OneAD: Leveraging Smart Technology to Best Serve Brand Communications in the Low-Touch Economy

“Digital brand building is now a top-level task. The brand who does not catch up immediately will soon be forgotten.”

Brand communication has gone through a massive transformation regardless of industry. Especially in the low-touch economy that has developed since the COVID-19 pandemic. Consumer behavior has become so variable in today’s fragmented digital environment and skewed to all facets of digital life.

Regarding the behavioral changes these days, digital brand powers have become critical to the success of the market-share competition. Digital brand powers refer to the influence of a brand in a digital environment that is recognized, preferred, considered, and even advocated by its consumers. It is the decisive factor affects consumers’ decision. Digital brand building is now a top-level task. The brand that did not catch up immediately would gradually be forgotten.

OneAD, one of the AdTech titans in Taiwan advertising industry, believes the rich "graphs" across the open internet are the optimum approach to accomplish digital brand building task. People's online and offline activity reveals their behavioral signals such as most-visited types of websites, topics of interest, ads they engaged with the most, merchandises they recently purchase, places they have been to, and a multitude of other behaviors. By covering all the touchpoints across the open internet, OneAD has the opportunity to fetch browsing data, ad respondent data, pre & post-purchases data, telco marketing data, and brands' first-party data from diverse platforms and devices.

By accumulating such rich data, OneAD is able to compute and structure a complete "Data Funnel" with multiple graphs, including demographic graph, audience graph, ad respondent graph, and shopper graph to mirror consumer's online & offline journeys. Through this, OneAD can fully utilize a data-driven audience targeting solution to capture consumers at all stages of the funnel- from consumers who show initial purchase potential to consumers who've made a purchase decision at scale. Among all these graphs, “shopper graph” is the one to help brands detect key audiences’ future purchase behaviors.

We recently interviewed Joyce Lee (the CEO and Co-founder of OneAD) to know more about OneAD market-leading innovation for brand marketing that embraces Big Data and Technology in the Taiwan market.

Read on for the excerpts from the interview.

Q. Can you tell us about the unique “Shopper Graph” data approach?

Shopper graph is portrayed by consumers' digital behaviors toward specific brands, products, product functions, and product demands. Through big data and elaborate computing, we can extract the shopper graph of each consumer on the Internet. This includes the degree or frequency of attention to a brand or a product, or the preference towards product function based on demand.

When a consumer’s behavioral signal in a shopper graph significantly changes or shows a higher degree of participation than others, we can say that this consumer shows high consumer intent. Through consumer intent, brands can find a wealth of potential consumers based on data showing the intensity of their behavior change and the brand and demand tendency. A brand can thus deliver the most relevant digital advertisements to these high potential consumers at scale. According to OneAD's report, compared to targeting based on broad interest tags, the advertising interaction rate increased by 54% for consumers with consumer Intent.

In addition to the shopper graph, brands can also leverage similar methodology to cultivate their brand graph and product graph. Through the keywords of brand’s name, product’s name, product functions description, and product demands description, a brand can clearly portray its brand graph and product graph. Comparing these graphs with consumers’ shopper graph, brands could target the most related and high potential customers across the open internet with ease.

Q. What methodology does OneAD use to meet an advertiser's data challenges?

One of the examples to elaborate OneAD’s integrated capabilities in DataTech (multiple data graphs) and AdTech (programmatic) is the Brand Audience Build methodology, which we call B.A.B. OneAD advocates the spirit of the open internet and devotes to help brands accumulate their own data assets by building an exclusive audience pool. It is what B.A.B is meant to be.

One of the biggest challenges for brand building today is that consumer behavioral data is not owned by brands, which in turn incapacitates data assets to be accumulated over time. Nowadays, brands largely rely on walled gardens, such as Google and Facebook, to achieve their marketing purpose; however, the precious consumer data generated during a campaign cannot be reserved or transferred, not to mention accumulated for future use. On the other hand, brands today often use first-party data generated from official and e-commerce websites. Such data is valuable but not big enough to extend into market penetration. We all know that the power of big data stems from its massive data pool.

