How Does Amazon Know So Much About You?

I have always been a pretty neat, clean, and tidy person. I don’t like clutter, I like seeing the lines on the carpet from a vacuum in a room, and everything (and I mean everything) has a place. Well, having kids changes that because now my living room looks like a bomb went off at any given point with the number of Magna-Tiles, Paw Patrol cars, and wooden blocks that are strewn all about. Just the other day as I had stepped on another Tyrannosaurus Rex that I thought, “there’s gotta be a better way to keep all these toys somewhat organized,” so I immediately got onto Amazon and purchased a bunch of mesh zipper pouch bags. I thought they would help keep all my son’s dinosaurs in one pouch, all his cars in another, his blocks in another so that he could still find what he wanted, and my living room would look a little normal.

That’s just one example of when I have used Amazon in the past week. I have also bought Halloween costumes, fog juice, ink for my printer, and a smart plug. While I am feverishly making purchases left and right from Amazon to make my life easier, Amazon is gathering all sorts of data about me based on my purchases, searches, interests, behaviors, and more. Amazon is now the second largest data collector on the internet, so all of this data that’s gathered is then used so that businesses, marketers, and advertisers can reach a very detailed, targeted audience.

With four different ways to reach Amazon users with ads, businesses have options on how targeted they want to get, and also on what kind of ads they want to serve to users. Through Amazon, you can reach consumers with Behavioral Targeting, Product Targeting, Custom Audience Matching and Lookalike, and Retargeting.

With Behavioral Targeting, you are showing your display, video, or Over the Top (OTT) ads to specific consumers based on what they’ve purchased, browsed, or searched for on Amazon, and then show those ads across Amazon.com (if it’s a display ad), Amazon owned properties and on thousands of partner websites and apps. Through my recent activity on Amazon of what I browsed for and purchased, I put myself in the following categories:

Halloween Costumes

Halloween Costumes and Decorations – In-Market
Apparel (Kids and Baby) – In-Market
Baby Apparel – In-Market

Fog Juice

Halloween Costumes and Decorations – In-Market
Party Supplies – In-Market

Ink for my printer

Office Products and Supplies – In-Market
Premium Office Products – In-Market
Ink and Toner – In-Market

Smart Plug

Smart Home Products – In-Market

With Product Targeting, we are getting a little more precise because we are building an audience of people who have searched, browsed, or purchased specific products on Amazon, and then showing them a display, video, or OTT ad on Amazon.com (if it’s a display ad), Amazon owned properties, and on thousands of partner websites and apps.

To put those same products into perspective for Product Targeting, maybe Party City is running a campaign and they want to reach moms, so they build an audience of people based off those that have searched for, browsed, or purchased Halloween costumes, party décor (fog juice), or Halloween candy. If Staples was running a campaign wanting to promote their home office equipment, they could start serving me ads if they are looking for people that have searched for, browsed, or purchased office furniture, desk chairs, or printer ink.

With Custom Audience Matching, Amazon will take a list of email addresses, physical addresses, or phone numbers, match them to Amazon users and show a display, video, or OTT ad across Amazon.com (display only), Amazon owned properties, and on thousands of partner websites and apps. You can also choose to use a lookalike audience which is then finding other people with similar characteristics and behaviors on that original list, and then serve them ads. When you sign up for an Amazon Prime account, you never would have thought that when you signed up for an Amazon account, you were signing yourself up for a whole lot more than Amazon Prime!

As a business owner, it sounds real sexy to think of your ads being on Amazon.com, and sure, that is really neat, but the real power of partnering with Amazon is reaching people with that same targeting data that Amazon has created, but while they are off of Amazon. That’s what is happening when people are seeing ads on Amazon owned properties and on Amazon Publishers. As consumers, we typically go to Amazon.com, search for something, put it in our cart and leave, so we aren’t spending a ton of time on Amazon.com. We are, however, spending time on IMDB.com, Freevee, Twitch, and FireTV, which are all properties owned by Amazon. Additionally, Amazon has partnered with thousands of different websites and apps so that you can be served ads while on various websites and apps that are not affiliated with Amazon, called Amazon Publishers, and these are just a few:

As an ad platform, Amazon is growing at a very rapid pace. Their share of U.S. net digital ad revenue is 10.3%, behind Facebook at 25.2% and Google at 28.9%. Now 10% might not sound like a lot, but Amazon has only been in the advertising game for 10 years. Both Google and Facebook have been around a lot longer than that, so to be that close in 10 years says a lot.

