Chances are your brand does a power of good, whether through corporate and social responsibility activities or environmental, social and governance practices. But are you maximising its value?
Probably not, reckons Amy Williams, founder and chief executive of Good-Loop, a sustainable advertising platform that turns online ad engagement into charitable donations.
She set the business up in 2016 and has spent the past decade challenging the idea that advertising has to interrupt, building a platform that rewards consumer attention instead by turning it into funding for charities and social causes.
Sales are up 100 per cent, year on year, as Good-Loop helps more brands ensure their ads are watched right to the end in skippable environments.
“Good-Loop buys ad space from YouTube, but we place an invitation into the ad experience that says, you can skip if you want to, but if you don’t skip, this advertiser will fund a good cause,” she says. “By doing that, we create a value exchange where people are rewarded for their time by making the world a tiny bit better and making a small donation to a cause that matters. And the advertisers get a completed view rate uplift of 110 per cent.”
Inside Marketing · Ep. 166 – Amy Williams of Good Loop
It allows brands an opportunity to have purpose, attention and performance, advertising’s holy trinity. Good-Loop’s successes show this in action, including for consumer goods giants such as Unilever’s soap Dove.
What any brand wants from its from its advertising “is a way to cut through a very cluttered environment and get eyeballs, and seconds of time,” she says. “The other thing you want is to have an emotional and meaningful connection with your consumers. Soap is boring, but Dove is the biggest brand in the world because it talks about body image and self-esteem.”
To succeed in competitive markets, “you have to have something in your brand, and in your business, that ‘ladders up’ to a wider, bigger societal and personal ambition than just soap, or sugar water,” she says. “These two facts are true: you want emotional connection and you want attention.”
‘Your donation from Nature Valley to protect Yosemite will unlock in 10 seconds. Then if you get to the end of that 10-second countdown timer, without skipping or scrolling, we’ll facilitate that microdonation’
Amy Williams, founder of Good-Loop
Yet most of the media that FTSE 100 businesses buy are entirely misaligned to these goals, “because the media we buy is optimising towards performance, clicks, engagements [and] metrics that incentivise an attention economy where attention is grabbed, forced and cluttered,” she says.
Just look at how, in some news websites, you can barely read the articles “because there are 50 ads in the way,” she says. “Or the amount of brands I work with who had just taken the skip button off altogether.” That’s not a good move, she cautions.
Good-Loop has created a new way to earn attention and therefore meaningful performance, rather than simply try and force it. “That has been our sweet spot,” she says.
The company produces a digital frame that sits around an ad and tells viewers that, while of course they can skip it, if they watch it to the end a donation will be made to a good cause.
“Most businesses do good somewhere, somehow,” she says. “Perhaps they don’t have a purpose; some do, some don’t, and the word has gone out of fashion recently, but every business cares about something. And more to the point, every consumer cares about something. So finding a way to build a bridge between, say, your CSR [corporate social responsibility] programme over here, or your foundation team over there that donates millions of dollars you never talk about, whatever it might be, there is some good to be unearthed.”
Good-Loop helps ensure businesses get more return on investment for such activities, as well as better ad engagement.
For General Mills, which makes Nature Valley, a cereal snack bar, the key was to focus on something that a majority of Americans are supportive of, regardless of political affiliation: public land.
“Public land and national parks are one of the most unifying causes in American dialogue across the aisle, and Nature Valley has a 15-year partnership supporting the National Parks Foundations – they are one of its biggest funders,” she says. But that partnership wasn’t fully activated in consumer consciousness.
Now, whether it’s for Nature Valley’s back to school campaigns, or its holiday or Easter campaigns, it sends Good-Loop its creative assets and Williams and her team will build a frame around each video that says “your donation from Nature Valley to protect Yosemite will unlock in 10 seconds. Then if you get to the end of that 10-second countdown timer, without skipping or scrolling, we’ll facilitate that microdonation,” she says.
“It’s literally a watch to donate message,” she adds. “And the value exchange is really central.”
Call it a third way. “The absolute pinnacle of our industry is ‘person watches ad because they want to buy product’. If you can get it, that’s the best-case scenario,” she says. “But the chances of getting that are so slim that, instead, we go from that ideal scenario to the extreme case of saying ‘we’ll spray this everywhere and force everyone to watch it and count ads that way’. But there is an important middle ground.”
Williams recently worked with a yoghurt brand in the US, which donated money for playgrounds. Simply by adding a donation layer to a very straightforward product ad, in a skippable environment on YouTube, the company saw completed ad viewing rates rise from 34 per cent to 78 per cent. “That’s a 136 per cent increase on a TrueView Rate benchmark,” says Williams, whose company, as a rule, donates a flat 20 per cent of the CPM (cost per thousand).
“On a $10 CPM (€8.60), $2 (€1.70) will go to the children’s hospital or parks foundation, or whatever organisation, which means the advertiser knows exactly how much is going to be raised up front,” she says. These aren’t donation dollars, she points out, but working media dollars.
“To get $10 worth of value, with a 75 per cent or 85 per cent completed view rate on your video, is a high-quality media buy,” she adds. And “the way we deliver that performance is by sacrificing some of our margin to make a donation.”
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