vernacular.

In the absence of the cookie, innovative new methods of targeting, which comply with data privacy laws, are now changing the landscape of precision targeting. Think data clean rooms to deterministic and probabilistic identity graphs, geo-graphs with geo-key indexed audiences to audience cohorts built with federated learning models and edge computing, plus geospatial contextual models. This portfolio approach to addressability offers brands hope for the post-cookie landscape. 

Diverse addressability signals will maximise campaign impact

The adoption of alternative user data points will require us to plan a more considered approach to a campaign’s addressability strategy. Marketers must examine a client’s desired outcome and employ a portfolio method for addressability signals, allocating budgets intelligently across channels. And while clients should always look to maximise the use of their first-party data assets, the type and quality of data available varies across the industry.

Make no mistake: these are complex challenges. But they also give us a glimpse into a more effective, precise targeting future. Take programmatic media buying, for instance. Brands were historically limited to data available in the “bidstream” - limited in scope and controlled by publishers or cookies. But now, brands can break down the silos between their offline and online data sets and reduce the latency between insight to action within their media activity. 

It is now possible for CPG brands to tap into retailer analytics data, such as stock availability, sales, and promotions, to enrich their media capabilities across the entire campaign lifecycle. 

For example, brands can use Point of Sale (PoS) insights to upweight or downweight campaign budgets in the area surrounding a retail store based on stock availability to maximise media spend efficiency.

Advances in ad tech can unlock unified audience data 

New technologies also mean that combining  disparate sets of data is becoming increasingly practical. One method is to translate a dataset’s variety of geo-granularities, such as lat/long, street address, postcode, or city/state, into a geo-spatial index called H3. H3 partitions the world into hexagonal cells allowing for other audience data sets to be indexed against those geo-keys. At GroupM, we’re already wielding these new data types and capabilities to huge success. 

We did this recently for fast food giant, KFC, that had just launched its own nationwide delivery service, enabling customers to order meals directly through their website and app, rather than through aggregates such as UberEats or Just Eat. Our team applied a multi-layered data strategy, leveraging a variety of disparate datasets into a cross-channel campaign, resulting in a 4 x uplift in percentages of brand-owned delivery, and a 16% rise in new app users. 

KFC continues to serve cookies in its restaurants, of course – but a lack of digital equivalents doesn’t have to stop you from reaching the right audiences, at the right time. It’s time we lean into these effective, privacy-safe alternative advertising strategies, delivering micro-moments that revolutionise marketing’s efficacy for good.