Empower

WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING
WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING WE ARE HIRING
Social
Leave a Comment or Be Left Behind
“I’m just here for the comments,” is a phrase we often see below trending content across social platforms. The comment section gives everyday people a place to sound off, and in 2022, fun-loving brands chime in too!

Playful brand engagement is not new on the social scene. For example, we all know Wendy’s has crushed it on Twitter since 2017. Their flexible brand guidelines (or lack thereof) have allowed them to poke fun in ways other brands would never dare. Wendy’s savage strategy has earned them close to 4 million followers and hundreds of published articles about their humorous tweets. Denny’s, MoonPie and Chipotle are others with similar winning Twitter strategies.

But what about new platforms like TikTok? Being video first, how can brands insert themselves into the conversation with the same level of ease? You guessed it… straight to the comments!

Commenting strategies and “tone of voice” are as varied as brands, but there’s an easy way to know when to add your two cents to the conversation.

Embrace the Viral Moments

Have you ever seen a video on TikTok with millions of engagements and thought to yourself “Who cares?!” The answer is: your brand should. Viral content tells us what is top of mind for people of the internet. When brands insert themselves in the conversation, they have an opportunity to become top of mind as well!

Many brands might struggle to fit into a viral conversation because there is no direct link between the trend and the brand’s product or service. But that’s the beauty of TikTok. Brands are given a space to appear just like consumers by sharing personable and humorous commentary.

Take #BamaRush as an example. Do the Pittsburgh Pirates or Sonic inherently align with hundreds of girls rushing sororities in Alabama? No. But they didn’t let that stop them!

@peytonfredericks

this is what it looks like when you aren’t a dancer in #rushtok #alabama #bamarush #bamarush2022 #tut #tutmovein #dz #deltazeta #rush2022 #rushtok #rolltide

♬ sunet original – Raluca Dumitru


Not only did Sonic’s comment earn 5X’s more likes than the average video shared from their brand page, they also saw a spike in page followers just days after sharing the comment.

Stand Out in Your Category

If stepping outside your immediate category isn’t a fit for your brand, that doesn’t mean you have to forego the benefits of a commenting strategy on TikTok. With over a million videos being shared each day, brands have an opportunity to filter niche keywords and engage with videos that are highly relevant to the products they sell.

Best in Class

Urban Decay leans into the popularity of the beauty category. They utilize a humorous tone to jump in on conversations around beauty products, techniques, trends and more.

When a TikTok user showed followers how she used an eyeshadow pallet to get out of work, the brand “checked in” with the creator to make sure playing hooky didn’t get her fired. The comment earned over 131K likes, which is almost 1,000X’s more engagement than the brand receives on videos posted to their page.

https://www.tiktok.com/@itsrileygracie/video/7127421452382522667?lang=en&is_copy_url=0&is_from_webapp=v1&sender_device=pc&sender_web_id=7132051066011567658

Panera Bread looks for indirect mentions of their brand and/or the products they sell. The creator in this video walks viewers through her dupe recipe for Panera’s famous “everything but the kitchen sink” cookie. The creator is making the cookies for her dad, an emergency doctor who had worked 8 days in a row. To show support for the creator and her father, Panera reached out via the comments and sent the family a gift card.

Panera typically earns between 100-300 likes on videos posted on their page—which is significantly less engagement than the 45K likes they received on this comment alone.

@mynameisemmahall

Paying my dad back for nonstop grinding to pay for my education with a batch of cookies 🫶🏼.. but they r for real the best cookies of all time so he kinda blessed #ReTokforNature #PostitAffirmations #cookies #levain #kitchensink

♬ original sound – Emma Hall

Collaborate with Other Brands

Videos that highlight the office culture and what it’s like to work in a brand’s headquarters are popular on TikTok. This type of content can garner strong B2B engagement.

One of Celsius’ top performing videos to date features their office culture and how much fun employees have working for the brand. Not only did the video earn above-average views and likes, but there were also a handful of brands that jumped in to share their appreciation for a fun-filled office environment. Microsoft365, Something Navy, No Good, Saks, Chobani and more appeared in the comment section and earned more engagement than any of the consumer comments.

