A recent eMarketer study found Americans now spend an average of 1 hour and 14 minutes per day on social media networks. Assuming we’re eventually able to relegate our phone to its resting place on our nightstands and achieve our recommended 7 hours of sleep each night, that means we’re spending over 7% of our waking lives scrolling, liking, commenting and consuming social media. Moreover, a 2019 Pew Research survey found that over half of all respondents check at least one social network several times a day. So what’s keeping us so engaged with these apps and coming back for more? I propose it is the power of the Feed — content that is continually curated, refreshed, and optimized for our engagement and enjoyment.
Social media is all about what’s fresh and current. Whether it’s the concerts our friends are attending, the topics that are trending, the hashtags that are going viral or the latest products companies are releasing, users are tuned into the contemporary. Most brands are doing an admirable job of regularly updating their social Feeds with new posts and tweets to stay relevant (did you notice how many brand logos and posted content adopted a rainbow hue this past month to show off their Pride? Too many for me to count…) Unfortunately, many of these same brands fall short in keeping their display creatives as timely (how many display ads did you see with Pride content? I can count maybe a handful…). Why the disconnect?
Well, for one, creative lead time and costs are prohibitive to having a display creative strategy that is as active and responsive to current trends as social media. A 2018 Forrester Wave Research report showed that the creative process still takes a matter of weeks to go from the big idea stage of brainstorming and collaboration all the way through to the final creative design approvals, asset generation, and trafficking.
Some progress is being made with the rise of creative management platforms (CMPs) for building and versioning audience-driven creative, and dynamic creative optimization (DCO) for real-time, product feed-based ad assembly with on-the-fly optimization of product and messaging.
Real progress, however, is being made with Spaceback Feeds, our platform’s latest offering for building and versioning social feed-based ads. Trafficking is reduced to a one-time setup, giving brands and agencies the ability to easily rotate fresh content from across their social networks into programmatic ads within minutes…seriously. This past Father’s Day we saw a brand deliver programmatic impressions against a new creative within their Spaceback Feed just 14 minutes after the content was posted on Instagram!
By simplifying the creative build and trafficking process through Spaceback Feeds, brands are empowered to provide their audience with timely, engaging content variations that are “people-optimized” with real-time social signals and familiar social formats. It’s the perfect way to connect with their users for the remaining 93% of the day that they aren’t spending on their favorite social networks.
Contact us to learn how to get started adding Spaceback Feeds to your display strategy!
