Got silos? You're not alone. Brand and performance campaigns are often developed in silos, leading to wasted media spend, misaligned campaign goals, and disjointed customer journeys. Fortunately, there are ways to unify brand and performance campaigns so that you can improve the efficiency of your awareness initiatives and drive stronger performance outcomes from brand spend.

To dive further into the topic, we held a recent virtual event “Demand More from Brand - Drive Stronger Performance from Brand Spend,” which highlighted how measurable upper-funnel brand advertising can positively impact sales and drive broader reach, and why embracing brand on top of demand is the key to remaining relevant and competitive.

The event featured Ken Ripley, vice president of sales at Scripps Networks, who was joined by Veronica de Campos, director of digital marketing at Jack’s Family Restaurants, and Grace Bailey, senior digital marketing manager at Auto Trader UK. The panelists explored how to plan audiences and inventory more effectively, tips for extending audiences and inventory packages across formats and devices, how to optimize live campaign performance based on Quantcast’s first-party data, and ways to get direct campaign feedback and insight on what is and isn’t working and why. Quantcast’s Amy Shriber and Annie Georgieva also provided a live demo of Brand Lift Live by Quantcast™, which enables marketers to measure the live impact of brand advertising.

Here are the key highlights from the event.

Campaign planning needs to be predictable and easy to activate

Amy Shriber, Quantcast’s director of product management, pointed out that it’s important to provide marketers with measurable outcomes they can rely upon. Brand Lift Live provides digital performance marketers with quantifiable ROI measurement for awareness campaigns by connecting campaign impact to performance KPIs such as site visits and conversions. Annie Georgieva, Quantcast’s senior product manager, added that when simplifying activation for both web and TV, Quantcast’s goal is to provide scale predictability without sacrificing audience precision. With Brand Lift Live, marketers have the validation that engaging their audience from brand to performance actually increases visitor and converter rates. Real-time data shows marketers how their brand campaigns are making an impact on customer perception. Across the board, marketers are able to rely on data to make meaningful optimization decisions while the campaign is still running.

Create an omnichannel approach to build stronger relationships with customers

Like other quick serve restaurants during the pandemic, Jack’s Family Restaurants, a southern legacy quick serve restaurant (QSR), had experienced declining foot traffic; they needed to quickly pivot to meet their customers’ needs. The goal of Jack’s Family Restaurants was to build stronger relationships with their long-standing customers and create awareness with new customers in emerging markets.

“We needed to make sure that our campaigns were connected and really focused on targeting existing guests. But we also needed to start leveraging our insights to reach new audiences, especially in new markets in areas where we don’t have a lot of brand awareness,” Veronica explained. The company created three distinct audience personas, which were then activated with an omnichannel campaign utilizing Display, Native, Video, and CTV. The coordinated omnichannel advertising approach connected consumers with the restaurant’s new ordering platform and loyalty program. In addition, Jack’s Family Restaurants experienced a twofold increase in foot traffic and a 5% increase in repeat purchases.

Leverage live campaign insights to fine-tune audiences, frequency, creative and messaging

Auto Trader UK was looking to increase consideration with new car buyers by introducing an omnichannel brand strategy that included video. “Having platform-specific reporting was really beneficial. By leveraging reporting for each platform, we can make those kinds of sharp, snappy optimizations throughout the campaign,” Grace noted. In addition, when they drill into a specific brand study across programmatic or on channels such as YouTube or Instagram, they can see how well the creative is working and take those insights back to their creative team.

Auto Trader partnered with Quantcast to run an upper funnel video campaign focused on consideration lift, paired with a lower funnel performance campaign to drive buyer leads. Starting with Brand Lift Live, they asked auto intenders, “How likely are you to buy a car online with Auto Trader?”, finding and optimizing to those that responded “very likely.” This not only provided them with real-time access to granular insights, but also enabled them to fine-tune audiences, frequency, creative, and messaging while their campaign was live to more efficiently find and reach their new car buyer audience. Quantcast’s Brand to Demand Attribution helped quantify the impact of these new upper funnel video investments on their sales goals. “What’s great about Quantcast is that we can report on the actual store traffic. With those KPIs, and behavioral lift, we can actually tie the results and the revenue from our digital channels directly to the sales that we’re seeing,” added Grace.

Make use of insights to stay on top of KPIs

As a publisher, Scripps is in the customer service business; they work with clients on whatever their KPIs are. Quantcast gives publishers intelligent planning, insights, and reporting so that they can create better custom content for their advertisers and stay on top of key audience KPIs for mid-flight optimizations. “Whether it’s things like upper funnel brand awareness or lift studies, we need to be flexible and able to respond to that. Quantcast can help advertisers harness the tools, whether it be forecasting or optimizing the campaign in real time. We want to be able to surface that and respond to it,” noted Ken.

Utilize connected TV to get your message to the right person at the right moment

Ken believes that CTV is “the cleanest and most effective way” to reach consumers with the right message. To maintain a competitive advantage, you should be active in whatever space your consumers are in, such as CTV, whether it be testing or acting on it. “Consumers are voting with their remote control. Acknowledging that and keeping up with it is the best way to future-proof your business,” asserted Ken.

With Brand Lift Live, advertisers can use the Quantcast Advertising Platform to plan and validate custom audiences and discover compelling supply for their audiences across CTV, desktop, and mobile. Additional platform insights examine the incremental reach of campaigns across web and CTV and the downstream contribution these brand activations deliver to performance campaigns and conversions.

Learn more

You can read about how brands such as Auto Trader UK and Jack’s Family Restaurants are using the Quantcast Platform and Brand Lift Live to leverage real-world insights and more efficiently find and reach new audiences.

Brand Lift Live is an integrated, real-time survey solution that enables you to optimize campaigns continuously against the brand awareness and consideration metrics that really matter, rather than limiting substitute metrics such as viewability and click-through rate (CTR).