This Holiday Season, Social Marketers Adapt to Ad Inflation and Diminished Targeting Capabilities

This year promised a return to normalcy, but like many expectations for 2021, social marketing for commerce’s busiest days of the year was not out of the 2010's playbook. Brands advertising around Black Friday and Cyber Monday had to spend more to reach the same customers in an inflationary environment, relied less on targeting in an increasingly cookie-free universe and pivoted objectives to making sure consumers are aware of the brand, rather than getting them to show up to the sales, according to five marketing executives. For the first time ever, total online spend on Black Friday decreased to $8.9 billion this year, according to Adobe’s Digital Economy Index. Despite these muted results, holiday season online sales are projected by Adobe to jump 10% year-over-year. As of this past weekend, there were 19 days when consumers had spent over $3 billion, compared to only five during the same period in 2020. As it has been for years, social marketing is an important driver of holiday sales, said Avi Ben-Zvi, vice president of paid social at performance-marketing agency Tinuiti. Shoppers Spent $100 Million Less on Cyber Monday This Year Than 2020 “For advertisers, social is still a place where they can reach people and reach people effectively,” he said. “People are on their phones a lot [during the holidays] and they’re not working so there is more inventory to serve ads.” To capture these eyeballs, Ben-Zvi’s clients spent 27% more on paid social on Facebook properties across the five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday this year than in 2020. Similarly, Ashley Karim-Kincey, vice president of media at Dagger, said clients increased paid social spend around Black Friday between 30% and 200% year-over-year. CPMs are up across Facebook and Instagram Karim-Kincey said the greater ad blitz was in part to tap into consumers more willing to spend in light of eased pandemic restrictions. “People are yearning to be out in public. They want to be in their communities; they want to be with their friends,” she said. Another variable driving up ad spending is that across platforms, CPMs are up, according to reports on Facebook ads from Tinuiti. In the third quarter of 2021, CPMs on Facebook (excluding Messenger, Instagram and Audience Network) were up 47% year-over-year. On Instagram, CPMs were up 32% from the third quarter of 2020. CPMs for both were also up from comparable 2019 levels, the report found. "It costs more to reach the same type of audience,” Karim-Kincey said. Ben-Zvi said for his clients, CPMs were up 62% on all Facebook properties over the five-day Thanksgiving shopping period. But this uptick shouldn’t be entirely surprising—while CPMs had some dips last year, 2020 was unusual, and in general, advertising on platforms is only becoming pricier, he said. Still, not all clients bought into the Black-Friday hype. Dana Busick, group director at Media Kitchen, said clients’ social spend for Black Friday was a smaller percentage of overall media spend compared to last year, though spending for the longer holiday season period was up. Rather, clients devoted more of their ad budgets to launching campaigns and initiatives they weren’t able to in 2020 rather than shell out extra cash for a mainstay like Black Friday. Less targeted, but more intentional Marketers have been adjusting their paid social approaches to a world where it is increasingly harder to target consumers, who with Apple’s latest operating system can prohibit tracking. This year, Dagger has been relying more on first-party data, using it to engage current customers and help inspire greater brand loyalty while using third-party to prospect for new audiences, Karim-Kincey said. Multipronged strategies can compensate for diminished targeting capabilities, said Ben-Zvi, including relying more on platforms' proprietary targeting tools, platform diversification and focusing on so-called upper-funnel activity, where brands target the widest range of possible consumers. “If we do a good job at the top, we have a much higher chance of converting those people later on," he said. A change in messaging In line with the focus on upper-funnel strategies, Busick and Karim-Kincey said the goals of the campaigns they worked on for Black Friday centered more on brand awareness than a particular sale or action. “In previous years it was more about creating some type of action,” Karim-Kincey said. “[Now], we just want to dialogue with them.” In line with raising brand awareness, Amanda Grant, global head of social at GroupM, said that campaigns for Black Friday were more than just several-day events. "There’s a good amount of work prospecting—priming an audience for a big purchase event," she said. The content of brands’ social campaigns changed as well, with messaging focused on the community rather than the individual, said vice president of social strategy for Known Studios Madison Utendahl. “The messaging has [changed] from ‘I need this now’ or ‘get it while it’s hot’ to 'share this with the ones you love,'” Utendahl said.