ADOTAS – Digital advertising company CPX Interactive has rolled out a new suite of social media ad strategies, as the company announced late yesterday. It’s not an entirely new set of services, but the difference now is that CPX has bundled those services together in a way that ideally allows advertisers to assess and make sense of the role of social media in their campaigns.
CPX executive vice president of marketing David Shay broke down the bundle into its four component parts during a phone call this afternoon. First, there’s the ability to incorporate social functions into display ads placed anywhere across CPX’s network or marketplace — that’s the call to a business’s social media site, rather than one from within its social media presence. There should be, said Shay, “some social call-out in the ads. You can have, right in your ad, a ‘like’ button or a ‘follow’ button — some kind of social functionality.” By bringing consumers into the conversation happening on social media that way, Shay said there’s a chance to “make real-time comments part of the campaign itself.” Second is a dedicated social media vertical in the CPX network, which presents the opportunity to place display ads specifically across over 200 social media site. “We’ve always had the opportunity to carve out verticals,” he said.
The challenge in placing display ads in social media, though, is that they often don’t perform in the way an advertiser might hope, and they tend to have limitations in design and interactivity. That brings us to the third part: the opportunity to serve adds in apps and games, where there’s greater flexibility than, say, the right-hand column on your Facebook home page. This can work for “any social network that has apps and games,” Shay explained. In an app, he said, “their inventory is just another publisher,” and selling in-app or in-game ads creates the creators of those apps and games to “sell ads within their environment.”
The fourth part is the “cost per fan” metric. “We buy inventory in a highly scalable way,” Shay explained. So, when the company went about deciding how to help advertisers pull in more social media followers and fans, it decided to create a metric analogous to what’s accepted in other places on the web. “We’ll give you a cost-per-something-else model, instead of making you pay for something extra,” Shay said. The advertiser can select keywords to target the right potential customers and, he said, “if you give us flexibility on the copy we can optimize it on the fly” within social networks, “just like display.” A statement from CPX said it was capable of giving a campaign a CPF (cost per fan) of $2, but Shay said, “Truth is, it ends up being lower than that.”
According to Shay and releases from the company, CPX has had success so far in its social advertising efforts. Shay cited a major food brand: “They came to us, and they had a Facebook fan page strategy. They wanted 60,000 fans in two months, and they hit [that number] in two weeks.” The same brand also drove “250,000 fans to a couple of their branded pages,” Shay said.
