“Search is no longer a keyword buy, it’s an audience buy,” claimed David McDiarmid, Head of Media for Digitas UK. “Our desire with our paid search strategy is to position our clients’ products and services when and where consumers need them. To achieve that goal we need to go beyond traditional search and find new audience activations that help us reach our target consumer.”
David and his team of digital experts are constantly looking for new ways to try new ad formats that will drive additional reach and bring more people into the marketing funnel. “We don’t do innovation for the sake of innovation. But the digital ecosystem changes that quickly that you must have that agile, always-on, testing mentality to figure out what’s going to work. Our push to be more audience focussed and use richer, more engaging assets was a big factor in wanting to try MSAN,” explained David.
While rich ad formats are traditionally thought of as a specialism of display advertising, the Digitas team saw MSAN as a natural fit for its mission: “We all need to be agile and adaptive and need to get used to buying different ad formats,” commented David, “Search is now an audience buy, and it’s an audience buy in which you can use image assets. So, it’s not too much of a stretch to be looking to do audience-based, image-based, digital media from a search perspective.”