To solve these challenges, OneAD initiates the B.A.B methodology. Under a brand’s market segmentation strategy, OneAD continuously detects multiple behavioral signals that a brand’s targeted consumers generate across the open internet and in offline activities. Based on these signals, we can leverage AI algorithms to calculate each anonymous consumer's brand or product preference, assess the correlation between the audience and the brands, and then deem them as certain brand’s high potential consumers. It enables brands in reaching more high potential consumers within the same budget, expanding new acquisitions, and increasing their market share.

AI can take this B.A.B approach even further by introducing keyword targeting. According to Google Search, 15% of searches per day are brand-new words, phrases, and sentences that have never been seen before. It indicates consumers’ extremely dynamic online behavior. It would be a tough task for brands to only depend on their experiences to define target audience. We can help brands become first movers and capture emerging potential consumers by leveraging AI technology to discover newly emerged and highly brand-related keywords. From there, we can gather and implement new sets of shopper graph data, which positions the brand one step ahead of their competition.

Take two of OneAD’s client campaigns as examples: leveraging B.A.B, a certain Auto brand gained 96% new website visitors, and a leading fast-food brand gained 10% more high-potential consumers under the same budget despite a lower frequency of advertisement delivery, yet was still able to effectively enlarge its high potential consumer pool.

Q. What plans for transformation are you pursuing to remain relevant now and in the future? And what will you do to facilitate the transformation?

OneAD was born to help brands successfully build their brands. Initially, OneAD assumed a more local Supply Side Platform (SSP) role to enable video ad solutions for top publishers in the Taiwan Market. In 2010, we established OneAD as an AdTech company when video advertisement was in its very early stages. OneAD pioneered the provision of an Outstream video ad network to the Taiwanese digital era.

As our company continues to grow, we start to incline towards the demand-side and become a major video ad operator providing ad solutions for Taiwan’s top 600 brands. Now as programmatic buy continuously thrives and becomes an unstable trend worldwide, we intend to enhance our brand-building solutions and introduce programmatic buy into all our data and ad services.

OneAD launched a brand-new demand-side platform called "SuperDSP" to achieve our expectations. SuperDSP is a PMP programmatic buy platform that can leverage OneAD’s premium inventories, enable eye-catching and creative ad formats across the open internet, and OneAD’s unique data funnel with multiple graphs are at the brand’s disposal. SuperDSP can not only make up for the shortcomings of other DSPs in the marketplace but also help brands conduct their brand-building task at ease and accumulate their key audiences at scale. It is significant to cultivate the digital brand powers.

Now with the newly-launched SuperDSP, brands can leverage the strength of PMP programmatic to conduct OneAD’s data solutions such as the data funnel and the B.A.B. Enjoy a more innovative way to successfully building their brands and enhancing their digital brand power in this highly competitive era.

Joyce Lee | CEO & Co-founder

Joyce draws from her experience at IBM, Hill+Knowlton Strategies and BBDO. Her deep knowledge in advertising & marketing, communication strategy, media management, and technology, means that she plays a key role in shaping the industry development of AdTech in Taiwan.

Coupled with her thought-leadership and unending passion for her craft, Joyce’s prominent impact in the industry has allowed her to get invited by ExchangeWire.jp, a well-known Japanese advertising technology magazine, to talk about the past, the present, and the future of Taiwanese digital video advertising. As one of the keynote speakers of the WorldFestival 2021, a global virtual conference supporting worldwide technology innovation, Joyce spoke about “Computing Consumer Intent at Scale” to countless audiences all over the world.

“When the shopper graph of a consumer significantly changes or shows a higher degree of participation than others, we can say that this consumer shows high consumer intent.”

“B.A.B is mean to help brands accumulate their own data assets by building an exclusive audience pool, which is the cornerstone of digital brand building.”