What makes an ad campaign successful? Creative content and broad distribution are important, but expert targeting may matter most. Reaching potential buyers when they’re primed to take action leads directly to sales. That’s why Dan Levin built Viral Gains, an insights and audience creation platform serving major brands and agencies worldwide.
As Levin explains, “When it comes to advertising and marketing, there's the creative side and then the advertising execution. Questions come up like where should we serve ads, on what channels, what frequency?” Distribution decisions carry weight, “but who you're actually reaching...that’s most important.” Viral Gains obsessively focuses on uncovering customer insights and building high-value audiences.
Profiling Ideal Customers
Levin offers a hypothetical diaper brand like Pampers as an example. Generically targeting “parents” misses nuances. Drilling down through surveys and AI analysis, his team can determine specific diaper-purchasing drivers. “Is it softness, leak prevention, eco-friendliness? Delivering those insights back to marketers, we then build audiences who care about those identified product attributes.”
Result - laser-focused prospect groups, informed messaging tailored to what matters most. Levin continues, “Not only did we uncover environmental friendliness is key, but here's an audience of a million people likely to care about diaper sustainability.” With the right audience built, creative teams can craft campaigns and influence buyers earlier in their journeys.
The Power of Zero-Party Data
In today’s privacy-conscious climate, ethically sourcing customer intelligence is also crucial for audience building. This inspired Levin’s zero-party data approach. He contrasts it with other data types:
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First-party data - What customers actively provide a brand
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Second-party data - Shared intelligence between non-competing brands
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Third-party data - Information purchased about customers
With third and sometimes first-party data, consumers don’t always want companies to have that level of knowledge about them. Zero-party flips the model - audiences voluntarily provide information themselves when asked or surveyed.
As Levin says, “It becomes incredibly high quality. We don't infer they like Cheerios because they posted about eating them on Facebook. We avoid creepy stuff and just ask people.” This transparent opt-in approach aligns with growing data regulations like GDPR and CCPA. When privacy legislation tightens, zero-party data only becomes more crucial.
Who Holds Decision-Making Power?
Though Viral Gains serves major brands like Coca-Cola and P&G, Levin stresses that agencies are his real customers. Retaining agencies to handle regional nuances, regulations, and technologies across markets helps massive multinationals be effective globally.
Selling straight to brands initially caused challenges despite admirable creativity, like targeting a VC’s airport with ads to simulate ubiquitous presence. As Levin explains, “Brands think, ‘If I haven't heard of Viral Gains, I don't want to use them and risk my job.’” He pivoted to raise awareness through brand conferences and awareness-building ads instead of active selling.
Avoiding Pitfalls and Maintaining Focus
Early on, Viral Gains also struggled requiring clients to use their demand-side advertising platform bundled with their core audience offerings. As Levin states, “We had to take this thing of ours and chop it in half...bifurcate the two.” He focused exclusively on the proprietary audience targeting technology that was their true “special sauce”.
Summarising key lessons, Levin says “Have empathy”, and understand decision-makers, pain points, and priorities. Also, “be the best at one thing” rather than diluting efforts across scattered offerings as new startups. Viral Gains uniquely dominates intelligence gathering and audience creation.
The Future of Advertising
In an increasingly crowded digital landscape, the brands best understand prospective buyers, and reaching them at opportune messaging moments will capture hearts, minds, and wallets. Viral Gains continues pushing this frontier, building the ideal audiences and sending carefully calibrated ads.
And they do so with consumer consent, transparency, and ethics top of mind, leading the change for a new era in advertising. Levin welcomes anyone hoping to tap these insights and audiences for their next campaign to get in touch. The results may just surprise you.
