Digital Advertising Services

Digital advertising is a comprehensive term that includes any advertising services on numerous digital platforms and digital channels. Many advertisers use an advertising agency to place and promote a product or service. These digital channels include television, websites, social media, mobile apps, and more.

The evolution of advertising to digital advertising in marketing dates back to Ancient Egypt. Check out the timeline below:

• 1472 – First known print ad was published for a book in England.
• 1704 – First known newspaper ad was published in America.
• 1835 – First billboard ads showcased the circus.
• 1893 – Sears was the first advertiser to use direct mail advertising.
• 1922 – Radio ads started.
• 1941 – TV advertising began with the first Bulova watch advertisement.
• 1950 to 1980s – The “golden age of advertising” flourished with big ideas and celebrity personalities who gained prominence as television audiences grew. The advertising definition marketing method included creating brand characters, such as “Tony the Tiger” for Frosted Flakes cereal.
• 1992 – Online or digital advertising started with the AOL web portal and online service provider, and the Prodigy search portal.
• 1994 – Programmatic advertising began. AT&T created the first digital banner ad. The conversion rate skyrocketed, showing approx. 50% of the people who saw the AT&T banner ad clicked on it.
• 1995 – Yahoo shifted from being an online directory to an advertising definition business model with the first keyword-based ads.
• 2000 – Google entered the market with search engine ads based on paid search. They launched Google AdWords with about 250 advertisers placing ads on Google properties through the system.
• 2005 – Connected TV officially started when iTunes allowed users to download certain television shows.
• 2007 – Netflix & Hulu started streaming services.

Since then, digital advertising has expanded across all devices with improved data collection and audience targeting methods. An innovative advertising services example doesn’t exist nowadays without digital advertising. Advertisers are looking for the best ways to data-mine customer profiles and retarget them with powerful personalized ads.

With digital advertising, the advertising services definition expanded from a single paper ad to the ability to track and deliver multiple ads to anyone at any given time a user is on their device “surfing the internet”. Digital advertising is vital for an advertiser to grab the attention of a user. Connected TV, for example, became one of the most powerful advertising channels to do so.

Depending on the advertising needs for a product or service and the available budget, there is everything from hiring a small business marketing consultant to contracting with a full-service agency.

Here is an explanation of the various types of advertising services. Learn what each type does and where they stand in today’s modern advertising industry.

1. Full-Service Advertising Agency

A full-service ad agency offers most types of advertising services. This kind of agency is used by businesses to mass outsource advertising campaigns. The main benefits are saving an advertiser valuable time and reducing the need for in-house staffing.

This type of ad agency handles all the advertising and marketing efforts of a business. The agency will create a strategic marketing plan, handle the creative aspects, produce the content, manage the advertising placement, orchestrate the media buy, and report on the results. They tend to have a very large staff and charge very high fees for their services.

2. Digital Advertising Agency

A digital ad agency focuses on digital channels. Almost all advertisers benefit from a digital advertising campaign. The benefits include better targeting and cost-effectiveness.

The best digital marketing services include agencies that offer full-service programmatic advertising. The focus of a digital ad agency is on a comprehensive digital marketing services list that may include Connected TV, OTT, Display & Native, Video, Audio, Social, and more.

3. Traditional Advertising Agency

A traditional ad agency works with newspapers, print, direct mail, linear television, and radio. Advertisers looking to use a traditional advertising agency are those who market products and services to consumers with multiple millions of dollar budgets for brand awareness campaigns, or local businesses reaching consumers on local channel stations.

4. Social Media Advertising Agency

This agency aims to create social media advertising services that get viral attention on social media platforms. Social media advertising is important; however, it is not common that an advertising campaign runs only on a social media service. Social media advertising is usually a part of a larger campaign that includes many digital advertising services that create various customer touchpoints across all digital media.

5. Creative Advertising Agency

A creative ad agency has the idea of people who brainstorm the creative concepts for a campaign and then design a comprehensive strategy to build brand awareness.

Businesses use a creative agency when they need help coming up with superb marketing and advertising ideas. The benefits come from outsourcing creative work to specialists. They may come up with ideas for a video campaign, a slogan, a unique angle to use for a promotion, and influencer endorsements. If needing creative recommendations, please don’t hesitate to contact Keynes for a list of best partners.

