Seedtag Analysis: Parents More Focused on Children’s Health for Back-to-School
As Managing Director, U.S., for Seedtag, Brian Danzis must be keenly aware of trends and changes in all aspects of digital and linear media to drive growth for the company’s clients, which have included Applebee’s, Gillette, JetBlue, and the NBA. For the past several weeks, he’s been focused on the back-to-school shopping season and how best to maximize revenue for clients across verticals such as computers, fashion, health, and fitness.
Some of these trends will likely impact the holiday shopping season, Danzis said, and contextual advertising is an important practice to reach target consumers with relevant messages. Seedtag specializes in contextual advertising and said its Q2 U.S. revenue was up 400% quarter-over-quarter. Seedtag also added new target markets in UAE, Argentina, Chile, Belgium, and India in 2022-2023 to meet accelerating demand.
Danzis sat down with StreetFight to elaborate on what he’s seeing in the market for Q4.
What trends are you seeing in this back-to-school analysis that could inform holiday shopping?
Parenting is rising to the surface again in fashion. The largest contextual category our contextual AI tool, Liz, uncovered in back-to-school fashion content is around families and parenting. Forty-five percent of back-to-school content was about primary school and kindergarten mentions regarding sports. Health and exercise are especially important in the basic education levels.
About 33% of back-to-school content regarding health and routines is focused on diet, with breakfast (25%) being highly relevant among health and routines content.
Backpacks and fashion were a pretty big topic of discussion as students go back to school. Forty percent of high interest about back to school clothing mentioned backpacks, but on top of that, Liz was able to uncover that much of this conversation surrounds shoes, jackets, and sweatshirts. Students want to be comfortable, so they’re looking for stylish, comfortable fall accessories and layers.
We saw that 87% of online retail visits are concentrated in just 25% of the content, with school supplies, clothing, and scholarships having a relevant presence among the highest visited content.
What are some of the surprises in this year’s analysis compared to previous ones?
Last year, 81% of back-to-school interest was centered on technology, especially the “gadget” category. This year, we’re seeing a lot more diversity. Trends popping are fashion, exercise, school supplies, scholarships, and concerns around health. One of the biggest surprises we’ve found in the subset of parenting is that exercise content is correlating to elementary school content. Parallel to that, 45% of content around elementary schools mention sports. So, we’re seeing that parents are taking more of an interest in ensuring their kids are getting a healthy, active education.
How is Seedtag in alignment with consumer privacy, especially with minors during back-to-school season?
Seedtag is a privacy-first platform, always thinking about the end user. We store no personal information on audiences we deliver ads to and are fully compliant with all international and local laws regarding targeting minors.
What is the most effective example of contextual advertising that Seedtag ever executed and for which client?
We have a CPG company that in marketing their cleaning products wanted to deploy a versatile messaging technique with five highly detailed audiences based on various concerns around COVID-19. There was no way for them to use standard IAB targeting, off the shelf third-party segments, or even keywords for this level of detail. We took these nuances and created custom contextual audiences based on those triggers and then applied them to the appropriate creative messaging and deployed them across our inventory set. The agency told us this was the only way they could have delivered on their client objectives and are extremely happy with the results thus far.
How does Seedtag help brand, agencies, and publishers in the post-cookie environment?
Seedtag is a full-funnel advertising solution that brands and agencies can leverage for privacy-compliant audience targeting without the need for cookies. With the ability to monitor the open web and uncover trends across categories, Seedtag provides insights on audience strategy, media planning, and media activation. For publishers, Seedtag helps creators understand what the open web is interested in and how editorial could be categorized or scored.
How does Seedtag define “contextual advertising?”
Over the last decade, marketers have been obsessed with “addressability” and fine-tuning their delivery of an ad to a particular demographic based on presumed habits of someone’s age and gender. However, today’s consumer is more diverse, discerning, and nuanced. Contextual advertising is having a renaissance because it focuses less on who you are and more about what you care about. At Seedtag, we see contextual advertising as a way to align a brand’s ethos with consumers’ values and passions. Leveraging AI, we take an unbiased approach to making this connection which we’ve found to drive greater reach and effectiveness.
