This post was created in partnership with Uber Ads
Brands still trying to follow the linear customer journey and sales funnel path could be left in the dust.
During an ADWEEK House Advertising HQ fireside chat co-hosted with Uber Ads, Lauren Johnson, deputy editor of retail media and commerce at ADWEEK, sat down with Jess Shuraleff, head of sales U.S. and Canada at Uber Advertising, and Gautham Pingalli, chief media officer of WPP Media, to discuss how to deliver a new commerce media strategy that capitalizes on unexpected moments of intent.
From linear to real time
Pinpointing moments of consumer intent was the recurring theme of this session, which began with Shuraleff noting how much the industry has changed.
“What we’re seeing within our ecosystem at Uber is that the consumer journey is really collapsing, and so the moments that have the highest impact are the ones where a consumer is showing intent,” said Shuraleff.
Pingalli concurred, sharing that his firm has had to do a lot of reevaluation with clients because of fragmentation.
“We’re seeing the over-indexing of certain touch points due to very specific metrics,” he explained. “What made sense a year or two ago is not making sense anymore.”
Consumers can be in a different mindset for different products or services at any moment during the day, added Shuraleff. “It’s thinking about how you capture them, how do you get in front of them in a moment where they’re open to that message,” she said.
The panelists then discussed Uber Ads’ recent partnership with Affinity Solutions, a consumer purchase data and insight solution, and how it helped demonstrate that well-timed, data-driven commerce media can connect directly to business outcomes.
“If a user is exposed to sponsored listings, which is our core product within our delivery app, the impact on actual in-store sales increases dramatically,” Shuraleff explained.
A more measured KPI strategy
Pingalli acknowledged that his firm’s recent focus has been on getting clients to rethink what they should be optimizing for.
“From an agency standpoint, what we’ve been able to do is think about measurement very differently. We not only measure for just the outcomes, but we’ve started, for a lot of clients, measuring for actions that deliver a person to that outcome,” he said.
Pingalli shared a case study where Mastercard teamed up with Uber and found success, even without a specific conversion goal.
“If you think about it, you’re putting something like Mastercard, a financial institution, out there at a point of transaction without asking for a transaction,” he explained. “So the ability to influence or articulate the value in a transaction-led ecosystem is a lot higher than we would have thought.”
To that point, Shuraleff noted that most brand awareness campaigns can still be measured for some form of sales or lift if you delve deeper into your KPIs, to which Pingalli agreed.
“I don’t get the performance budget vs. nonperformance budget bit at all,” shared Pingalli. “The audience is not thinking about YouTube as a brand ecosystem and Uber as a performance ecosystem. They’re going there with a specific goal, so it’s our job to figure out how we show up.”
Looking ahead, Uber Ads is hoping to build on the foundations of the last few years to better understand what the consumer is looking for. According to Shuraleff, the big question is: “How can we ensure that we are using our intent signals of movement across both our delivery and our rides app to continue to grow the ecosystem as a whole?”
