Cogent Weekly Newsletter

Sean Simon

Published on November 11, 2020

Welcome to Cogent’s first weekly newsletter! In this weekly format, we aim to bring you the best content we’ve read or heard in the previous week. We think this will help you to stay ahead of your competition. Each week, we will spotlight one Cogent Collective member. We welcome your feedback, as it will help us serve up the right content for your interests. We will strive to keep the format consistent so you know what to expect, like a latte from Starbucks…

? Fireside with Cogent

In case you missed it: 

What rhymes with “unprecedented”? Our first End of The Year Member Update features some familiar names, and is sure to put a smile on your face. It’s the story of how Cogent began, what we’ve accomplished, and includes insight into what you can expect from us in 2021. 

Marketers Underuse Ad Experiments. That’s a Big Mistake.

written by Harvard Business Review

Business experimentation is—rightfully—framed as a gold standard by scholars and leading practitioners, but the practice has yet to find its way into most firms’ day-to-day advertising strategy. That’s a big mistake. E-commerce companies that conduct ad experiments see two to three percent better performance per experiment run (as measured by purchases achieved per advertising dollar spent). In this study, an advertiser that ran 15 experiments (versus none) in a given year sees about a 30% higher ad performance that year; those that ran 15 experiments in the prior year see about a 45% increase in performance.

? Read the entire article

A Cogent Thought:

Marketers shouldn’t trust their media partners to evaluate themselves. Even though MTA’s industry promises haven’t lasted the test of time, it’s imperative to work with independent partners that can help validate your media spending. As an industry, we must keep measuring and optimizing so we can continue to move forward.


A Cogent Thought:

Consumers are hungry for innovative ways to discover products. Brands and retailers need to continue to test ideas to see what sticks. There will be leaders and followers in this area. Which one will you be? Gone are the days of free samples at Costco, but this has created opportunities for companies like Foodboro (a Cogent Collective member) which helps emerging CPG brands get in consumers’ hands. We believe it will serve brands well if they can show consumers how to use their products.

Livestreaming Will Take Retail By Storm in 2021

And four other predictions about the future of commerce

written by AdWeek

For many of us, 2020 was a year of endless monotony. For businesses, however, it was a year of immense upheaval, and perhaps no industry has had to adapt rapidly to new consumer behaviors more than the retail sector.

Looking forward to a new year, we can expect to see even more changes as consumers test new channels for discovery and purchases, while brands and retailers seek to position themselves wherever they anticipate shoppers will be.

? Read the entire article


The Podscape: A Map of the Podcast Advertising Landscape 

written by SoundsProfitable

Navigating the podcast advertising space can be a bit overwhelming, especially without any sort of map. So, in collaboration with Magellan AI, we took our best shot at outlining the industry to give those old and new in the space a better starting point for viewing the podcast advertising ecosystem.

It’s definitely neat to see how far this project has come. Magellan AI’s goal was to take this internal collage and create an external digital version to share with everyone. That’s a common theme that continues to shine through in the podcast adtech space: collaboration and community building. For those of you who haven’t done time in other advertising channels, it’s definitely a breath of fresh air. This beautiful mess of sticky notes could have simply stayed on their wall as an internal tool to guide how they viewed and approached different partnerships. Instead, they chose to release it to the public, making it something everyone in podcast advertising could benefit from.

? Read the entire article

A Cogent Thought:

The Lumascape made AdTech digestible so that each channel could advance. This effort should do the same for podcasting. These are mostly new players to most of us, and if you want to stay ahead of your competition, this should help you learn who the players are.


A Cogent Thought:

Out-of-Home advertising has evolved more than any other medium over the last two years. I often compare DOOH to TV because it has evolved from an analog one-to-many medium to a digital targetable and trackable medium. It’s not 1:1 like digital display and video. Still, it does leverage some of the same technologies to provide highly targetable audiences and measurement to help you optimize in real-time. Technology is changing the way people buy and consume OOH advertising. If you are a digital buyer, you should give this channel a look.

Geopath’s Year in Review

written by Billboard Insider

With more than 50 place-based members to date accounting for hundreds of thousands of OOH advertising spots, Geopath’s place-base measurement provides impressions, reach and frequency, across thousands of audience segments for place-based advertising, including signage in gyms, bars, amusement parks, stadiums, malls, airports, retail environments, cinemas, grocery stores and many other venues.

As the most comprehensive source of place-based measurement, Geopath allows buyers and sellers to have a more holistic view of the total OOH advertising ecosystem. With its partner, data enablement and processing company, Intermx, Geopath will add over 160,000 more place-based spots in the coming months.

? Read the entire article


Podcast of the Week

The Ad Industry’s Long Road Ahead

Produced by AdExchanger

Cogent Takeaways:

With cookies and IDFA at risk, we, as an industry need to be thinking about measurement, attribution and frequency.

Consent and privacy will lead publisher efforts to gain 1st party data that they can monetize with advertisers. Will consumers play?

Podcast ad spending is projected to increase 45% to over $1 B led by Spotify, iHeart, and Amazon.

There is an opportunity to do some innovative ad targeting, messaging, and measurement within podcasting.

The TV landscape will become even more competitive in 2021, with both paid and ad-supported platform options.

Advertisers will continue to follow the eyeballs, but they will need to invest in measurement to find the right ones in a media world that continues to fragment.


Member Spotlight

Chris George

COO
@Group Nine Media

Chris has been a phenomenal member of the Cogent Collective since June 2020. Chris has taken the time to learn about our partners, and quickly loops in the members of his team who would gain the most from each partner. Group Nine Media is launching their first test this week, and is working through a proposal with another Cogent partner. Chris’ candid feedback has helped us evaluate partners with efficiency and a publisher’s unique perspective.

Leave a Reply