On the consumer side of Amazon, millennials are the biggest audience using Amazon and outpace Baby Boomers by a ratio of two to one when it comes to using Amazon as a shopping tool. That’s not too much of a surprise seeing that at the time of Amazon’s founding, the oldest millennials were only 16 years old, and today millennials are between 25 and 40 years of age and just at the life stage when consumer incomes and spending begin to peak. Boomers, now 57 to 76 years, are going in the opposite direction with income and spending dropping as they reach retirement age. If a business is looking to target Millennials, Amazon is a great place to do that. They are the generation that is utilizing the e-commerce site the most, which is just one of the ways Amazon is gathering that first party data.

The post How Does Amazon Know So Much About You? appeared first on Vici Media.

Introduction of Social Mirror OTT Ads

As technology advances, so does the need for creativity.   When you can advance both at the same time, that puts you ahead of your competition.  That is what we do.  We always Beta Test new and innovative technologies to keep our clients on the cutting edge.  We want you to have everything that is new and shiny, and an opportunity to shine along with it.

We recently rolled out Social Mirror OTT.  OTT is an acronym for Over The Top.   But, before we dive into Social Mirror OTT, let’s make sure that you’re clear as to what Social Mirror is.

Social Mirror Ads look like your social media display or video posts, but they appear on other websites and apps.  They also run across all devices, including desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and even gaming devices targeted to the audience that you want to reach.

Each ad links back to the social platform it is mirroring and, has a second call to action button that links to the advertiser’s website!  Ads contain unique social actions related back to the originating platform (for example, the like icon, the heart icon, the pinning icon, the retweet icon… those actions are available). These ads can integrate with all the major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linked In, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube. Creatively, ads can be  display, video or carousel.

How do these ads work?  Pretty simple, actually!

Step 1: Create a social post and provide us with the URL of that post. Like this example here of a Tweet on Twitter from Yankee Candle:

Now Step 2: Enhance it with additional call to action opportunities.

We take your post and create it as an ad – that looks just like (and links to) the social post – and run it across thousands of websites and apps!

The best part is the ad has three call-to-action opportunities:

Clicks on the Social Media logo and your profile image, take the users to your Social Media business page.
Clicks on the Call-To-Action button take the users to your website.
Clicks on the Social Media icons below the ad take you to that post on your Social Media page

One aspect of Social Mirror ads that differs from that of Social Media Advertising is the ability to reach your target audience.

Behavioral Categories – Showing your Social Mirror ads to specific consumers based on their previous on-line behavior, across all devices.
Keywords – Showing your Social Mirror ads on webpages and apps that contain keywords related to your business, across all devices.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Showing your Social Mirror ads to people using machine learning to target consumers based on who is engaging with the ad, across all devices.
Retargeting– Following people after they leave your website and showing them your Social Mirror ad, on other websites and apps they go to, across all devices.
Custom Audience Matching and Look Alike – We target people (or businesses) on your list of emails, addresses, or phone numbers, when they go online and show them Social Mirror ads when they are browsing across websites and apps.

Once we have uploaded your database, we’ll be able to provide you with an Insights Report.  Just another advantage over traditional Social Media Advertising.

In addition to your traditional posts on social media, we can also create Social Mirror Stories Ads as well as create a Social Mirror OTT campaign for you.

OTT, or Over The Top is an umbrella term referring to video programming transmitted via the internet, which bypasses traditional cable or broadcast distribution.   It can be consumed on any device including computers, mobile devices, and Connected (Smart) TVs.

At Vici, all of our OTT campaigns are served ONLY on Connected (Smart) TV’s, the premium and most preferred inventory.

So, with Social Mirror OTT, we are able to take content from your Social Media posts (any of the 8 major social platforms mentioned earlier) and use that content to create an OTT Video commercial.  We’ll take your social post and create an OTT ad that runs on Connected TV’s!  These ads will feature your logo, your business name, even a description on the screen.  To top it off, we’ll also include a QR code that links potential customers to your website.

Let’s talk about how they work:

These can be horizontal or vertical videos.
Videos can be any length between :10 up to :60.
You provide us the URL of the social post and the elements.
You provide us the website click through URL and we create the QR code that links to that webpage.
Monthly reports will showcase how many scans were received.
The ads don’t link to the social account. The QR code instead scans to the desired website.
We creates the QR code. Technically, this could be provided to us. However, if that’s the case, we won’t have the ability to report on it.   These ads could also be done without a QR code, if desired.

