#MarketingExcellenceAwards SG 2021 spills: Yahoo's predictions on the future of digital advertising

Yahoo is a global media and tech company that offers a full-stack platform to grow businesses and drive more meaningful connections across advertising, search and media. It worked with Singtel to reach out to users who weren’t part of its consumer base, and stay top-of-mind by maintaining brand awareness in a busy digital landscape using programmatic DOOH platforms. The campaign saw Yahoo win silver for Excellence in Programmatic Marketing at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's Marketing Excellence Awards Singapore 2021. 

In an interview with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, Carol Tay (pictured), senior director of sales, Southeast Asia, Yahoo, shared how digital advertising helped brands stay relevant and top-of-mind with their consumers during the pandemic. She also shared how digital advertising platforms such as DOOH, AR and VR can help brands adapt to consumers' hybrid behaviour post-pandemic. 

This interview was done as part of MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s winners’ and finalists’ interview series for Marketing Excellence Awards Singapore 2021. To find out more about the awards click here.

Borders and markets are now opening up. How are you leveraging this to help brands and agencies?

Tay: Consumer behaviour and preferences continue to adapt, with these shifts coinciding with developments in the post-pandemic situation as borders open up, industries are seeing a revival, and vaccination programmes boost consumers’ confidence as they step out of their homes and indulge in outdoor activities and habits after having stayed indoors. Yahoo has always been committed to helping brands adapt to changing consumer attitudes by connecting them to their passions, and we remain focused on supporting our clients and thinking outside the box to engage users.

Today’s emerging consumer profiles carry the lessons of the new normal while returning to some pre-pandemic habits. This has resulted in a hybrid behaviour, where consumers continue to rely on online mediums for their shopping decisions and have gotten accustomed to online engagement, but now have a desire to venture outdoors and be at the centre of in-person experiences. Brands now need to meet them exactly where they are and engage them at the right time. Recognising the gaping hole for marketers to fill, we focused on helping our clients connect the dots between the online and offline channels that consumers traverse, providing a holistic consumer view and enabling a seamless consumer purchase journey — supercharged by innovative experiences such as AR or DOOH platforms.

What was one shift in the marketing space that caught you by surprise? How did your team pivot?

Tay: One shift that we observed is the rise in consumer demand for seamless experiences as users alternate between various channels: whether online such as desktop, mobile, and CTV, to offline platforms such as OOH or in-store presence. Last year’s focus was on providing immersive experiences for what had become a predominantly-online consumer base, and we are seeing a continuation of that behaviour as real-world and offline avenues open up.

We uncovered an interesting insight through our Yahoo Omnibus study, which showed that 35% of users took shopping inspiration from OOH, interactive ads, and podcasts. In the past, it wasn’t uncommon to think about how online channels can support offline activities, but in today’s world, we are seeing a flip. Now, the approach instead, for many, might be how offline channels can support online activities. And this is a totally different ball game and approach to strategising and executing campaigns.

That gave us much insight into the benefits of further integrating our platforms and tools more holistically, allowing us to reach consumers at various touchpoints. We launched an exciting programmatic DOOH campaign with Schroders on Orchard road and Singapore’s central business district, where we ran ads across screens at premium locations with high footfall traffic during peak hours complemented by retargeting across mobile devices. We achieved an impressive 80% higher mobile click-through rate than the average.

Tell us one crucial learning lesson the team gained in 2021.

Tay: Understanding your consumer is key to creating and executing effective campaigns. It’s an age-old lesson, but it’s one that has really underscored its significance in 2021, as users demanded richer and more immersive experiences — innovative, next-gen tech such as AR and VR, programmatic DOOH, and other platforms that deepen engagement have set the groundwork for us, more so as we continue to ride the digitisation wave in Asia.

Consumer attitudes continue to shift, and sparking meaningful connections that connect users to their passions are essential in winning them over. It is likely that we will see even more innovative technologies that further deepen interactions with consumers as their hybrid activities — of relying on both online and offline means — continue to take shape. Moving forward from that insight, we are focused and committed to providing holistic, seamless experiences for consumers as they teeter between online and offline platforms and powering up touchpoints for wherever they are, whenever.

Tell us a bit of the marketing plans and client/agency campaigns you are working on this year.

Tay: Yahoo remains focused on providing solutions today for tomorrow's future and ensuring that brands and agencies will be equipped with the tools they need now, even as they look ahead in the digital future.

As we inch closer to the cookieless world, first-party data and innovative privacy-centric solutions are the order of the day. In fact, today, 30% of ad opportunities are without advertising IDs, with more than 75% of all ad opportunities expected to be identity-less by 2024. We have recently launched Next-Gen Solutions for web, an advanced contextual targeting solution that uses machine learning and real-time data signals to provide omnichannel targeting and buying across non-addressable inventory in the Yahoo DSP. This builds on our previous launch in 2021 that enabled audience reach and monetisation independent of mobile app IDs for in-app environments. Beyond that, as part of our suite of identity solutions, Yahoo ConnectID, for when identity can be resolved, draws on data from millions of opted-in users across Yahoo’s global portfolio of owned and operated media properties.

We’re also excited about our recent partnership with Near, the world’s largest source of privacy-led intelligence on people, places and products, merging this with Yahoo’s omnichannel DSP and suite of identity solutions. This alliance will bring a unified view to bridge the gap in online and offline targeting, attribution and measurement, solving a key pain point that marketers face in a hybrid commerce environment.

Beyond preparing for the cookieless, omnichannel future, we’re also committed to helping marketers adapt faster to the changing digital ad landscape through our Yahoo Academy Learning Center, an on-demand learning platform where marketers can access extensive use cases and learn how to maximise Yahoo’s DSP for supercharged, omnichannel campaigns.

What is one trend you are excited about in 2022?

Tay: We anticipate the demand for holistic, seamless experiences that effortlessly connect users at every touchpoint this year, as consumers learn to integrate online and offline habits into their own lifestyles. Omnichannel advertising will continue to make gains in 2022, and it will be a playground for our suite of next-gen solutions. I am excited to see programmatic DOOH develop into a richer, interactive platform and to see what limits would be tested here — we’ve learnt that 66% are more likely to remember content that uses innovative technologies, and from the results we’ve achieved with immersive experiences, I believe that we will further witness how these tools further amplify brand messages alongside consumer activity and interaction. Yahoo’s suite of privacy-centric identity solutions will also ensure relevant reach at scale, and further power the ability to merge online and offline worlds as we inch closer to the cookie phaseout.

The blurring between physical and digital realms, as in the case of the metaverse, is the writing on the wall — and I believe in 2022, we will witness more of its beginnings through simulated experiences and a depth of first-party data as more users opt in and put the work in developing their online personas.