@celsiusofficial So is CELSIUS a fun place to work at? #CELSIUS #CELSIUSLiveFit #officelife #managersbelike ♬ hotel r a s p u t i n service – veggibeats

Qdoba uses the TikTok platform to roast and/or call out competitive brands. In this video the brands lets McDonald’s know their “specials” are not that special…

@mcdonaldsdid u get all that? download the app in the bio so you do♬ original sound – McDonald’s

Many brands aim to piggyback off the success of popular brand accounts like Scrub Daddy, praised for being one of the most engaging brands on the platform. Brands like Jamba Juice, NASCAR, Burger King, Slim Jim, and many others comment on popular Scrub Daddy videos in attempt to lead potential fans to their individual brand pages.

Yes, It’s for You

TikTok is relatively new, but it won’t be for long. Your brand can still seize this unique opportunity for relevance—translating consumer attention into sales. If you’re ready to engage, just reach out to our CultureTap team to find out how we can help your brand slide into the comment section.

 

Media
The Effects of a Cookieless Future and the Evolution of Data
After nearly two decades of dependency on cookie-based advertising in the web, the ecosystem is about to undergo a fundamental shift from the legacy third-party cookie tracker to newly developed cohort-based targeting and persistent identifiers (PIDs) from advertising companies centered around Google Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox project, announced in 2020.

Just recently delayed for second time, after being originally slated for 2022, then 2023, this transformation is now expected to happen in the second half of 2024. Despite these ongoing delays, tied to challenges with European regulators concerned about disadvantages to Google competitors, we still believe now is the time to begin working towards adopting a first-party focused data structure, improving our data collection, evaluating our approach to 3rd-party data, as well as reviewing existing privacy policies.

Cookie Replacement Solutions

While not yet finalized, the leading marketplace cookie replacement solutions have already been through several iterations of testing for privacy, efficacy in targeting and measurement, and longevity impacts compared to cookie-based targeting. There are a multitude of proposed solutions in the marketplace with early adoption being slow to pick up in place of cookies. Empower is already testing several of these solutions.

Consumer privacy demands and pending/new legislation also play a role in the adoption of a post-cookie identifier strategy which must meet those benchmarks while preserving internet advertising’s value exchange. By no means has a market leader been identified as a replacement, but leaders are beginning to emerge to replace a cookie with another persistent identifier, such as a user’s email address or a device ID. Currently, open-web bidding inventory on cookieless IDs represents a smaller portion of targeting methods, but that number is expected to grow regardless of the delay by Google.

Cookieless strategies are nothing new, Mozilla and Apple both have blocked 3rd-party cookies on 40 percent of the web for several years running, and advertisers have adapted to those challenges similarly to how advertisers will have to adapt to the 60 percent of the web that Chrome represents. The key difference is Google’s dominance as an ad tech behemoth itself, which puts their future strategies at odds with regulators and competitors alike.

Marketplace Impacts & Advertising Strategy

The immediate to mid-term solutions are as follows:

  • Adopt persistent, consent-based identifiers as part of the ecosystem and test for scale
  • Reprioritize contextual buying strategies
  • Build up first-party data sets and expand scalability for prospects via lookalike modeling

Advertiser strategies will likely focus more on adopting the use of alt-IDs in place of cookies while preserving 3rd-party data. This incorporates alt-IDs in data-enabled marketplaces in programmatic DSPs and leverages advanced contextual placements. Publishers are also working to shore up their contextual effectiveness and alt-ID partnerships with bidding exchanges and seller-defined audiences from SSPs.

Advertisers should explore additional resource deployments for first-party data collection, prioritizing PII-based offline (POS/email) whenever possible. Online first-party data collection in platforms leveraging cookieless tagging technology will enable targeting of 1:1, cohort, and household level. First-party-based, high-value seed audiences enable powerful lookalike modeling efforts for upper funnel tactics not dependent on cookies to serve new customers.

In Short…

While cookie-based targeting is not at immediate risk, prioritize testing alternative identifiers at an ever-increasing scale until cookie-based targeting is phased out in 2H 2024. Collect more first-party data while continuing to leverage 3rd-party data, lookalike models and contextual targeting.

Marketing
Q3 Impact of Economic Uncertainty Report
Recessions and budgeting and inflation, oh my!

With so many factors on seemingly wobbly pillars, it is no wonder that there is economic uncertainty in 2022.

They key to clarity? Adapting, not surrendering, to economic changes.

In our Q3 Impact of Economic Uncertainty Report, Empower’s Strategy and Intelligence teams collaborate to break down how brands can adapt by understanding the U.S. economic outlook, consumer sentiment woes and economic psychology, while also sharing their POV on how advertisers should move forward.

For a detailed look at this report, fill in your information below and download a copy.

Download
Please fill in the form below to instantly download your copy of our full report.

Empower