As I write this after the 7th Zoom meeting/Google Hangout of the Day, I’m thankful for at least one notable effect of shelter-in-place: it has given me and my team the time to pause and reflect on why we started the company -- and what it delivers in this weird time for our industry.
If I wrote only a couple of sentences about why we started Spaceback and what we wanted to bring to the larger ad/marketing industry, it would go something like this:
Basically, there was a gap between paid media and social media… which happened to mirror exactly the gap between ad performance and user experience.
We asked ourselves what we could do, technologically, to put the user first while still leveraging the best of adtech infrastructure?
In answering those questions, Spaceback was born.
We combine the best of social -- the authenticity and feel of a personal relationship between brand and user -- with the efficiency, pricing, targeting, scale, and measurement of programmatic ads.
And, spoiler alert: it turns out that when we improve user experience, we also improve performance. Which seems so obvious in retrospect. But as we built our platform, the results became undeniable.
When you recalculate the value of users/reprioritize the value of bringing a good experience to them, it’s a better transaction. It is possible to bring a brand’s most amazing content from social into this programmatic environment without compromising all the good things that programmatic brings. And this helps close that gap between brands and their audiences, not just the gap between paid and social.
Which brings me back to where I started this post. Remembering why we started Spaceback and what we’ve tried to achieve… how can we help our industry in this unprecedented moment?
Time will tell, but here’s a starting point, before I jump on to my 8th Zoom call of the day:
Brands, agencies and advertisers are weighing questions which in any other time might feel routine, but now seem especially urgent: Spend now, or wait? Invest in marketing or save? And what messages should we convey?
In times of crisis, traditional branding and advertising halts, or at least slows down. But social persists when other parts of the content machine aren’t firing. Globally, we are all spending more time on our virtual connections, not less. We are connecting with brands and with the communities around them more, not less.
Utilizing social display for advertising could well be a boon for advertisers right now. It’s some of your best, most human content -- and social validation will point towards which posts are resonating. It’s an effective, easy, and (with Spaceback, at least) inexpensive way to keep your brand in front of your audience.
Leveraging your social content is something you can do, knowing that it will keep you connected to your customers as you decide what’s next for the rest of your program and answer those important questions. It’s what Spaceback did before the pandemic, what we’re doing now, and what we will do with you, together, as we all jump into whatever happens next.
