Marketing Blog

Here’s a short video about how the team and creatives brought Cannes to you!  

Six-second video ads aren’t just a hot new trend—they’re the future of video advertising. As GumGum and Adweek discovered earlier this year, a majority of marketers find unskippable six-second spots to be more effective than longer ads. With companies like Google, Fox, Facebook and Michelin all hopping on the bandwagon in the last year, the momentum’s picking up. Welcome to the age of six-second ads. 

Having spent 7 years working at media agencies, myself and other GumGum employees have advantageous insider knowledge of the needs and challenges one faces on the agency side. Understanding how agency folks function, react and make key decisions is pivotal to GumGum’s success in the advertising space, which is why the New York office hosted the first ever Agency Panel Discussion. We wanted to provide the opportunity for GumGum employees to ask questions about how we can improve as a whole and better position GumGum in the competitive digital landscape.

When Mark Zuckerberg was on Capitol Hill to testify about Facebook’s privacy concerns he was asked a question by Senator Lindsey Graham who questioned simply “who’s your biggest competitor?” Zuckerberg explained it wasn’t so simple and that different competitors overlapped in different ways. The answer was insufficient to Graham who pressed on saying, “if I buy a Ford, and it doesn’t work well, and I don’t like it, I can buy a Chevy. If I’m upset with Facebook, what’s the equivalent product I can go sign up for?” 

With every new innovation in media technology, marketers must develop new advertising formats that align with the latest ways people consume news and entertainment.

Indeed, as consumers started moving from television to desktop video in the mid 2000s, advertisers quickly learned that the traditional 30-second ad spot was far too long for the short form video people were watching online. In response, they developed the 15-second pre-roll ad. While this format has served advertisers well for some time, the rise of mobile video means that it is time for the format to evolve once more.

Sponsorships are ubiquitous and from the red carpet, to the baseball diamond, we see company logos splattered everywhere. At times it seems like nothing can be done without a sponsorship as traffic reports are brought to you by someone and just about every sports team has an official car dealership, mattress company or veterinarian. Clearly there is a lot of value locked into sponsorships, but nothing comes easy and sponsorships too have their challenges...

We’ve all been there. We step on to our local auto lot hoping to maybe peek around at a few cars and the salespeople start circling. Every car you look at is the best choice unless another vehicle is more expensive or has more options in which case that one is the better choice. It is no wonder that studies have found that 81% of Americans say that they do not enjoy the car buying experience. What is fascinating is the number one reason consumers don’t like it, it isn’t primarily the negotiations or thinking they’re not getting a good deal, the number one reason consumers don’t like it is they don’t trust salespeople with 29% of people labeling that as the prime culprit.

On Wednesday, GumGum, an artificial intelligence company, with deep expertise in computer vision, was awarded two prestigious Performance Marketing awards at the 2018 Performance Marketing Awards ceremony. The company received recognition for the Most Creative Performance Marketing Campaign and Best Technology and Telecoms Campaign for their partnership with Vodafone and Wavemaker.

GumGum recently wrapped an innovative campaign with a simple goal: to entice leisure-loving guests to visit our clients’ hotels and resorts, whether for quick weekend getaways or longer holiday travel. To achieve this, we leveraged our proprietary targeting capabilities to find travelers in the US dreaming about or planning their next getaway. Then, we served up our highly visible contextually relevant ads while they searched for content relevant to adventure and relaxation. The results? Resounding success: GumGum's targeted ads earned a leading hotel and resort chain 148K extra visitors, at a cost per acquisition of $4.73—that's 12.75 times cheaper than other marketing channels typically considered for performance marketing, such as Google Search.

As marketers, it’s our job to be in touch with the unique sensibilities of the many audiences that make up our customer base. After all, it’s extremely difficult to sell someone a product if you don’t know where to reach them or how they like to be addressed. Moreover, when we are able to communicate effectively with members of a given demographic, we’re far more effective at cultivating loyal customer relationships and achieving our marketing goals. This is of utmost importance when that audience group is growing in size.

In order to find out where people are really turning their attention on the mobile web, we decided to conduct an eye-tracking study. In this experiment, we measured how more than 1,000 consumers interacted with editorial and advertising content on several mobile web pages, using eye-tracking technology to tell us where their eyesight was focused at any given moment.