We’ve just launched this product and have already seen massive success, just like our standard Social Mirror Campaigns.

Your clients turn to you for your expertise.  They rely on you to keep them up to speed on what’s new and what works.  This is new.  This works!

Be the resource to your clients that brings the cutting edge technology to your clients.  Bring the new and shiny and feel confident in the opportunity to produce results.   We’ve already tested this, so you don’t have to.

If you’re looking for opportunities that will make you stand out from your competition, this is it.

The post Introduction of Social Mirror OTT Ads appeared first on Vici Media.

Introducing the Insights Report for Consumers and Businesses

Ever want to be a mind reader? Be in a crowded room and read the thoughts and interests of those around you? Or even in a restaurant and wondering what the other guests are talking about or into? Now it is time to look into your digital crystal ball with Insight Reports. Is it mind reading…well no, but it is the closest thing to it to learn more about consumer demographics, business revenue footprints and knowing more about a clients database.

How is this possible?

From a database list, we use cookie-less data and match first party data whether it’s phone numbers, names, emails, physical addresses, domain URLs, mobile device ids, HHIP addresses, other wifi addresses and compares it to offline data (like census and income data) and location data (mapping people from a business location to a home IP address) to determine who a person is and what their characteristics are.

What is included in this report?

It provides details on location, age, life stage, ethnicity, political party, household income, charitable contributions, home value, discretionary income, net worth, invested assets, genders present in the household, and number of children.

Let’s take a peek at each section of the Insights Report for Consumers:

The first part includes a segment summary.

Total Households is the total number of postal addresses we can match to targetable households.  (Please note this number is not always the one used for the match rate. It depends on the match type – if the match type is addresses, we’ll use this number. If the match type is emails, we’ll use emails and so on).

Total People is the total number of people living across all matched households, this is from our offline data of people-based profiles who share the address/location.

Total Household Devices is the total number of devices being used by the people within all households.

Total Top Household Devices is the total number of frequently used devices we can match within a household.

Total Household Network IPs is the total number carrier IP addresses, associated with your mobile phone dynamic IPs (when roaming, on LTE, etc). Generally, this number is higher than Wi-Fi IP’s because network/carrier IPs are constantly changing, and they rack up a bunch of IPs found.

Total Household Wi-Fi IP’s is the total number of IP addresses from Wi-Fi routers/modems we can detect in total within a household.

Total Phones is the total number of landline phones across all households, which were can match within a household. Note that these are landlines, not the mobile phone numbers so this number is typically lower because landlines are of limited use.

Total Emails is the number of emails that are owned between all houses. Please note we can’t expose these email addresses.

The next section of the report covers location data.

Urban means lives in a town or city in a more densely populated area. Suburban means lives just outside a town or city is a less densely populated area. Rural means characteristic of the countryside rather than the town in a sparsely populated area.

The next chart is the age breakdown by age segments.

The next chart shows a Social Matrix of those matched. This is where the mind reading comes in. You and gain valuable insights on your database. For instance, things like your audience could have a high % of “Luxury Lifestyle” meaning they are 52–64-year-olds living luxurious lives due to high-paying professional jobs and greater disposable income or “Core Families” meaning 40–51-year-olds with a strong focus on the family. Career and job are secondary leading to financial planning issues and lower credit status.

Other Insights include race and political party affiliations.

Insights Reports includes Household Income Data compared to the national average:

Information if they are charitable contributors in the community compared to the national average:

Home Value data compared to the national average:

It also includes Discretionary income data:

As well as Net Worth data compared to the national average:

Is your database list investing their assets? Invested Assets data is included in Insights Reports:

And more demographic data included gender and children in the household:

Not only can we take a deep dive with a consumer list, but also with businesses.  Insights Report for Business look a little different. Data includes top business types, top business organizations, # of employees and revenue.

For example, you can see how many employees each business has to determine if they are a small, medium, or enterprise operation:

So, what to do with all this data?  First, we can find these people online through custom audience matching and serve them a variety of different digital ads. Native (including video), display, video pre-roll, online audio, OTT or Social Mirror. So many options!

This data can be used for future targeting options or used for lookalike targeting to find other consumers or business that look like your list. Adding on social matrix info, political party, income, or even net worth could really expand the reach to an audience you may otherwise have missed.  Take your campaigns to a whole new level with Insights Reports and Custom Audience Matching!

The post Introducing the Insights Report for Consumers and Businesses appeared first on Vici Media.