Making Advertising Better
In a data-driven world, we all expect to interact with the brands we love on our own terms.
Wherever and however we choose to engage, the brands that stand out are those which align with our personal values, serve relevant, respectful experiences, and recognize us as individuals in the moment.
And, going beyond recognition alone, the brands we truly trust are those that act in good faith, using their influence and voice in an authentic, ethical and socially aware manner.
So, as the advertising world shifts – to adapt to third-party cookie deprecation and adopt stronger data privacy strategies – isn’t it time advertisers did better, to break bias, and transcend people’s expectations?
Aligning a company’s mission with the values and principles of its customers; that’s exactly what conscious marketing works to achieve. Bringing a people-first approach to marketing, advertising, process, and ethos across a business, conscious marketing helps brands to embrace a more respectful, relevant, and kind way of reaching people.
In short, it’s a promise to make advertising better.
And, for future-thinking organizations, this is a no-brainer – it means stepping away from poorly segmented, biased, or irrelevant advertising, and towards behavior-based, first-party, data-driven marketing that engages and builds relationships with the people who matter most.
Key benefits of conscious marketing
So, what does ‘conscious’ really mean for a brand?
Choosing to follow a conscious approach goes far beyond a single act of positivity or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
Founded in inclusivity and respect, conscious marketing ingrains honesty, accountability, and transparency throughout a business – from its ethos to its actions.
As a result, those who prioritize it, not only build a more ethical business, but enable greater loyalty, more relevant customer relationships, and form a ‘virtuous loop’ across all activities.
Remembering that conscious marketing takes a people-first mindset—for your customers, conscious marketing enables:
- The right behavior-based messaging to suit an individual’s activity. Conscious advertising bases its content, timing, and visibility on real insight about a person, not assumption.
- Non-interruptive relevance, as content is respectful of timing and frequency. Conscious messaging avoids interruption, and aims to provide content exactly when people need it.
- A bias-breaking, respectful approach that considers inclusivity in the language it uses.
- Stronger, authentic, and trusted relationships with the brands that match people’s values.
From your brand’s perspective, conscious marketing enables:
- Ethical business practices and processes, everywhere. Conscious marketing is a holistic approach to ensure everything – from the partners you work with to internal processes and culture – enables diversity, inclusion, and ethical practice.
- Increased trust, engagement, and loyalty, through more relevant, respectful – and consequently successful – campaigns.
- Enhanced insights that can positively shape growth, future campaigns, product development, and more.
- Increased revenue and reduced costs. More relevant campaigns – which reach the right people – increase trust, loyalty, and engagement, enabling more efficient, cost effective campaigns.
- Reduced brand risk. A conscious approach aims to both meet, and transcend baseline privacy regulations; it ensures that those following it are better positioned to stay ahead of change.
So, what does a conscious approach to advertising look like in practice?
Examples of Conscious Marketing in Practice
Championing a conscious approach, below are a series of Matterkind and Kinesso case examples to illustrate conscious marketing in action.
Removing bias and increasing audience relevance for a retailer
Part of a conscious approach may include reviewing audience bias, to ensure an advertiser takes a diverse, inclusive approach – and therefore reach a more relevant, yet wider customer base than with previous campaigns.
The case: When onboarding a beauty retailer’s CRM, the Matterkind/Kinesso team evaluated the CRM’s composition, based on the general category shopper population.
The result: The CRM skewed lower in composition for the diverse populations that the beauty retailer was actively seeking, within multi-cultural and generational groups.
As a result, Matterkind created a High-Value Audience (HVA), informed with additional audience composition to enhance areas that the CRM was lacking; to consciously bring messaging to the right, diverse shoppers that the brand was invested in reaching.
Increased performance, and optimized spend for professional services
Serving respectful messaging that’s mindful of frequency and relevant in the moment, rather than interruptive, is another element of conscious marketing.
The case: A professional services company wanted to improve media performance and optimize its digital ad spend; taking a conscious approach to analyze audience overlap, increase relevance, and reduce ad frequency helped it to enhance campaign efficiency.
Results: Using Audience Hub to unify audience data measurement, not only across digital media channels, but also partners, vendors, audiences and tactics, and to highlight audience duplication across campaigns, the business was able to:
- Identify inefficiencies across several industry segments (wth a 96% segment overlap between ‘Capital Markets’ and ‘Banking’ industry segments).
- Increase reach efficiency by adjusting ad frequency, and improving message management to help avoid ad fatigue. Pre-solution, the average frequency was 1.53. Post-solution, this was reduced to 1.45.
- Improve reach to +3MM unique users, creating a weekly reach of 22MM, compared to a previous weekly reach of 19MM. Removing duplication reduced the average ad frequency, meaning impressions could be reallocated to more relevant and new, unique users.
- Reduce cost inefficiencies by no longer serving media to duplicative segments.
Increased impression distribution, frequency management and addressable TV inclusion for CPG and pharmaceuticals
Following an addressable approach that’s based on behavior, and which is mindful not to fatigue, but to support audiences, is one way that this brand used conscious marketing to great effect.
The case: A pharmaceutical leader wanted to reduce linear TV campaign overexposure to households, through addressable TV. A conscious approach helped to enable this consideration of messaging, to attract more relevant viewership, and suppress fatigue.
The results: The integration of addressable TV with national TV viewership, enabled an increased audience reach from 80% to 92%.
Running a national TV reach extension and frequency management analysis, based on viewership, also helped to identify unexposed and Light TV viewership – which in turn increased relevant impressions.
Making Conscious Marketing Work for Your Brand
Beneficial and considerate to your business and your customers, adopting a conscious approach is a wise choice for forward-thinking organizations.
Of course, as with any new approach, making the move can take time to fully activate; so, now is the time to start considering how conscious marketing can work for your brand!
To help you plot your route:
Remember, it’s OK to start small – and test!
Shifting an organization’s mindset, process and technology toward a conscious process takes time! Because of that, it can help to start small – run a test or pilot first to determine what works for your brand. A conscious addressable advertising partner can help you to assess and optimize, as well as support and advise you on where best to begin.
Build the case for your business stakeholders
Securing substantial change sits with your Executives and Board. Again, a conscious addressable advertising partner can help you to build that business case, and advise on what practical results a conscious ethos, process and tech stack will deliver.
Adopt addressable advertising
No matter how a person chooses to engage with you, following an addressable advertising approach (which uses first and third–party data, rather than third-party cookies to display content) ensures behavior-based relevance, flexibility, and that campaigns are always conscious of an individual’s preferences and context.
As the advertising ecosystem moves ever-closer to supporting marketing that’s relevant, recognizes people as individuals, and thoughtfully adapts to their needs, adopting a conscious approach means taking a step towards transformed relevance for your customers – and greater long-term results for your brand. It’s time to create marketing that matters!
