Brand Advertising Consumer Research

You Miss 100% of the Shots You Don’t Take – And the Ads You Don’t Serve

May 02, 2024

By: Ravi Pimplaskar

Media Buyers: Imagine you had an audience segment representing a significant portion of your customers that held brand value equal to or superior to other segments. However, despite the segment’s importance and high brand value, you discover that your social campaigns are reaching less than half of them. What would you want to do?

Our new Game-Changing Shift reports, produced using behavioral data from our research partner Qrious Insight, analyze the effectiveness of social media and YouTube advertising across 4 categories: QSR, Retail, CPG, and Streaming Video. In each case, the reports revealed a subset of viewers much less likely to encounter these brand categories’ ads. This elusive segment isn’t any different in consumption than those who frequently see their ads – making them just as likely to be a customer.

Media buyers would immediately take action if this overlooked segment were defined by age, gender, or lifestyle. However, this segment is mostly uniform when comparing demographics except for one difference – they spend more time playing games than they do browsing social media.

Yes, you read that right. Simply put, these individuals are less likely to see your ads because they prefer mobile gaming over social media. Logically this makes sense. If someone isn’t on social media as much, they won’t see ads as often. However, considering the substantial resources poured into social ad campaigns (7x more than they spend on mobile games), marketers should evaluate if they are getting the results they expect.

The good news is that there are different ways to meet this audience. For example, media buyers could try to find social channels where mobile gamers frequent more often. But the easiest way to meet the audience is to advertise where they spend most of their mobile time – in mobile games.

Want to learn more about how time spent in mobile games versus YouTube affects the impact of advertisers’ mobile campaigns? Check out Game-Changing Shift reports!