Last September Facebook rolled out Atlas, a mobile ad serving platform that takes aim at the attribution problem — the fact that finding and tracking consumers is getting more difficult because of how people are bouncing from device to device, from phone, to tablet, to desktop and back again.
Atlas tackles the issue with a combination of Facebook and other on- and offline data sources, touting “people-based marketing” and downplaying cookies, the digital marketing industry’s dominant tracking method. Facebook’s story is that cookies tell only half the story, since they can’t identify people when they switch devices.
Today Facebook provided evidence that Atlas is working. Live Nation, the major U.S. concert producer, turned to the platform for a mobile- and app-heavy campaign to promote Madonna’s 2015 “Rebel Heart” concert tour. Going mobile was a natural strategy for Live Nation; the company has internal data showing that 93% of concertgoers use smartphones to search for tickets but two-thirds of concert attendees who open Live Nation or Ticketmaster email on their phones switch to computers to make purchases.
Using Atlas for the Madonna tour campaign, Live Nation was able to tie a 66% increase in purchases to mobile, an attribution, Facebook said, that wouldn’t have been possible using cookies alone. Live Nation also used Atlas to serve Madonna ads to the dating app Grindr — with global broadcast messages and banner ads — and the 100% mobile app was one of the campaign’s top performing channels. Such results would have been invisible using traditional measuring tools.
“The cookie just isn’t cutting it anymore,” Facebook’s head of ad tech David Jakubowski said at the Cannes Lions advertising festival today during a presentation of the results.
Live Nation is convinced. The Madonna campaign was the company’s first “global, end-to-end” tour launch using Atlas. It now is using the platform to measure and analyze the rest of its tours.
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