Analyzing American Express’s $167M Display Ad Strategy

When I think of credit cards, I immediately think of American Express (AmEx)–particularly their platinum cards. Chances are that a lot of you do, too. That’s how popular this brand is in the payment cards industry.  With a vision of providing the world’s best customer experience every day, AmEx has been issuing cards since the mid 1900s. People tout their customer service and rewards programs. But a big part of the reason this brand grew to have more than...

Rupali Jeganathan

Finance › 5 min read

Brands only have 1.7 seconds to grab attention with video ads. Here’s how to do it

As an advertiser, it’s never been harder for you to capture and retain your audience’s attention. Research from the University of California, Irvine and Microsoft reveals that back in 2004, people spent an average of 2.5 minutes looking at any given screen before heading elsewhere. Today, this figure has dropped to just 47 seconds. All of which means that if you’re going to engage potential customers and compel them to take action, you’d better grab their attention fast. How...

Phil Norris

Customer Psychology › 6 min read

BFCM display ad strategy: Best practices from Home Depot, Pandora and more

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are make or break for retailers, with over 200 million consumers shopping in-store and online across the 2023 Thanksgiving weekend. Per Adobe Analytics, Cyber Monday remains the biggest online shopping day of all time, with total sales climbing 7.8 percent to $38 billion last year — including peak sales of $15.7 million per minute between 10:00 – 11:00 pm Eastern. With so much on the line, it makes sense to start planning your...

Phil Norris

eCommerce › 6 min read

Ad Testing 101: Create Effective Ads That Drive Results

Walk outside your home, and you’re bound to see ads everywhere. On billboards, posters, buses, and even subway platforms. You’ve probably bought something after seeing these ads (as have millions of other people).  The reason? These ads are effective. They tug at your heartstrings, make you miss something you never had, or convince you that your life will be better once you sign up for that gym membership.  But how do brands know these ads will work? By testing...

Rupali Jeganathan

A/B Split Testing › 6 min read

Battle of the brewers: How Bud Light, Guinness & Modelo are competing through display ads

The pop of the bottle opening. The gentle glug-glug-fizz as you decant the golden liquid. The foamy head; the condensation on the glass. You just can’t beat a frosty beer on a hot summer’s day. Beer-related searches on Google spike during the hottest months of the year… …and with International Beer Day still in our recent memory (who knew?), we decided to use Adbeat’s competitive intelligence data to analyze the display ad strategies of three of America’s biggest beer...

Phil Norris

Food and Drink › 6 min read

How brands are using the Olympics in display ads (feat. Gillette, Intel, Toyota & more)

Not normally a big fan of weight lifting or equestrianism or modern pentathlon? You might change your mind, because the 2024 Summer Olympics (July 26 – August 11) are here. Given that the two previous editions of the summer Games both surpassed three billion viewers, it’s expected to be one of the most-watched televised events of the past decade. In fact, with the last three Games (two Winter Olympics and one summer Games) all taking place in Asia, viewing...

Phil Norris

Advertising Basics › 6 min read

Airbnb, Booking.com and VRBO: Analyzing the display ad strategies of big travel brands

Now that summer is in full swing, many of us have one thing on our minds: travel. Interest in travel-related search topics like “hotel” spikes during the hottest months of the year… …prompting travel brands large and small to battle it out for our vacation bucks. But how do the travel industry’s biggest advertisers leverage display ads to differentiate themselves? Where are they spending their money? And what types of creatives and landing pages do they use? To answer...

Phil Norris

Landing Pages › 7 min read

How Shopify, Squarespace & Wix use display ads to fight for ecommerce supremacy

By 2027, global online sales are expected to surpass an eye-watering $8 trillion. So it’s no surprise that starting an ecommerce business consistently ranks as one of America’s most popular side hustles: Of course, to start an ecommerce business, you first need a website. And if you don’t have the coding skills to create one from scratch, your best alternative is to use a website builder. While there’s no shortage of options, not all are a natural choice for...

Phil Norris

eCommerce › 8 min read

8 persuasive Pride display ad campaigns (featuring Hulu, Tinder & more)

About one in 13 adults in the US now identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or some other sexual orientation besides heterosexual. Which makes Pride month a massive deal for pretty much every brand. And it’s even more essential for those with younger-skewing audiences, given that almost one in 10 millennials and more than one-fifth of Gen Z adults identify as LGBTQ+. Unsurprisingly, this means Pride has become a battleground for brands looking to target LGBTQ+ consumers —...

Phil Norris

Advertising Basics › 5 min read

How Grammarly’s $210M display ad strategy helped it become a unicorn

Whether you write professionally, like to keep your masterpieces within the notes app, or just stick to writing work emails, you’ve probably heard of (and even used) Grammarly.  With a motto of “better writing, better results,” this writing assistant app was founded in 2009 to help people write better, plagiarism-free content. Since its inception, this company has spent a fortune on display ad campaigns, with an estimated ad spend of $210.8M in the last year alone.  Clearly, this has...

Rupali Jeganathan

Case Study › 5 min read