6. Media Buying Advertising Agency

A media buying agency focuses on media planning and buying for cost-effectiveness. They place ads for clients using programmatic advertising methods. Programmatic advertising allows real-time bidding on the ad placement.

This type of agency develops a timeframe, creates a budget, and can even curate a list of digital advertising agencies to partner with. The goal is to reach the target audience for the lowest cost possible and manage the advertising campaigns by tracking the key performance indicators of the media buys.

7. Public Relations Advertising Agency

This type of agency is responsible for the public image of a person, company/organization, product/service, and brand. A PR ad agency handles press releases, manages positive and negative media attention, and conducts online reputation management efforts.

There are many types of advertising channels in the digital advertising world. Here are digital channels and strategies that an advertiser may use.

1. Connected TV Advertising

Connected TV advertising (CTV advertising) is increasing dramatically in audience size. CTV is viewing television with any device (television, desktop, tablet, mobile phone) that is connected to the Internet. This includes smart TV devices, such as Roku and gaming consoles.

The benefits of Connected TV advertising are:

• Data-driven targeting
• Unified measuring
• Precise frequency
• Premium advertising

Consumers are rapidly “cutting the cord” with cable television providers. Now, they are seeking live video streams from online services like Hulu, Amazon Prime, and others because it’s cheaper, easier, and time-sensitive. According to Statista, 46.6 million households are predicted to drop traditional TV services in the United States by 2024.

2. Display & Native Advertising

Other types of advertising include Display and Native advertising.

Display advertising promotes a product or service by using visual content that may include text, images, audio, and video. The goal of Display advertising is to be visually compelling, improve target audience engagement, and increase conversions, especially when paired with a Connected TV strategy.

The benefits of Display advertising are:

• Brand awareness
• Retargeting capabilities
• Strong tracking and monitoring user engagement through campaign performance metrics
• Most importantly – Cost-effective

Native advertising mixes well with the content. A Native ad might only have a tiny identifier that says “advertisement” or “sponsored content” to notify a viewer. Its effectiveness comes from its ability to blend in with the rest of the content. A Native advertisement has the opportunity to be highly effective if it is relevant to the content where it is displayed.

3. Programmatic Audio Advertising

Programmatic Audio advertising is the insertion of ads in online audio content such as podcasts and online radio. Examples include Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. This is a highly effective method of using digital advertising services to build awareness of an advertiser’s brand because of the ability to segment various audiences and the fact that large amounts of consumers listen to audio programming (i.e. podcasts, or audiobooks) in the convenience of their free time.

4. Programmatic Video Advertising

The largest audience for Video advertising is on YouTube. The key to effectiveness for any video advertising platform is to produce engaging video content. Video advertising displays in many ways, including in and out of the live stream, embedded video on websites, in-game video, and interactive video. These are skippable video messages that show either before, during, or after viewers watch streamed content.

The benefits of Video advertising are:

• Ads can be cost-effective
• Ability to hyper-target audiences
• Strong tracking and monitoring user engagement through campaign performance metrics

5. Paid Search Advertising

A Paid Search targeted advertising strategy comes from bidding for placement based on keywords. Paid Search campaigns show advertisements mixed in with the search engine results. The ads show along with the organic results of a search when a user searches for something.

The benefits of Paid Search are:

• Increased visibility
• Increased new and current web traffic
• Strong tracking and monitoring user engagement through campaign performance metrics

6. Social Media Advertising

Social media campaigns benefit from the extensive range of audience-targeting strategies that exist. Social media campaigns can include the use of social media influencers to drive brand awareness. These can also include Paid Social, which is sponsored updates and ads on social media that show up in the social media users’ newsfeeds.

The benefits of social media campaigns are:

• Increased brand awareness
• Improved customer engagement
• Increased inbound web traffic
• Improved search engine ranking

Many advertisers are able to use various online advertising methods within their internal marketing teams. However, working with experts in these fields could save advertisers overall time and money and dedicate that to exploring more strategies.

All types of advertising strategies are beneficial for any advertiser or company. Most digital campaigns start with strategic planning that creates a set of personas. The personas should describe the characteristics of their target audience and the demographics of a desirable potential customer interested in a product or service.

The next step is to conduct the research necessary to identify where these people are to be found and determine the most cost-effective way to reach them through the various types of advertising media. Keynes is happy to help any advertiser or company explore the various avenues of digital advertising and digital channels. Contact Keynes today to see how we can reach your niche audience(s).