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

How flower delivery brands use display ads to boost Mother’s Day sales

There are two classic ways to show your mom how much you love her on Mother’s Day. One is to write it in a blog post for a leading competitive intelligence platform (I love you mom!). And the other is to say it with flowers. Most Americans choose option #2. Per the National Retail Federation, 74 percent of consumers sent their mom flowers for Mother’s Day 2023, making them the nation’s go-to Mother’s Day gift. On average, households spent...

Phil Norris

eCommerce › 6 min read

More than music: How Spotify, Apple & Amazon promote their streaming platforms with display ads

Remember the days when listening to your favorite artist meant buying a record or CD? While vinyl album sales are on a strong upward trajectory, it’s fair to say we’re living in the digital music age. Streaming overtook physical sales and downloads for the first time in 2018, and it’s hard to see that trend reversing any time soon. Which is music to the ears of the streaming industry, with 91 percent of US internet users listening via some...

Phil Norris

Copywriting › 6 min read

The battle of Tax Day: Analyzing TurboTax, H&R Block and TaxAct’s display ad strategies

Tax Day wouldn’t rank too highly on most people’s lists of favorite dates. But for the tax software industry, it’s like Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, and Black Friday all rolled into one. Per CivicScience, 39 percent of Americans in 2024 prepared (or planned to prepare) their taxes using tax software, with 23 percent using a free tool and 16 percent choosing a paid platform. Intuit TurboTax is comfortably the most popular tax tool, but there are a bunch of...

Phil Norris

Finance › 6 min read

Crafting Powerful Testimonial Ads That Convert

Here’s a thought exercise. How many times have recommendations from other people driven your purchase decisions? And how many times have you bought something online without checking the reviews first?  As for me, I have done that a sum total of zero times. That’s right. I never buy anything without reading the reviews first. And I’m not alone in this. 9 out of 10 customers read reviews before they buy something online. This is the power of social proof....

Rupali Jeganathan

Advertising Basics › 7 min read

Netflix vs Amazon: The display ad battle for our streaming bucks

In a world where 95 percent of Americans pay for more than one streaming service, it’s hard to remember a time when we weren’t all hooked on video-on-demand (VoD). But it hasn’t always been this way. Netflix may not have been the world’s first streaming company, but it was certainly the platform that brought the business model to the mass market. Yet for the first decade of its existence, the company didn’t even do streaming — it was a...

Phil Norris

Business Models › 6 min read

Inside Samsung’s $150M+ display ad strategy: Can it overtake Apple?

Founded in 1938, Samsung is a South Korean conglomerate with affiliates selling everything from life insurance to engineering services to oil tankers. But, from a B2C perspective, the company is best known for appliances and other electronics products. It’s the world’s second-biggest smartphone manufacturer, with a market share of 16.3 percent as of Q4 2023… Source: Statista …and it’s also a major player in countless other consumer electronics niches, including smart TVs, refrigerators, and laptops. With global revenues north...

Phil Norris

Computer and Electronics › 6 min read

Marketing to Millennials: 5 Strategies To Increase Your ROI

Lazy. Entitled. Zero work ethic. Addicted to their phones. These are some of the most common phrases used to describe millennials. But what nobody tells you is that they are a generation that values work-life balance and is more socially aware, tech-savvy, and influential compared to the baby boomers. In fact their net of influence is so wide that they have reshaped the very landscape of digital advertising. Having surpassed the baby boomers, millennials are also currently the largest...

Rupali Jeganathan

Advertising Basics › 5 min read

2023’s top-spending display advertisers: Who they are & what they did

Digital advertising showed no signs of slowing in 2023, with global spending reaching an estimated $423.3 billion — accounting for approximately $3 in every $5 spent on ads worldwide. But who’s spending all that money, and how are they spending it? To answer those questions, we analyzed exclusive Adbeat data to identify the 10 biggest display advertisers in the US in 2023, representing a combined $4.6 billion+ of spending on video, direct, programmatic, and native ads throughout the year....

Phil Norris

Programmatic Advertising › 6 min read