Valentine’s Day, birthdays, graduations, housewarmings, weddings, baby showers…the gift-giving occasions never seem to end.
We’re all a bit obsessed with buying and receiving presents.
Thing is, we’re not that good at it. But we grab a bunch of flowers or a box of chocolates or a $50 Amazon gift card because we know we have to get something.
Consider that last year over half of Americans admitted to receiving gifts that they didn’t actually want, with 60% of these products being purchased online. That’s a lot of wasteful junk thrown in the backs of closets.
Sure, you could say that it’s up to gift-givers to be more thoughtful when it comes to buying for friends, parents, siblings, or colleagues.
But online advertisers need to get a tad more savvy at creating ads to reach the right demographic.
That’s easier said than done.
Since the rush to social platforms circa 2019/2020, both small and medium-sized brands have become more than familiar with running online advertising campaigns.
The problem is that this has led to a content overload (which hasn’t shown signs of subsiding) in addition to the fact that it’s simply too easy to lead a suboptimal campaign.
There is only one thing worse than being hit by a shockingly crap ad, and that is being hit by a shockingly crap ad that isn’t even meant for you.
Nowhere is this more egregious than in the world of gift advertising, which tends to adopt an all-too-cliché format.
One week before Mother’s Day, there’s usually a swarm of floral-themed ads with unoriginal copy (“No present is too big for the woman that survived your teenage years…So, why not check out our latest range of Mother’s Day watches?”).
When advertisers say that “familiarity works,” this is definitely not what they mean. It’s high time that gift advertising’s creative, copy, format, and delivery are reimagined.
Here’s a mantra: Instead of working with what you don’t know, begin with what you do know.
Then keep going from there. Acquiring quality performance, creative, and persona data should be your top priority.
What do we know is the commonality between nearly all gift ads?
They’re selling a product to a consumer who won’t keep it for themselves, but will rather give it to someone they love or care about.
This emotional hook becomes your main data point, and ultimately what will drive consumer action.
Vitaly Boitelet, Chief Product Officer at SmartAssets, explains that ad tech is now able to help strike the right emotional balance in digital advertising.
“There’s a fine balance to getting it right,” he says.
“A real measurement of ad success is making people feel something—it can be happy, sad, inspired, and many things in-between. Yet if we over-amplify certain emotions, what we often see is distress, disinterest, or disbelief.”
—Vitaly Boitelet, Chief Product Officer at SmartAssets
While there's no magic formula to follow, there are certain things to keep in mind when crafting your next gift-related campaign.
Level your ads with the right amount of emotional resonance. This should be a forethought instead of an afterthought in the content production process. Learn from the most important creative elements and triggers that have worked in your best performing campaigns.
If you're unsure of how to strike the right balance, ad-tech software such as SmartAssets provides insights and prescriptive recommendations based on historical performance data.
Powered by behavioral science, combined with platform best practice, the platform can help analyze and tweak video and static ads that are emotionally impactful and creatively effective.
Have you ever been tempted by the unique gift mode that Etsy has to offer? Not only does the site break its selection down by holidays and events, it also breaks it down into gift collections for specific personas, from “The Mixologist” to the “Bird Watcher.”
When you’re producing a gift ad, you’re never completely sure who the gift’s intended recipient will be.
Construct and deploy a range of personas for your gift advertisements; this variety of characters can cast a wide net, given the unknown preferences of the loved ones your audience is buying for.
Gen-Z might not have the same purchasing power as Generation X just yet. Promoting a product to an audience that is highly unlikely to purchase could result in wasted ad spend and lower ROAS.
How can you come by this data point?
There are effective new ways to create, target and deploy surveys at speed using technology such as Harris QuestDIY. The platform would be ideal for determining, say, how much 18-25 year olds in the U.S. are comfortable spending on a wedding gift.
Ads are basically a dialogue with your consumer, and brands need to know how to speak their consumer’s language.
As a general rule of thumb, most people like to get the message quick and simple. This means introducing the product, speaking directly to the gift-giver, and demonstrating the benefits of the product or service.
To help get this right, SmartAssets offers recommendations based on best practices for prominent headlines, attention heatmaps for important text, and salient calls-to-action.
Have you ever been in a store where festive gifts are on the shelves in October?
Santa Claus isn’t coming to town for almost 3 months. Unless you're targeting the most organized consumers on the planet—most people are probably starting their seasonal shopping mid-November.
Research into consumer habits is the key to getting this right, and technology such as QuestDIY can provide you with tailored surveys for seasonal events (for instance, are most boyfriends buying Valentine’s Day gifts a month in advance, or on the evening of February 13?).
Other tools offered by The People Platform utilize anonymized mobile data to track things like IRL foot traffic and engagement with out-of-home ads, which can help with your gift-ad targeting.
Creativity is often understated, yet this is the biggest controllable multiplier of advertising profitability (12x!).
AI-supported creative tagging software like SmartAssets lets you know what your audience is most interested in, and what’s worked in your ads in the past. This includes products, colors, scenery, emotions, memorability, and attention rates.
So, how do you know that Santa works in your festive ads? How can you be sure that your chosen color palette triggers the highest memorability possible? How do you know that Gen-X prefers humor infused in their advertising?
Are you using the latest tech to make data-driven decisions, or are you just vaguely trusting your gut?
Remember that ads are generally an uninvited interruption. All the viewer really wants is to get back to their Hulu series or YouTube video.
So, try and make your ads feel more like native engaging content that the user wants to interact with. This can be done by making your content more interesting, informative, or entertaining. (Easy, right?).
Remember: Consumers enjoy it when an ad teaches them something new (56%), makes them laugh (55%), inspires them (47%), makes them feel something (36%), visually engages (36%), and surprises them (30%).
The shortcut to getting your product seen is to look to the influencer channels.
Platforms such as PRophet Influence can tell you the best way to engage your audience with the influencers and content creators who most make sense for your campaign. Remember that this should target the person who is giving the gift.
So make sure you find the right niche for the product you’re offering, and an influencer that has relevant content themes, topics, and personality for your brand.
Gift advertising is tough.
After all, on Father’s Day, you’re not selling to fathers themselves...you’re selling to partners, or children who are buying for the dads in their lives.
That can involve a whole lot of mental gymnastics.
Stagwell Marketing Cloud can help kickstart your own creativity with an array of solutions to build consumer personas, discover more about your audience via surveys or insight communities, and test the effectiveness of ad assets before you launch them.
Dig a bit deeper into some specific use cases and how they can change the way you work.
